4.5 America Was Founded On Two Rivers part 5

Conservatives’ heroic Founders myth makes it difficult to understand what they deliberately created. The myth of men of extraordinary ability struggling to advance individual liberty frees the public to praise their good intent despite flawed execution. “American history is the story of working toward the fulfillment of that promise.” I’ve written that. I was fundamentally wrong.

Stepping back to gain perspective, what information would compel us to believe these extraordinary men did not create exactly the government they wanted? If a reason exists, it must be found by identifying what they chose to create.

The Constitution created a republic with the least citizen input possible. In Common Sense Thomas Paine rejected the English (continental) system of government with its House of Commons, House of lords (aristocrats), and a monarch. Burke (invention of conservatism) considered it his duty as a member of Member of Parliament to do what he personally thought best to preserve the privileges of tradition, not what the ten percent of the population who could vote elected him to do. While King George was the Revolution’s and Paine’s villain, Parliament had been the ruling authority for a century before the Revolutionary War.

Rather than start anew, the Constitution mirrored the aristocracy bound English system. The state and federal restrictions limited voting to white, male property owners. State restrictions limited holding office to protestants, reducing those eligible for elected office to as little as ten percent of the population, similar to Burke’s electorate. The 3/5ths compromise deliberately skewed the number of representatives in favor of slavery. That small, skewed group of voters elected congressional representatives. The representatives then selected the state’s Senators.¹ The representatives and senators comprising the Electoral College selected the president and controlled the Supreme Court appointments. The Founders justified this system as the protection of individual freedom from “The tyranny of the majority”.

That tidy justification is semantic nonsense. During the Federalist years, they controlled congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. Total control turned the separation of power they valued above a Bill Of Rights into a fiction. Women, blacks, and indigenous people could not vote. Not even all white men could vote. Those who could vote had no meaningful input beyond their representative. The Constitution created a government controlled by twenty-five percent of the population at most. That is tyranny by the minority. The Founders defended it as the protection of individual freedom, the same language Paine and the Anti-Federalists used. Similar words, however, did not mean they supported similar laws and protections. Recognizing the semantic entanglement of :freedom” and “liberty”, is critical for understanding the fight over the need for a Bill of Rights.

Our Americana image of the founding of the country, devout Puritans founding the nation with their Christian values guiding its path, is simplistic to the point of meaninglessness. They were a small portion of the early Northeast settlement that Woodard² calls “Yankeedom”. Later, separate migrations from different parts of Europe populated Woodard’s “Greater Appalachia” and the “Deep South” with distinct purposes and values.

Woodard’s “Deep South” was driven by dreams of wealth from labor intensive cash crops. The Constitutions of the Carolinas proposed government based on the perpetual subjugation of an underclass. The idea that all people, even all white men held rights and deserved personal freedom violated their belief in the Great Chain of Being. Virginia and the “Deep South” brought indentured servants and children, kidnapped off English streets, to grow the cash crops. Unlike the Puritans who came as self-sustaining communities, “Deep South” society quickly stratified into classes because these immigrants lacked the necessary skills and organization.

“It is apparent that such human refuse dumped on a strange shore in the keeping of a few hundred merciless planters, was incapable of developing the kind of stable society under construction in the Puritan North. Instead of the hymn-singing pilgrim to whom idleness was the badge of shame, we must start with the cynical, the penniless, the resentful and the angry. Many of them died on the plantation under the whips of taskmasters.“³

When too many indentured servants died of diseases the demand for more malaria resistant black slaves exploded. The idea that kidnapped Africans could hold individual rights threatened the foundation of the Southern cash crop economy. To slave owners, rights were their ability to impose their will on others. (from post 3.4)

“The European conception of individual freedom was, by contrast, tied ineluctably to notions of private property. Legally, this association traces back above all to the power of the male household head in ancient Rome, who could do whatever he liked with his chattels and possessions, including his children and slaves. In this view, freedom was always defined – at least potentially – as something exercised to the cost of others.^{”4 5}

They adopted Republican Roman principles of freedom very selectively. In sum it reduced to the principle that anyone who does not own property is a slave. Society was composed of free property owners, “slaves” who worked for hire but could move about, and bonded slaves. Only free (white) men could act solely on their self-interest.⁶ By definition, freedom was property.

As the Constitution was debated and individual states established their constitutions, the Southern states turned to the English (continental) model of government with rule by their natural aristocracy. Massachusetts, the states blocking successful adoption of the Constitution was their political enemy. To people in Massachusetts, rights protected every individual from abuse by the government: the tyranny of the minority. They believed in participation in government with decisions made by open votes in public meetings, regardless of property ownership. Government was loud, messy, and democratic. Virginians hated it.

The Federalist view: the government’s duty is to protect people’s property. There is no need for a Bill of Rights. The Anti-Federalist view: the government’s duty is to protect people’s freedom. The Bill of Rights constrains the government.

The Founders wrote exactly what they wanted.

Next: Bill of Rights, Thomas Paine

¹ The Senate moved election by voters in 1913, Amendment XVII.

²  Woodard, Colin American Nations finish citation

³  Caudill, Harry M. Night Comes To The Cumberlands finish citation

⁴  Graeber, David and David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything: A new history of humanity. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux p 66.

⁵  Using Roman law selectively to justify misogyny is itself misogynistic. Marriage cum manu, which included life and death authority, applied to the Patricians (10% of the population). By the shift to Imperial Rome only priests used it, then even they they abandoned it. For the rest of the population women held rights, could own property, and divorce husbands. The conservative claim that women are property with no legal identity is drawn from a short period and tiny fragment of the Roman population, then reimposed by the Catholic Church.

 ₆ The requirement for “white” negates the pretension of objectivity. First, in ancient Rome what mattered was citizenship and people of color could be citizens. Second, some blacks did own property.