After spending a week at Chautauqua focused on the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, I am even more deeply intrigued with the story of their initial conception. The discussions included two associated documents – the Federalist Papers and the Bill of Rights. The consensus of the scholars and historians who discussed the founding of our nation was that these four documents had provided a model for our “Grand Experiment”, the effort to bind together thirteen disparate states into a single republic, founded on the principle (according to Abraham Lincoln) “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth”. The fact that the experiment has survived for two and a half centuries was a source of optimism for all of them.
I found it interesting to learn that the Declaration was originally commissioned as a public relations tool at a time when the war was not going well for the Colonials. Washington had driven the British out of Boston but was in the process of evacuating New York in the face of a massive invasion force, bolstered by the addition of 8,000 Hessian mercenaries. The residents of the thirteen colonies were deeply divided. Perhaps a quarter, mostly English and Highland Scots, were Loyalists, committed to George III and Parliament. Another quarter, mostly English, were Patriots, incensed at the way the Crown treated its colonial citizens. The remainder, mostly English, German, and Scotch-Irish peasants who had come to the New World to escape feudalism, were largely uncommitted. They were prime candidates for an appeal based on the concepts of the Enlightenment, especially freedom from religious persecution and from feudal overlords. Once Jefferson, John Adams, and Franklin got into their assignment, they realized the power of this appeal and converted a propaganda tool into a mighty statement of principle.
Included in the Hessian regiments was my maternal great-great-great grandfather, George Klees. Fortunately for us, he was captured at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777 when Burgoyne surrendered his army, spent the rest of war as a prisoner, and elected to stay here when he was repatriated. One wonders what his reactions were when he first learned of the Declaration. The rest of my ancestors, scattered across Pennsylvania and Maryland, were prime candidates for its message, and almost certainly endorsed it enthusiastically. We believe my paternal great-great-great grandparents, Johan Jacob Euler (Oyler) and Anna Margaretha Wetzel, had come here as Redemptioners, serving long terms as indentured servants to pay for their passage. The concepts of the Declaration would have been particularly welcome to them.
Following the successful conclusion of the war it was obvious that the Articles of Confederation, cobbled together to enable the colonies to work together during the Revolution, were inadequate for operating a functioning national government. Consequently, the thirteen states sent delegates to Philadelphia to hammer out an effective agreement on this matter. Once information on their deliberations became available, opponents to the overall idea (primarily States Rights advocates) began to publish Anti-Federalist articles in prominent newspapers. This prompted Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to respond with the Federalist Papers, a powerful collection of seventy-seven essays delineating the concepts being proposed for the new Constitution that detailed its modus operandi. Their motivation was to present this information clearly and concisely in order to induce the general public to endorse their efforts. The papers were published in prominent newspapers and broadly reprinted and discussed.
The target audience for the Federalist Papers was an elite group of well-educated, well-informed men. This correlates exactly with Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s vision for western Pennsylvania, a correlation that is not coincidental; Brackenridge and Madison had shared the same mentor, John Witherspoon, when they were students at Princeton (known then as the College of New Jersey). While there they were introduced to classical philosophy (Aristotle and Cicero) and the Enlightenment (John Locke, David Hume, and Montesquieu). Coincidentally, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay were having a similar experience at Kings College (now Columbia University). The seeds of the eloquent language of the founding documents were sown at that time in their fertile minds, as well as in those of the other Founding Fathers.
The speakers introduced the concept that the Declaration was a mission statement recording the vision of the Founding Fathers and that the Constitution was their Operating Manual. In my working years I was responsible for dozens of operating manuals for complicated machinery and industrial plants. Key to that experience is the necessity to revise and update them as additional information becomes available. Last week we watched a demonstration by a Colonial Williamsburg blacksmith, using a portable forge of the type common in 1776. Following its operating manual faithfully, he struggled a little igniting it with flint and steel by catching a spark in charred cloth and blowing it into a flame. An appropriate revision to his manual would be the substitution of a book of matches for the flint and steel. This is not intended to suggest that we should make it easier to amend the Constitution; it does seem appropriate for us to confirm our belief that some flexibility is required to accommodate dramatically different conditions. The fact that the Founding Fathers elected to include the Bill of Rights as amendments confirms their recognition of this reality.
The combined effect of these four dramatically different documents has been the provision of a model for our “Grand Experiment”, an experiment that has survived monumental travails – wars and rumors of wars, recession and depression, political scandals, etc. – and still is alive and well two and a half centuries later. Much of this success comes from continued vigilance by well-educated, well-informed voters who judiciously adhered to the vision of the Founders and amended the Constitution slowly and thoughtfully to reflect changing times. It is incumbent on all of us to resurrect that process and allow the experiment to continue for centuries to come.