4.1 America Was Founded On Two Rivers part 1

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, (George Santayana).¹ “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, (Winston Churchill). “A generation which ignores history has no past and no future” (Robert Heinlein).

Whether motivated by chauvinism, bigotry, or racism, unwillingness to learn the conflicting political rivers of our history is a personal failure. Donald Trump and the figures behind Project 2025 are doing everything within their power to remove indigenous Americans, women, blacks, and the legacies of genocide and slavery from our history. They do not want centuries of abuse to mar the myths of the founders’ perfect work.

The New York Times Magazine published “The 1619 Project” (August 14, 2019) about the introduction of slavery into the colonies and its consequences. It argued that the foundation of American wealth, especially Southern Colonial wealth, came from stealing other people’s labor. In response Trump’s conservative President’s Advisory Commission released “The 1776 Report” (January 18, 2021), a historical apologia written without the benefit of historians. The commission chair, Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry Arnn, called for American classrooms to focus civic education on the enduring and unifying principles articulated in the Declaration Of Independence.

The Declaration Of Independence did not shape the Constitution or American law. Its misogynistic phrase “all men are created equal” is legally meaningless. Eleven years later the Constitution divided the population into separate categories: indigenous peoples, slaves, women, and white males – the only group holding rights. The 1776 Project dismissed attempts to extend legal rights to women’s, blacks’, and indigenous people’s rights as identity politics. The commission excused slavery as widespread and a product of the time, ignoring that American chattel slavery was historically violent.

Historians’ reviews of “The 1776 Project” were overwhelmingly negative and fond it shallow, factually wrong, and propaganda. It is dangerous to pretend the Commission’s authors did not know how misleading their paper was. Further, if they knew, what was the purpose of forcing their disinformation into American classrooms? Why hide, distort, and lie about our history?

Part of the American myth is that the founders were doing their best to create a democratic government. I fell into that trap in “The 1776 Project: An Autopsy” I wrote in 2021. The apologia² is that the Founders were trying to create a new form of government and their omissions caused by the traditions and values of their day. The apologia continues that the country has been refining personal rights and government. The record of Supreme Court holdings I traced is accurate, but the apologia is wrong.

While the Originalist doctrine is inadequate to determine the law, its emphasis on letting the founders speak for themselves is important for understanding how the U.S. has always been a struggle between the two rivers: change-liberalism and stability-conservatism.

If we want to understand and guide our government we must let the Founding Fathers’ words and actions speak for themselves. Dolly Madison was among the women urging their husbands to include women. They were left out. Indigenous people’s governments influenced the Constitution. They were left out. The delegates discussed the inconsistency of individual rights and slavery. No colony refused to sign because of slavery. Most founders owned slaves. Every word in the Constitution is there by majority vote. Every omission is a deliberate rejection. The Founding Fathers created the Constitution they wanted. More importantly, the conservatives supporting The 1776 Project’s Constitutional originalism want to return to the white male supremacy of 1788.

The shift from imagining the founders as heroes promoting liberty to understanding them as intelligent men defending their personal wealth and ambitions was a long journey. I’ve posted about John Locke this and Jean-Jacques Rousseau that, as though the founders did more than steal random bits.

The Founding Fathers were intelligent, educated men. They read Locke, Rousseau and the other Enlightenment writers. They read Plato and Socrates, picking what bits fit their concerns: qualification for citizenship, the presumption of slavery, the inferiority of women. They were, as a whole, wealthy men living off their slaves labor. They were the 10% of Athenians who had a rights to vote while their wives were restricted to the home.

How do we know this?

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams discussed the necessity of governance by a “natural aristocracy” based on individual men’s virtue and talent, rather than Europe’s birthright aristocracy. By excluding blacks, indigenous Americans, and women from public life, the white, male Founding Fathers enshrined their Great Chain of Being in the Constitution. That presumed “right to rule”, reflecting God’s ordained statuses justified The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), drafted by Lord Ashley (Cooper) and John Locke.³ Lord Ashley touted the Fundamental Constitutions as the model for all states, especially southern states, with large slave populations.

The Fundamental Constitutions relied on statutory, not common, law. It included exceptional religious tolerance, including for Indians. It established an inviolate class system (Great Chain of Being) of hereditary nobility divided into three ranks: palatines, landgraves, and caciques. It established a hereditary serfdom class of leetmen and leetwomen who were under the command and jurisdictions of the noblemen they served. These drudge laborers had no political rights and could never improve their, or their children’s, position in life.

The Fundamental Constitutions gave all freemen absolute authority over their slaves, meaning every black person, because no black could be freed (manumitted). Like William the Conqueror dividing the English Common, the Constitutions granted two fifths of all land to the Lord Proprietor and noblemen. Freemen could own the rest of the land, and any man owning fifty acres could vote.

The Fundamental Constitutions was never fully enacted because it was overly complex, impractical, and resented by subsistence farmers. That did not diminish its impact. Its ideas settled into slave states’ weltanschauung. It survives in the Deep South’s presumptions about the organization of the world that Colin Woodard identifies in American Nations.⁴

Next: the American conservative river continues

 1 The Life of Reason (1905-05), Reason in Common Sense. Pat Stoermer has influenced my thoughts. He speaks on George Santayana’s quote here:   https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1ABkKHhV7s/?mibextid=wwXIfr

 2 I use apologia in the sense of an effort to excuse or justify a faulty claim.

 3 This was when John Locke served as secretary for one of the Proprietors of Georgia.

 4 Woodard, Colin American Nations: A history of the eleven rival regional culture of North America Penguin Books: New York (2011)