A Defense of America

A Defense of America

A Defense of America: An Introduction

By RICH LOWRY

July 9, 2020 9:24 AM

The last couple of months have been profoundly dispiriting. We’ve gone from the George Floyd case and a discussion of some potentially worthwhile police reforms to, in many influential precincts of our culture and in the streets, a wholesale rejection of the police and a poisonous critique of America at its roots. We’ve gone from a debate about the status of Confederate statues to the toppling, defacing, and removal of statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. We’ve gone from the 1619 Project’s appearing in an issue of The New York Times Magazine to its becoming the dominant narrative of America in many quarters. In recent weeks, demands that would have been considered preposterous a short time ago — the band the Dixie Chicks must change its name, the Florida Gators must abandon their chant — instantly became reality. It is in this context that we’ve devoted our current issue to a defense of America. The pieces range from history to data about racism to culture, and all are devoted to the idea that, despite our current tribulations, we still live in the last best hope of earth.

RICH LOWRY is the editor of National Review. @richlowry

America’s Founding

By RICHARD BROOKHISER

July 9, 2020 10:43 AM

Our job is to understand and uphold it

From Hamilton: An American Musical to rioters defacing every stone Founder they can find: A lot can flip in a short time, especially in a country as social-media-addicted as ours. But don’t tear up your tickets yet. The American founding remains an epochal and admirable event in political history.

“The Founding” is the period spanning the American Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution, 1775–89. But the political backstory begins in Jamestown, England’s first permanent American colony, in the summer of 1619, with the first meeting of the General Assembly.

The Jamestown colony had been in existence since 1607. Its early history was checkered. The first settlers arrived on the Virginia coast during a severe drought, which made it almost impossible for them to raise crops. In one bleak year, called the “starving time,” they were reduced to chewing leather and eating vermin (and allegedly corpses). The colony attempted to recover from that disaster by imposing martial law: Men had to work in gangs under overseers; anyone who disobeyed was broken on a wheel (i.e., crushed to death). Meanwhile the leaders of the hapless venture squabbled among themselves.

Something had to change. In 1618 a new governor, George Yeardley, was given a mandate for political reform.

The General Assembly, which he convened the following year, was an innovation in European colonialism. It consisted of Yeardley and his council of advisers, who were all appointed in England. But they were joined by 22 burgesses, selected by the eleven boroughs and plantations that composed the settlement. The burgesses were elected according to the principle of one man, one vote, and the assembly, when it met, made its decisions the same way. There were limits —

indentured laborers and women had no vote in the boroughs, and the governor could veto any measure the assembly passed. But this was the seed of a representative body.

What topics did it discuss over the four days that it met? It proposed a standard price for tobacco. It required church attendance, forbade whoring, and directed that a man who had slandered his employer be nailed by his ears to the public pillory. It reviewed the performance of one of the colony’s emissaries to its Indian neighbors. The universal topics of politics: the economy, morals, foreign affairs.

In the beginning the General Assembly’s resolutions were advisory: Nothing could be enacted without approval from London. But persistence in Virginia and inattention in England ultimately gave the assembly’s decisions the force of law. The House of Burgesses, as it came to be called, was the first essay in the fundamental American political liberty, self-rule. This was the other 1619 Project, and it began weeks before Jamestown’s first purchase of African slaves.

Over the decades, American colonists secured other rights. Freedom of religion was the fruit of Enlightenment thinking, compromise (where many religions jostled, it proved easier to let them be), and Christianity itself (“desiring to doe unto all men as we desire all men should doe unto us,” as the Flushing Remonstrance put it). Freedom of the press flourished because colonial juries nullified English laws against sedition. But liberty, as Burke observed, is power. Undefined and unfiltered, it inevitably degenerates into the liberty of the strongest, whether in the form of anarchy or of despotism. American thinking about the right matrix of liberty was summarized in the Declaration of Independence, the national birth certificate.

Thomas Jefferson, its draftsman, claimed in his old age that he had not been declaring his own particular thoughts, but simply supplying “an expression of the American mind.” So he had: The Continental Congress, which adopted his document, red-penciled his peroration and his indictment of George III. It left the philosophical statement with which the Declaration begins — a masterpiece of compression, only half of the second paragraph — almost untouched. The representatives of all 13 states signed off on it because it was, as Jefferson said, “the common sense of the subject.”

This half paragraph affirms American liberties in the most sweeping manner. Self-rule gets mentioned (“Governments . . . deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed”), as do “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Perhaps its most startling word is “among” (“among these [rights] are . . .”). The Declaration is not a bill of rights, because it won’t presume to make an exhaustive list.

The source of American liberty is the “Creator” (“endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”). Jefferson’s language can be as elusive as it is ringing. Though he esteemed Jesus as a moralist, he was personally no more religious than Ricky Gervais. But while he and Congress were perhaps fudging a theological point, settling on a formula that would embrace both him and a Calvinist nurtured in the Great Awakening such as Sam Adams, they were making a vital political point: The rights Americans enjoy come from outside history, and outside mankind. Thomas Jefferson did not confer them; neither did Congress. As no one made them, so no one can efface them. Rulers can trample them, of course (as Congress believed George III was then doing). But they are as much a part of us as arteries or imagination.

The great half paragraph begins with a clause, the first of its self-evident truths, that is as practical as it is philosophical: “all men are created equal.” This is the Declaration’s balance wheel, the limit that it places on everyone’s liberty. No man’s power may justly annihilate another’s, because no man belongs to a different, superior order of being than any other. The one-man–one-vote practice of the Jamestown General Assembly is rewritten in gold.

The new Constitution, written eleven years later to replace the Articles of Confederation, confirmed the point. Like the Declaration, it had a skillful draftsman — Gouverneur Morris, the peg-legged ladies’ man from the Bronx. (No prole he — Morris was a wealthy elitist, and proud of it.) But the Constitution was a collective document, argued into shape by 55 men over four months and then debated nationwide for a year. Four provisions and one silence established equality in America’s fundamental law.

Article II, Section 1, gave the executive power to an elected president, while Article IV, Section 4, guaranteed each state a republican form of government. There would be no royalty in the United States, neither nationally nor locally.

No lords either — Article I, Sections 9 and 10, prevents both the federal and state governments from granting titles of nobility.

And while the Constitution wove slavery into American life and government in several ways — mandating the return from one state to another of fugitive slaves, partially counting slaves in the calculation of representatives and presidential electors, allowing states to continue the slave trade for at least 20 years — it did not use the word “slave,” referring instead to “Person” or “Persons.” On paper, at least, there would be no classes in American life.

The prohibitions against royalty and nobility may seem needless, closing the barn door after the horse has been let go. But the temptation to look up and exalt was — and is — strong. One of Washington’s officers during the Revolution, Colonel Lewis Nicola, suggested Washington become king afterwards; another, General William Alexander, claimed to be a Scottish earl and was punctiliously addressed as “Lord Stirling” by his comrades. Elected political dynasties have flourished throughout our history, from Adamses to Cuomos — to say nothing of the worship Americans accord athletes, entertainers, and now, it would seem, influencers. The Constitution wisely prohibited kings and lords because Americans, like any other people, are so often unwise.

law passed by the Articles of Confederation Congress in the summer of 1787 was more forthright than the Constitution on the subject of slavery. The Northwest Ordinance settled the status of one-fourth of the country, bounded by Pennsylvania, the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and the Great Lakes. The authorship of the Ordinance, unlike that of the Declaration and the Constitution, is somewhat clouded; Nathan Dane and Rufus King, congressmen from Massachusetts, usually get the credit. Manasseh Cutler, a Congregationalist minister and land speculator — what an American type — also gave input. The Ordinance directed that the Northwest Territory become states, on a par with the original 13, as soon as it was settled. It also declared that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory,” except as punishment for crimes.

Yet whatever the Northwest Ordinance said or the Constitution didn’t say about slaves, there were almost 700,000 of them in the United States when those documents were written (out of a population of almost 4 million). “Why is it,” the Tory abolitionist Samuel Johnson had asked as the Revolution began, “that the loudest yelps for liberty are heard from drivers of Negroes?”

Many in the founding generation asked themselves this question. Their answers were various. Many had never owned slaves (John Adams, the people of Vermont). Others freed those they owned (George Washington at his death). Still others passed laws abolishing slavery, immediately or gradually, in five states by 1789, in two more by 1804. And some Founders who continued to own human property continued to agonize over the question. In 1835 James Madison, one of the last Founders left standing, told Harriet Martineau, an English traveler, that he hoped American slaves — over 2 million by then — might be freed and sent to Liberia. (Martineau, who knew how few had so far been sent there, was skeptical: “How such a mind as his could derive alleviation to its anxiety from that source is surprising.”) Many felt no anxiety. John Rutledge — whose brother Edward had signed the Declaration of Independence for their home state, South Carolina — told the Constitutional Convention, to which he was a delegate, that “religion and humanity” were irrelevant when considering the slave trade. “Interest alone is the governing principle with nations.”

Or maybe, when declaring that “all men are created equal,” the Founders simply meant men like themselves — white men. This was the argument advanced by racists, south and north, in the 19th century, and oddly by BLM protesters today. It was answered, in every generation, by those (Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr.) who asserted that the founding documents were freedom documents, setting a standard against the day when it might be met.

1

It is important to get our founding right, for the world as well as for us. The American Revolution was the first of an era of revolutions that has not ended yet. So many of them have turned out worse. The two nearest to ours in time set the pattern. France would not find domestic tranquility until the Third and Fifth Republics. Haiti is still looking.

We once brought a great thing into the world. Our job is to understand and uphold it.

Historian RICHARD BROOKHISER is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

The Exceptional First American Century 

By DAN MCLAUGHLIN

July 9, 2020 11:07 AM

Our first hundred years are startlingly unique

The startling growth of liberal democracy and free markets over the past century sometimes obscures the extent to which America, in its first century of existence, from 1776 to 1876, stood nearly alone in the world. The first American century was when the United States was, most truly, an exceptional nation.

America at its founding was republican, in the sense of having no king; democratic, in the sense of grounding all political power ultimately in the consent of the people; liberal, in the sense of protecting the individual, natural-law rights of the people; and constitutional, in the sense that political powers and rights were set down in a written instrument binding on the state. None of these were entirely new ideas in 1776 or 1787, but all of them had failed more often than not in the past. Trying them meant explaining why they would work this time, a question very much in doubt — then, and for a century thereafter. What was true in George Washington’s time was still largely true in Abraham Lincoln’s: Nobody had ever tried republicanism, democracy, liberalism, and constitutionalism at the same time.

Not only was this experiment novel; it was tried on an unprecedented scale. France was then the dominant power on the European continent; the original 13 states, spanning the Eastern Seaboard, covered an area a third larger than France. The Northwest Territory, ceded by Britain in 1783, expanded the new nation by a third; the 1803 Louisiana Purchase then doubled it. After Florida was acquired from Spain in 1819, the Mexican War and the settlement of the Oregon Territory between 1846 and 1848 expanded the country by a third yet again. Seventy-two years after independence, the United States was still the world’s only republican, democratic, liberal, and constitutional state, and it spanned the width of a continent. There was nothing like it on earth.

The young United States was, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, unlike the Old World in that the building of its civilization could still be observed, rather than recalled from ancient texts and stones. Much of the nation’s westward expansion took place over land that had never been settled in the European sense, either because the Native American population was sparse in places or because the tribes eschewed European-style permanent agricultural settlements and cities. When the Spanish arrived in the San Francisco Bay area in 1769, for example, it was home to 17,000 people grouped in communities of 50 to 400, where over 7 million people live today. By the time of the American conquest 80 years later, the population of California had dropped in half again. And the non-Native populations of the territories acquired from France and Mexico were far smaller than the Native populations.

The Founding generation was painfully aware of the historical weight against it. The brief effort to remake England into a republic in the mid 17th century had been a bloody, illiberal fiasco. France’s revolution would soon provide its own grisly example. The Federalist Papers are shot through with explanations of how the new Constitution was designed to avoid the pitfalls that had felled past republics and democracies. Madison devoted three consecutive essays to discussing ancient Greek confederacies, the election of Holy Roman emperors, the Polish republic (which was then in the process of being dismantled by its neighbors), the Swiss cantons, and the Dutch republics. The corruption of the Roman republic into an empire weighed heavily on the Founders. Washington and other key Founders were devoted to Joseph Addison’s tragedy Cato, about the republican hero Cato the Younger’s failed opposition to Julius Caesar’s dictatorship.

The uniqueness of the American experiment did not end with the Declaration or the Constitution. It persisted into the 1860s, even compared with the mother country and her possessions. Britain, in 1776, was increasingly liberal, but was still a monarchy governing an empire. Even to this day, it has no formal, written constitution approved by its people and binding on Parliament. Not until a 1975 referendum on membership in the European Communities were the British people directly consulted on their form of government. Britain granted significant representative home rule to colonies such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand only in the 1850s and 1860s. Canada did not adopt a written constitution until 1982. In 1845, it was still possible for the Duke of Wellington to argue that “the Democratic Party throughout the World is inimical to this country. . . . Wherever a democratical influence or even a democratical Press exists, we must expect to find enemies.”

Until the British Great Reform Act of 1832, the House of Commons did not even pretend to be a representative institution with districts of vaguely similar proportions. Entire industrial cities had no representation at all. Even with Parliament ascendant over the throne and its members forming into modern parties, the hereditary House of Lords retained significant powers well into the mid 19th century. The lords were stripped of their veto over national budgets only in 1911. Britain maintained property qualifications until 1867 that prevented five out of six adult males from voting. The United States, by contrast, had eliminated all property barriers to universal manhood suffrage (at least among white men, and in some states free black men as well) in all but three states by the end of the 1830s.

On the European continent, monarchy still ruled. It successfully crushed or co-opted the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, many of which made strikingly modest demands for constitutional government. Much of the continent lay under the power of the Russian, Austrian, French, and Spanish thrones, and smaller monarchies covered the rest, from Stockholm to Naples, Brussels to Athens. The center of Italy was still ruled by the pope. Italy was finally united under a king in 1860–61, Germany under a kaiser in 1871. Only in 1870–71 did France establish a durable republic, on its third try, after Napoleon III was defeated in a war with Prussia. Crowned heads still ruled much of Europe all the way to the First World War. Asia, Africa, and the Ottoman Empire had even fewer representative institutions or guarantees of individual rights or limited government. Even the Confederate States of America, founded on the enslavement of four-tenths of its people, was a constitutional republic with more democratic institutions and liberal guarantees (such as a free press and no established churches) than most of the world had in 1861.

The only significant republican exceptions in Europe, for most of the first American century, were the Dutch republics and the Swiss cantons. Neither was as democratic or liberal as the United States, and both were much smaller. The Dutch republics were aristocratic oligarchies, and their chief executive was a hereditary stadtholder, later a king. Only in the revolution of 1848 did the Netherlands adopt a constitutionally limited monarchy. The Dutch did not adopt universal manhood suffrage until 1917. In Switzerland, reformers held up the American example as a model for attempted constitutional reforms on multiple occasions, but the cantons were simply a loose confederation of aristocratic enclaves until the 1847 Swiss revolution.

European liberal reformers looked to the American example, and while early Americans were skeptical of involvement in European affairs, their sympathies and sometimes financial support were with the liberals. The French revolution remained popular in the United States until well into its illiberal turn. The Marquis de Lafayette and Tadeusz Kosciuszko tried, and failed, to bring American ideas home to France and Poland. So did Tocqueville in 1848. After the 1848 revolutions, Giuseppe Garibaldi fled Italy for Staten Island, Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth toured America to great acclaim, and scores of German and Irish rebels fled to American shores. The German-born Emanuel Leutze’s epic Washington Crossing the Delaware, shown in New York and Washington to tremendous fanfare in 1851–52, was painted in Düsseldorf as a statement of American inspiration to frustrated German liberals after the failed revolutions of 1848.

The only part of the world that followed the American lead before the Civil War was Central and South America, with decidedly mixed results. Haiti was the second republic in the Western Hemisphere, but its governments were unstable, with monarchies proclaimed in 1804, 1811, and 1849. Mexico resisted monarchy after its independence in 1821, but it proved similarly unable to resist frequent backsliding into authoritarian rule under the multiple presidencies of Antonio López de Santa Anna between 1833 and 1855. In its liberal turn under Benito Juárez in the 1860s, Mexico looked naturally to the United States for support. Argentina was riven by civil war and dictatorship until 1861. Brazil remained an empire, Paraguay a dictatorship, Cuba a Spanish colony, Nicaragua a playground for revolutionaries and filibusterers. Suffrage was widely restricted by literacy tests across Latin America long before they were introduced in America as instruments of Jim Crow. Caudillo governments predominated.

Early American republicanism was social as well as political. The American Revolution touched off — quite unintended by its leaders — a revolution in social mores. Colonial American society was hierarchical and dominated by elites, albeit less so than the rest of the world at the time. Not only slavery but indentured servitude existed in every colony, and social deference to gentlemen was expected.

All of this but southern slavery was swept away in waves of republican sentiment in the decades following the Revolution. Tocqueville, visiting America in 1831, began his famous study by observing: “Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people.” He explained to his European readers that this produced a different type of informed, self-reliant citizen: “The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes.” He saw even the most primitively housed settler of the frontier as “a highly civilized being, . . . who penetrates into the wilds of the New World with the Bible, an axe, and some newspapers”: “I do not think that so much intellectual activity exists in the most enlightened and populous districts of France” as on the American frontier.

The wide-open spirit of America, its lack of hierarchies and restrictions compared with Europe, made it an enormous engine of material and scientific progress and economic mobility. America’s population exploded, growing at four times the rate of Europe’s between 1810 and 1860. With 31 million people in 1860, it was still comparable in population to France or Austria, and had fewer than a tenth of the population of China, but it supported a third of the world’s newspapers. Indiana had one newspaper in 1810; by 1840, it had 73. The United States boasted the most railroad mileage in the world in 1850, and more than doubled that over the next decade. Samuel Morse’s telegraph grew far faster than its equivalents in Britain and France, because American businessmen instantly adopted it to coordinate railroad schedules and trade commodities.

Early Americans were acutely aware of their uniqueness. As Lincoln told the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859, in America, “there is not, of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. . . . Many independent men, in this assembly, doubtless a few years ago were hired laborers. . . . The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” Even in Britain, where industry was booming, this was not so. British workers saw their wages stagnate and perhaps decline in absolute terms between 1800 and 1850. Land was not so easily obtained anywhere in Europe as it was in America.

Early Americans were also uniquely unmilitarized, a cherished sign of limited government and independence from foreign intrigues. On the eve of the Civil War, the Army consisted of little more than 10,000 men, and its largest extent had been 49,000, at the peak of the Mexican War. By contrast, Austria had 300,000 men under arms; Prussia, with half of America’s population, conscripted 40,000 new recruits every year.

The great exception stood out. Slavery was common throughout Africa, Brazil, and the Ottoman Empire in the mid 19th century, but it became all the more conspicuous in America because of its contrast to the egalitarianism of American society. The nation’s debates over slavery were so heated precisely because Americans after the Revolution prided themselves on being unlike the class-ridden societies of Europe and the despotisms of Asia. The many foreign critics of the unique American system returned constantly to the hypocrisy of slavery because it was a convenient deflection from the American example.

Independent republican citizens, neither slave nor master, made up the great bulk of Americans. The 1860 census found that only 1.3 percent of Americans owned slaves. Even accounting for the fact that these slaveholders were heads of multi-member households who loaned out slaves to some of their non-slaveholding neighbors, slaveholders were a minority in every state, and slaveholding families have been estimated at about 7.4 percent of American households. Over 60 percent of the country lived in states or territories with no slaves. That proportion had been growing steadily for over half a century. The critical mass of free citizens in the North and West enabled the Union to prevail.

COMMENTS

The Gettysburg Address stands as the most concise statement of Lincoln’s view of the Civil War as “testing whether [this] nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure,” and whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” This was not hyperbole, or some idiosyncratic theory of Lincoln’s. Still unique in the world, little over a decade after the collapse of hope for liberal, democratic, constitutional republics in Europe, America still had to prove its case against the skeptics. In 1865, speaking from Napoleon III’s empire, French republican Eugène Pelletan observed, “America is not only America, one place or one race more on the map, it is yet and especially the model school of liberty. If against all possibility it had perished, with it would fall a great experiment.”

The early Americans seem to us today unaccountably harsh in certain ways, from their brutal wars against the Native Americans to their long tolerance of slavery. Yet we owe them much. That debt goes far beyond the ideas of the Founding. Ideas that die in practice do not command imitation. The Americans of the nation’s first century stood essentially alone on the world stage, and they proved that a nation that was democratic, republican, liberal, and constitutional could not only survive challenges external and internal, it could expand, prosper, innovate, reform itself, and endure. Their ideas — and even the principles against which we now rebuke them — would not cover so much of the world today without those labors.

DAN MCLAUGHLIN is a senior writer at National Review Online. @baseballcrank

Slavery and the Constitution

By PHILLIP W. MAGNESS

July 9, 2020 11:27 AM

From the beginning, it pointed toward racial equality

A stunning legal drama unfolded before the King’s Bench in London in early 1772. James Somerset, a slave brought to England from the American colonies, petitioned the court for a writ of habeas corpus, which would free him from confinement on his enslaver’s ship. Lord Mansfield, the judge reviewing the case, granted the writ in a stinging rebuke of Somerset’s captors: “The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory.” As no such law existed in England proper, Somerset was to be freed.

The judgment’s narrow construction intentionally limited its immediate implications. When word of the case crossed the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin wrote his abolitionist friend Anthony Benezet to denounce “the hypocrisy of this country, which encourages such a detestable commerce by laws for promoting the Guinea trade; while it piqued itself on its virtue, love of liberty, and the equity of its courts, in setting free a single negro.” Somerset’s case would nonetheless put the first chip in the legal edifice of plantation slavery, and with it set the foundations for a neglected tradition of anti-slavery constitutionalism.

When mentioned at all today, Somerset’s case often suffers from the political distortion of our present moment. The New York Times’ 1619 Project attempted to repurpose Mansfield’s ruling as evidence that the American colonies revolted some four years later in response to the existential threat that the case supposedly created for the colonial slave system. In reality, the British Empire still remained a half century removed from emancipation — a cause that found its earliest parliamentary support among Charles James Fox, Edmund Burke, and other Whig supporters of the American revolutionaries. And while the Times grudgingly walked back its claim that protecting slavery provided a primary impetus for the events of 1776, the paper offered no indication that Somerset’s brand of anti-slavery constitutionalism took root in the nascent United States.

The next blow came in Massachusetts in 1783, with future U.S. Supreme Court justice William Cushing instructing a jury in a strikingly similar “freedom suit” that “the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and [state] Constitution; and there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature.” The resulting verdict released Quock Walker from bondage, leading the commonwealth to become the first of the original 13 colonies to carry out immediate emancipation.

Freed from London’s oversight, American independence unleashed an early wave of similar actions across the northern states. Between the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut adopted gradual-abolition plans under their newly constituted state governments. The national Northwest Ordinance of 1787 successfully barred the entry of slavery into the modern-day Midwest. And Vermont, which joined the union as a state in 1791, had operated under an anti-slavery constitutional provision since it broke from Britain in 1777 against the backdrop of the Revolution. New York would follow in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804, both with gradual processes.

The political entrenchment of slavery in the southern states obscures this important constitutional legacy today, particularly as revisionist historical accounts such as the 1619 Project attempt to re-center the American founding around the maintenance of a plantation economy. The Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones accordingly speaks of the founding generation as if they were a unitary voice conspiring to preserve slavery, charging that, “in the texts in which they were making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it.”

Such simplistic narratives strip this era of its nuance, though, denigrating the constitutional component of the abolitionist project in the process. It is true that the framers of the Constitution omitted direct mention of slavery, even as they accepted the now-notorious three-fifths clause and mechanisms to return fugitive slaves to bondage. Yet many delegates recognized the moral fault of these political concessions. In denouncing a clause that preserved the slave trade until 1808, Constitutional Convention delegate Luther Martin chastised the institution as “inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution, and dishonorable to the American character.” In doing so, Martin echoed the Fairfax Resolves of 1774, in which George Washington and George Mason condemned the British Crown for sustaining this “wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade” in its colonies.

In the legal context of the 18th century, the Constitution’s conspicuous evasion of the word “slavery” carried another meaning, at least among critics of the institution. Just as Mansfield constructed the Somerset ruling on British law’s silence about slavery, the omission — some abolitionists hoped — of the word in the U.S. Constitution might be construed at a future date to deprive the slave system of affirmation in positive law at the federal level.

On the opposing side, southerners pressed for the fugitive-slave clause as an attempt to avoid recurring repetition of the Somerset outcome. “If any of our slaves . . . go [to the North], and remain there a certain time, they would, by the present laws, be entitled to their freedom, so that their masters could not get them again,” James Iredell explained to the North Carolina ratifying convention. In defending the clause, he then acknowledged that “the northern delegates, owing to their particular scruples on the subject of slavery, did not choose the word ‘slave’ to be mentioned.”

The clause conceded to slave owners a horrific tool by which the resources of the federal government could be mustered in subsidy and support for their institution, yet at the same time the Constitution’s unusual evasion of the term set up a legal tension between pro-slavery and anti-slavery constitutional theories that persisted until the Civil War. The political entrenchment of the former lies at the root of most modern critiques of the document, particularly because the “positive good” theory of slavery espoused by John C. Calhoun displaced that peculiar creature of the founding generation, the slave owner whose trepidations about slavery’s moral wrongs led him to cast about for a political solution that might eventually wean the country from its original sin.

Thomas Jefferson would famously “tremble” for his country when he reflected “that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.” Some three decades later the philosophical tension persisted, but the hoped-for political solution remained elusive. “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go,” he wrote, summarizing the predicament. “Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” Jefferson and others of his mindset explored the possibility of diffusing the institution into the western lands, out of the belief — now known to be mistaken — that it would dwindle away. James Madison lent his support to a solution rooted in colonizing manumitted freedmen abroad in locales such as Liberia. Though hopelessly impractical and at times racist in its designs, the colonization program gained an influential following before the Civil War, passing next to Henry Clay as an advocate of the weaning strategy before being taken up by the moderate but certain anti-slavery voice of Abraham Lincoln.

Distance from the founding generation emboldened a new pro-slavery legal theory that read more-explicit affirmations of slavery into American constitutionalism. In the founding generation, notes legal historian William Wiecek, “even slave-state jurists at first accepted [Somerset’s] anti-slavery premises,” only to work around them by constructing exceptions and exemptions. The ascendance of Calhoun’s pro-slavery doctrine transformed the Constitution’s implicit concessions to slavery into an explicit and affirmative sanction — a legal theory that the 1619 Project casually adopts, albeit as a repurposed indictment of the Constitution itself. As with Calhoun, this step requires rejecting the Founding’s aspirational principle that all men are created equal — “an error” that was “inserted in our Declaration of Independence without any necessity,” according to the South Carolina senator.

Less discussed is the parallel emboldening of Somerset’s anti-slavery constitutionalism in the hands of abolitionists. Consider an 1817 “freedom suit” case in which Justice John McLean of the Ohio supreme court opined, “Were it proper to consider it, the Court, as well as from the principles recognized by our Constitution and Laws, could not hesitate in declaring that slavery . . . is an infringement upon the sacred rights of man.” Within a generation, abolitionist legal theorists William Goodell and Lysander Spooner had each penned elaborate treatises applying Somerset’s reasoning to the U.S. Constitution, contending that it lacked a clear affirmation of slavery as positive law. While modern scholarship is apt to relegate such doctrines to the political periphery, they counted no less than Frederick Douglass among their converts. A direct legal lineage to Somerset may be seen in Douglass’s famous 1852 Fourth of July address, in which he argued precisely the case that the Times today rejects: “Interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.”

COMMENTS

Douglass’s appeal entailed more than fiery abolitionist rhetoric, though. In five years’ time another “freedom suit” would come before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of a slave named “Dred Scott.” The decision’s infamy derives from its clumsy attempt to enshrine pro-slavery constitutionalism as national doctrine, creating a primary catalyst for the Civil War in the process.

Still, the anti-slavery constitutional message may be seen in the case itself for raising the issue of Scott’s legal claim to freedom. To this end, the same John McLean of the earlier Ohio decision, now sitting as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, penned one of two dissents. In his biting attack on the ruling of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, McLean paid homage to a predecessor freedom suit, noting that “it is a sufficient answer to all objections to that judgment, that it was pronounced before the Revolution, and that it was considered by this court as the highest authority.” He was referring to Somerset’s case.

This article appears as “Interpreted as It Ought to Be” in the July 27, 2020, print edition of National Review.

PHILLIP W. MAGNESS is a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.

On George Washington

By NOEMIE EMERY

July 9, 2020 11:46 AM

His letters show his changing view of slavery

George Washington, father of his country, which was the first to say that men were born free and thus ought to be equal, was also the owner of slaves. So were three of the next four men to succeed him in office, who were also Virginians, and who had even fewer reservations about this than he. Back in the day, this was noted by many, Samuel Johnson among them, who wondered in London just how it happened that “the loudest yelps for liberty” from the other side of the ocean had come from the drivers of slaves. Among the Founders, there would be two extremes, from Alexander Hamilton, the “Bastard Brat of a drunken Scotch Pedler,” as John Adams once called him, who came to the country at age 17 a convinced abolitionist and stayed so forever, to Thomas Jefferson, who talked a good game by declaring loudly in print that “all men are created equal,” and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, but whose conduct in keeping some people in chains seems to say otherwise.

Of the three, Washington alone changed his perspective, starting his life by accepting the status quo as it was in his own home state of Virginia, and ending it by going so far in advance of most public opinion that he wanted to see slavery outlawed. He seems to have given the matter itself, or the human bondage with which he lived, no thought at all through his late twenties. Though he inherited ten slaves from his father when he was eleven and bought eight more for himself later on, he hardly seems to have been around them, or his home, for that matter, at first absent for long stretches of time on surveying trips for his friends the Fairfaxes (at that time the colony’s most powerful people), and later on military missions for the local militia, during which he began and then fought in  the French and Indian War.

That war and his derring-do in it would bring him the cachet and the fame that allowed him to woo and to win an extremely rich woman — Martha Dandridge Custis, heir to her husband’s very large fortune — whom he married in January 1759. She brought with her when she came to Mount Vernon some 80-plus slaves from the estate of her late husband, more than four times the amount Washington had owned or commanded before. No comments of Washington’s survive from this period about race, or slaves, so it seems fair to assume he took the system for granted, as the way things were and would go on forever, as most people do the world they grew up in. But that would change with the oncoming war.

It was not what Washington said or did about slaves during the eight years of the Revolution that marked the extent of what happened in it, that marked the tremendous extent of the change. In the meantime, he had led an army with 5,000 black soldiers, traveled and lived in the parts of the country that had very few slaves and no large plantations, had as his younger aides and associates Alexander Hamilton, John Laurens, and the Marquis de Lafayette, who were fierce abolitionists, and had eight long years to think of the sheer incoherence in fighting a war on the premise that all men deserved freedom, while some people at home were in chains.

Whatever the cause — and perhaps all were the reason — when Washington was back home for good (as he thought) at Mount Vernon, he started to write things such as these: “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for this Abolition,” he wrote in a letter in 1784. “It is much against my inclination . . . to hurt the feelings of these unhappy people by a separation of families,” he wrote two years later. “Were it not . . . that I am principled against selling negroes, as you would do cattle in the market, I would not, in twelve months from this date, be possessed of one as a slave,” went one other letter. And another insisted, “I never mean, unless some particular circumstance should compel me to it, to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptible degrees.” In the will he wrote in the year that he died, he stipulated that if his wife survived him, he would free on her death all the slaves he owned outright, while those from the Custis estate, whom he did not control, would revert to those owners. After he died, Martha became so concerned that the slaves would kill her in order to gain their own freedom that her attorneys set them all free.

Why was Washington the only slave owner among all of the others who set his slaves free?

COMMENTS

One answer was that he had a more evolved social conscience, but the other was that he belonged to a wholly unique mercantile order: They were inheritors and agrarian planters; he was a self-made man, and an entrepreneur. Jefferson was born into great wealth and raised in a feudal and class-ridden system; Washington was born the third son of a middle-rank planter who rose by his own efforts and made his own wealth. He understood the free-enterprise system: Men discovered their talent and sold their own service, for whatever their talents would bring. He demanded hard work of himself, and all men black and white who worked for him, but soon realized blacks would never work to capacity unless they could realize a gain. Under slavery, they could never improve their own status or standard of living, so why should they work for another man’s gain?

“Despite all of Washington’s talents as an entrepreneur, enslaved men, women, and children had by their labor played a vital role in creating his wealth,” says Edward G. Engel in his book First Entrepreneur. Though

time had taught him to view their continued labor as a grave moral injustice, it was his conception of a moral economy . . . that led him to decide that slavery as a system was not only bound to fail, but would, so long as it existed, hinder the growth of national prosperity. . . . By undermining the basic principles of industry, such labor morally degraded not just the slaves but those who owned them. . . . It was for this reason above all that Washington came to believe that he had to free them — albeit, true to the principle of interest, in a way that did the least harm either to the enslaved or to his estate.

Washington, though a fourth-generation Virginian, was in his essence a Northerner, one who believed in the egalitarian, freewheeling, immigrant-friendly culture of the Northeast, and of the Midwest, as it would develop, and leave the South — which would not revive until the late 20th century when segregation was beaten — behind. He was the world’s first and only Northern Virginian, which is why we revere him today.

This article appears as “George Washington” in the July 27, 2020, print edition of National Review.

NOEMIE EMERY has also written for the Washington Examiner and The Weekly Standard.

On Thomas Jefferson

By MYRON MAGNET

July 9, 2020 2:19 PM

He trusted to the advance of the Enlightenment to end slavery

Nobody embodies the paradox at the heart of the American founding more vividly than Thomas  Jefferson, the slave owner who penned the American creed of liberty in the Declaration of Independence and who, with a slave as his concubine, would “dream of freedom in his bondsmaid’s arms,” as Irish poet Tom Moore jeered during Jefferson’s second presidential term. As young vandals torch our national heritage, in an infectious delusion that America was conceived in slavery, not in liberty, take a good look at our third president, warts and all. You’ll find, despite his undeniable flaws, one of history’s great men who helped build history’s greatest nation. He is especially relevant now, when the qualities he placed at the center of our culture are at once so beleaguered and so essential. 

By his order, Jefferson’s gravestone identifies him only as the father of the University of Virginia and the author of both the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia statute of religious freedom — intellectual accomplishments all. Of his presidency and other government offices there’s not a word. He was a true child of the Enlightenment, most at home in the world of ideas and convinced that reason would lead to truth, material improvement, and moral progress. Hence his emphasis on religious freedom in a Virginia that, even after the Declaration of Independence, had an established Anglican church, exacting taxes from all citizens and forbidding the promulgation of unorthodox religious beliefs.

No one can make you profess or support dogmas you don’t believe, Jefferson countered. The first freedom is the freedom to think whatever thoughts you like and say whatever your reason tells you is true. No one can deny, his statute declared, echoing Milton’s sublime Areopagitica, “that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”

So simple and so obvious: but can one find a college administrator or newspaper editor with the courage to say this to politically correct mobs howling down unorthodox speakers or writers today? Would any one of them declare, with Jefferson, “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man?”

Then there is America’s foundational idea, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, summing up Locke’s political theory with diamond-like compression and clarity, and adding to it a uniquely American flourish that makes it something new in political thought. Men are born equal in their rights to life and liberty, and they form governments only to protect those rights. Public officials thus work for the citizens; even “kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people,” as of course are the administrative state’s meddlesome “swarms of officers [who] harass our people and eat out their substance.” All can be fired for abuse or neglect of their trust, including failure to keep citizens safe in their homes and streets.

But there’s one more unalienable right with which we’re born: the right to “the pursuit of happiness.” “Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue,” wrote the great English novelist V. S. Naipaul, whose Trinidadian childhood as the grandson of Indian indentured laborers made him never take Jefferson’s formulation for granted. It is, he marveled, “an immense human idea” that contains a world of possibility: “a certain kind of awakened spirit, . . . the idea of individual responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement.” We are born, Jefferson declared, with the right to forge our own happiness in our own way, to make the most of whatever talents and energies, tastes and curiosities lie within us. Who before, in man’s history of serfs and lords, could dare dream of such liberty?

When Jefferson claimed to have fathered the University of Virginia, he was not kidding. Arguably America’s greatest architect ever, amateur or professional, he designed its meltingly beautiful campus as a textbook of classicism. He oversaw its construction, served as its rector, hired its faculty, and devised its curriculum, “based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind to explore and to expose every subject susceptible of its contemplation.” His educational aspirations had been even grander than this. Early in his political career he had lobbied hard, though unsuccessfully, for a purely meritocratic system of public education that would make every Virginian literate and send the most talented on to secondary school and then university, with the selection more rigorous at each stage, to generate a constantly renewed “aristocracy of virtue and talent.” Now that cities spend $25,000 a year to send each child to elementary school and parents shell out $65,000 for a year at an elite university offering more snob appeal than learning, we are rapidly discarding such a meritocratic ideal, heedless that our predatory global competitors are overtaking us in wealth and power as a result. But even in Jefferson’s day, his ideal was hard to realize. His students got drunk, brawled, shot off guns among his classical pavilions, and roughed up their professors. Jefferson, then 82, came down from his mountaintop home to remonstrate with them. He mounted the stage, tried to speak, and burst into tears.

Recently, among the Jacobin mobs vandalizing our cities, some yahoo in Charlottesville graffitied a statue of Jefferson near the university with the legend “Racist + Rapist,” making him an almost complete intersectional villain. What about those charges?

It is true that Jefferson owned slaves, and that Monticello, built to his exquisite design of bricks made and laid by slaves, as in Egypt of old, was a slave plantation, its rare and precious furnishings and books, even the Château Margaux and Château d’Yquem in its cellars, bought by the sweat of slaves’ brows. (I write this with some trepidation, lest the mob come to demolish America’s most beautiful house.) But he knew to the marrow of his bones that slavery was wrong, an affront to his most cherished principles and those of the new nation, and he began saying so publicly at 26, when he tried unsuccessfully to persuade the legislature to make it legal for Virginians to free their slaves. Later, he needed Benjamin Franklin’s avuncular consolation when his fellow congressmen edited out of his draft of the Declaration of Independence his condemnation of George III for allowing the slave trade, a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty.” The existence of slavery endangered the liberty of all Americans, he thought, for it undermined citizens’ belief that human liberty comes from God and is not to be violated without His punishment. Indeed, he wrote of the slaves, in words that sound like Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, “when the measure of their tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness, doubtless a god of  justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light & liberality among their oppressors, or at length by his exterminating thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not to be left to the guidance of a blind fatality.”

Jefferson trusted to the advance of Enlightenment to end an institution that had existed in America for more than a century before the Revolution and that the Founding Fathers couldn’t abolish at a stroke if they wanted their new nation to comprise all 13 colonies. But they blocked its spread with the Northwest Ordinance; they set a date to end the slave trade; and they foresaw that tobacco’s exhaustion of the soil would make slave plantations uneconomical and slavery unviable. But then came the cotton gin and the 1820 Missouri Compromise, extending slavery westward and giving it renewed life. “Like a fire bell in the night,” Jefferson wrote, the compromise “filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.” It would have to be exterminating thunder, after all. In the midst of the Civil War’s bloodshed, it was to Jefferson’s immortal words that Lincoln turned to proclaim America’s new birth of freedom.

COMMENTS

Finally: “Rapist.” The sans-culotte with the spray paint doubtless meant Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemings, the half-sister of his beloved wife, who left him a widower when he was 39. Begotten by Jefferson’s father-in-law upon a slave woman whose own father was an English sea captain, Sally was three-quarters white and, according to one contemporary, “decidedly good-looking.” A teenager in Jefferson’s household when he was the American minister in Paris, she was pregnant when he was to return to the United States and, because she was free under revolutionary France’s law, would agree to come back with him only on his promise to free her baby and any others she might have when they turned 21, a promise he kept, as her son, Madison, recounted the whole story in 1873. Of other women in the normally hot-blooded Jefferson’s life after this we hear nothing. What DNA evidence exists is inconclusive. Historians have spun fantasies — that she looked like her half-sister, that he felt, . . . that she felt . . . But more we do not know.

Freedom of thought and speech; all men equal in rights, including the right to the pursuit of their own happiness in their own way; a meritocratic society: We need Jefferson’s seminal ideas, the ideas that formed the core of our American identity, now more than ever.

This article appears as “Thomas Jefferson” in the July 27, 2020, print edition of National Review.

MYRON MAGNET — Mr. Magnet, a National Humanities Medalist, is the author of The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735–1817 and, most recently, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution.

On Abraham Lincoln

By ALLEN C. GUELZO

July 9, 2020 11:13 AM

‘Great emancipator’ is right

‘The moment I was president,” sighed Abraham Lincoln in the spring of 1864, people “seemed to think . . . I had the power to abolish slavery.” He didn’t. And despite the demands, the pressure, and even the bullying of abolitionists, politicians, and journalists, he was correct. American slavery, as it existed before 1861 and the outbreak of the Civil War, was a creation of state statutes. In an era that knew nothing about an “incorporation doctrine” requiring the conformity of state law with the federal Constitution, a jurisprudential firewall separated the authority of the federal government (and of Lincoln, as its executive) from the states. In strict constitutional terms, then, Abraham Lincoln’s hands were tied on the subject of slavery. “Before I could have any power whatever,” he explained, “I had to take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and execute the laws as I found them.”

That did not mean that Lincoln was indifferent to the hideous wrong of enslaving other human beings. “The slavery question often bothered me as far back as 1836 to 40,” he remembered. “I was troubled and grieved over it.” And in 1837, as a newly minted Illinois state legislator, he had sponsored a resolution condemning slavery as “founded on both injustice and bad policy.” But even then, he acknowledged that the firewall between federal and state authority gave the federal government “no power, under the constitution, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different States.”

True as it was that Lincoln hated especially “to see the poor creatures hunted down and caught and carried back to their stripes and unrequited toil,” and  described himself as “one who abhors the oppression of negroes,” his only political option in the 1850s was to “oppose the extension of slavery” into the western territories of the old Louisiana Purchase. Even as president, Lincoln candidly declared, “I am naturally anti-slavery,” and he believed that “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” But he had “never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to . . . practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery.”

The Civil War altered that landscape for him. The Confederate insurgency called on Lincoln to exercise his constitutional designation as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States,” and equipped him with the mandate to do whatever was militarily necessary to suppress that insurgency. Those “war powers,” he believed, included emancipating the Confederacy’s slaves, arming them, and turning them into a weapon to win the war.

But the Constitution nowhere spelled out exactly what Lincoln’s “war powers” were, and so it required a risky shimmy onto the constitutional limb on January 1, 1863, to issue an Emancipation Proclamation “warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity.” Even Lincoln was not entirely convinced that the Proclamation would survive post-war litigation, which is why in January 1865 he twisted so many arms in Congress to ensure the adoption of the 13th Amendment, constitutionally abolishing slavery. “I cannot recall my proclamations,” he insisted, but “whether they are binding or not will be a question for the courts.”

Once the Proclamation was issued, though, Lincoln countenanced no turning back. Even before issuing the Proclamation, he promised that “the slave of every rebel master who seeks protection of the flag shall have it and be free,” and that “no slave who becomes for a time free within the American lines will ever be re-enslaved. Rather than have it so, I’d give up and abdicate.” Once he signed it, he was adamant. He “should be damned in time & in eternity,” he wrote, if he should abandon the freed slaves. In his last presidential report to Congress, he warned that any movement to revoke the Proclamation would be met with his resignation from the presidency: “If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to re-enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it.”

Lincoln described the 13th Amendment as “a King’s cure for all the evils,” since it put emancipation beyond any reach of judicial recall. “It winds the whole thing up.” And yet, not the whole thing. As early as September 1864, Lincoln dispatched a staffer, William Stoddard, to assist in implementing reconstruction in Union-occupied Arkansas, and urged him to “do all you can, in any and every way you can, to get the ballot into the hands of the freedmen.” And in his last speech, on April 11, 1865, he proposed phasing in an extension of “the elective franchise . . . to the colored man” in Louisiana. This infuriated one of his audience, who swore that for this outrage against white supremacy, “I will put him through.” Which is, three nights later, what happened. The infuriated hearer was John Wilkes Booth.

Six weeks after Lincoln’s murder, the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass took the stage at a memorial meeting in New York City’s Cooper Institute (where, five years before, Lincoln had delivered the speech that almost certainly made him president) and described Lincoln as “emphatically the black man’s president.” At the outset of Lincoln’s presidency, Douglass had been sharply critical of Lincoln’s slow, prudential pace toward emancipation. But after meeting Lincoln for the first time in 1863, Douglass was impressed by Lincoln’s freedom from racial cant and bias. “He was the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color,” Douglass wrote years later, “and I . . . account partially for his kindness to me because of the similarity with which I had fought my way up, we both starting at the lowest round of the ladder.” Lincoln, declared William Howard Day during a fund-raising event for the Emancipation Memorial being created by the sculptor Thomas Ball, was “the dearest friend, the kindest man” that “as president” the freed slaves “ever knew.”

And that, for most of the following century, was the prevailing African-American view of Lincoln. Booker T. Washington, who came the closest of any African American to being a national spokesman for American blacks in the Jim Crow era, lauded Lincoln in 1891 as “that great man, the ‘first American.’” In his autobiography, Washington claimed: “I think I do not go too far when I say that I have read nearly every book and magazine article that has been written about Abraham Lincoln. In literature he has been my patron saint.” William Lilly, Lincoln’s first African-American biographer, was certain when he wrote Set My People Free: A Negro’s Life of Lincoln in 1932 that “the figure of the president who emancipated the blacks has become more vivid and dynamic.”

Lilly, however, was wrong. Emancipation was not followed seamlessly by a color-blind integration of black and white in a single republican society, and the disappointment showed especially when Douglass was invited to speak at the dedication of Ball’s Emancipation Memorial in Washington in 1876. “We are at best only his step-children,” Douglass said, “children by adoption, children by force of circumstances and necessity.” Still, it was not until the 1950s that the erosion of African-American approbation of Lincoln became noticeable. By then, a black middle class was making its first serious inroads into Jim Crow segregation, using its new economic leverage to force the old Confederacy, and then the rest of the country, out of its contentment with second-class black citizenship. And it did so at the behest of black leaders — Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin — who saw themselves as self-acting, not as patrons of friendly whites, and who resented the rotted cream of condescension offered by white liberals almost as much as they did the unshirted bigotry of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils.

That assertion of independence impacted African-American views of Lincoln much as any coming of age loosens trust, makes dependence look suspect, and encourages the dismissing of nobility that falls short of perfection. As Julius Lester wrote in 1968, “one of the bigger lies that America has given the world is that Lincoln freed the slaves, and that blacks should be grateful from can to can’t because Mr. Lincoln was so generous.”

This disenchantment with Lincoln took two forms. One, promoted by Lerone Bennett Jr. (in Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream), was to underscore a number of embarrassingly unenlightened comments Lincoln had made in the 1850s on race and thus prove that Lincoln “believed until his death that the Negro was the Other, the inferior, the subhuman, who had to be . . . subordinated, enslaved, quarantined to protect the sexual, social, political, and economic interests of Whites.” The other, introduced by Vincent Harding and Barbara Fields, is the “self-emancipation thesis” — that slaves took advantage of the tumult of the Civil War to run away in such numbers as to mount “a full-blown inner civil war . . . within the South” and force Lincoln’s hand in issuing the Proclamation.

COMMENTS

These disenchantments flourish more through their polemical force than because of any serious historical evidence. It was actually a surprise to many Northerners that the slaves did not use the Civil War as an opportunity for insurrection (and why should they, given the risks such insurrection ran?). A moment’s reflection will remind nearly anyone that slave runaways had no voting rights, and thus no way to influence Lincoln’s decision on emancipation. And while it is easy to cherry-pick Lincolnian comments that lack modern sensitivities on race, it is also more than a little unusual to find in a mid-19th-century white man so little trace of racist demagoguery.

A century and a half ago, Thomas Ball’s Emancipation Memorial showed how a white man could open a door to the future for a black man and both rise the taller for it together. Even Frederick Douglass, for all his disappointments, could say at the memorial’s dedication that Lincoln “is doubly dear to us, and his memory will be precious forever.” Today the voices not of unreconstructed bigotry but of contemptuous historical ignorance demand the toppling of the Emancipation Memorial and decry Lincoln as the model racist. If we have lost the mutuality that Lincoln represents, the capacity to rise as citizens together, then we have almost certainly lost Lincoln. And if we have lost Lincoln, we may very well have lost ourselves, black and white, together.

This article appears as “Abraham Lincoln” in the July 27, 2020, print edition of National Review.

ALLEN C. GUELZO is the senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University and the director of the James Madison Program’s Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship.

On Systemic Racism

By ROBERT VERBRUGGEN

July 9, 2020 11:31 AM

A useful concept misapplied

For several decades now, America has struggled with a new development in race relations: Jim Crow is gone, and the great majority of whites have abandoned openly racist attitudes, and yet severe racial inequality has persisted. Where it was once obvious why blacks lagged whites on numerous measures of thriving, today the explanation is more complicated, involving the prejudice that indisputably still exists, the legacy of past discrimination reflected in the environments that blacks experience, and cultural and behavioral differences between the two groups. This is one reason the term “systemic racism” has caught on with the Left: It ties all of this together, places the blame on a white-dominated power structure, and through the word “racism” links the situation today with the earlier one whose brutality roused voters to take action.

The point of this article is not to debunk or endorse the notion of systemic racism, or indeed to get bogged down in the semantics of the term at all. (In the broadest uses it can refer to any social process that results in racial disparities, in which case it’s more of a catch-all concept than a testable claim.) It is, instead, to briefly explain the racial dynamics at the center of the current problem — including how they’ve changed and what causes them — and to chart a path forward rooted in conservative principles.

The clearest positive development is that white Americans have overwhelmingly, though not entirely, abandoned the explicit racism many of them proudly professed half a century ago. In 1972, a quarter of whites told the General Social Survey they would refuse to vote for a black president; in 2010, fewer than one in 20 did. As recently as 1990, two-thirds of whites said they would oppose or strongly oppose it if a close family member married a black person, a number that fell below 15 percent in 2018 — and to half that among those under 40.

Concrete results have mostly improved too, though different measures find improvement at different paces and at different times, and it isn’t impossible to find indicators that remain stagnant. By one measure, the black poverty rate fell from 47 percent to 25 percent between 1970 and 2014, while the white poverty rate dropped only from 17 percent to 11 percent. The earnings gap between white male and black male workers has shrunk from 43 percent to 33 percent since 1950 — though if you include nonworkers with no earnings, such as those incarcerated or out of the labor force, the number has actually remained flat at 49 percent. Standardized-test scores have converged as well, though this trend slowed to a crawl after about 1990. Even incarceration, which skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s as legislators toughened policies in response to high crime, is on its way down — with the black rate declining much faster than the white one.

Americans are mixing socially with people of different races much more frequently as well. According to work by the demographer William Frey, to completely integrate neighborhoods in 1970, you’d have had to move more than 70 percent of the black population to new places; by 2010, that had fallen below 50 percent. And according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, only 4 percent of white newlyweds had a spouse of a different race in 1980, compared with 11 percent in 2015; blacks’ rate of intermarriage rose from 5 percent to 18 percent over the same period.

Of course, this is slow progress. Almost 15 percent of whites still have a problem with interracial marriage, and fully integrated neighborhoods would look a lot different from the neighborhoods we actually have. It is also clear that discrimination in the job market persists: If you send a white person and a black person with identical résumés out to apply for low-skill jobs, the white person will get significantly more callbacks. (Of course, sending them to apply to college or a high-level position at a big corporation might well give the opposite result, owing to affirmative action, an odd way in which the most help is given to the most well-off.)

However, as racial disparities have declined and white attitudes have simultaneously improved, the former have become less of a function of the latter — and deeper issues, including racial differences in wealth, neighborhoods, schools, skills, culture, and personal behavior, have risen in importance. In one recent study, the demographer John Iceland took the black–white poverty gap and “decomposed” it into factors such as education, family structure, and age. In 1959, these “observable” characteristics explained only half of the gap. (The unexplained portion of the gap cannot be interpreted purely as the effect of discrimination, but it indicates that blacks and whites fared differently even when they had the same measured characteristics.) By 2015, these traits explained two-thirds, with family structure especially gaining in importance: It explained 12 percent of the gap at the beginning of the time period but a third at the end.

A limit of Iceland’s study is that his data include only a level of education, with no more-precise numbers on skills. (Two people with high-school degrees can have very different skill levels, and B.A.s from different schools can mean very different things.) By contrast, a 2014 study by Bhashkar Mazumder on upward mobility included the result of a cognitive test taken in adolescence and, like some previous work, found this to be very important: “The black–white gap in moving out of the bottom [income] quintile is only 5.2 percentage points for those with median [scores on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test], compared with the unconditional gap of 27 percentage points.” This suggests the educational-achievement gap is the root of much else.

Criminal-justice disparities are similar. There are countless studies, some of them well conducted, finding bias at various stages of the process — from police-deployment patterns to prison sentences — but there can be no denying that racial differences in crime rates play a major role. The black homicide rate is roughly seven times the white one, for example; and there are significant if smaller disparities for lesser offenses as well, even if we rely on surveys of crime victims, rather than arrests (which may result from biased policing), to estimate offending rates. Differences in offending, by themselves, likely explain most of the incarceration gap, though studies disagree as to the exact proportion.

Studies of police use of force paint the same picture: There’s bias — perhaps a lot of bias, depending on which measures one prefers — but even perfect cops, deployed to neighborhoods purely on the basis of crime and not race, wouldn’t find themselves needing to use force against all racial groups equally. Blacks are actually a higher percentage of people who kill cops than of people killed by cops, so obviously suspects of different races attack cops at different rates.

These problems are far more difficult to address than the ones we faced in 1960, when lunch counters were segregated, businesses could (and did) openly refuse to hire blacks, and interracial marriage was illegal. White racism may ultimately have caused today’s problems, but eliminating white racism, at least in the conventional sense of that term, can only mitigate them somewhat. And the racism that’s still around is usually much less blatant, and therefore harder to identify and stamp out. These days it’s tricky to demonstrate bias at the statistical level, let alone prove it was at work in any specific case absent a smoking gun.

The modern Left’s response to this state of affairs has been multifaceted, but always racially divisive in a way likely to stoke backlash, and often in denial of the fact that behavioral gaps are a part of the problem. One new tactic from the realm of corporate consulting is to browbeat whites into admitting their subtle complicity in racism and then accuse them of “white fragility” when they get defensive. There have also been the usual race-based policy proposals, from affirmative action to reparations for slavery. The practical, political, and constitutional problems with these approaches are obvious enough to any conservative, and I won’t repeat them here.

What the Left gets right, though, is to look at the question of race relations in a broader way, moving beyond yesterday’s de jure segregation and open racism and encouraging whites to reflect on what they can do to improve things. The Right can do this as well without joining in the drive to label everyone and everything “racist” and enact explicitly race-based policies in the name of antiracism.

Public policy can improve black outcomes and speed integration in a way that advances conservative principles. And thus we as conservatives can do more than highlight differences in behavior — as real and important as those differences may be — and then say the solutions can come only from the black community itself.

This is not the place to outline a full platform, but here are a few examples of policies that might help. Education reform has long been a strong suit of the Right, with even many deep-blue cities having come around to seeing the virtues of charter schools and other forms of school choice. The Right, always wary of government abuses, can also sign on to moderate policing and incarceration reforms: Cops and prisons are both important for cutting crime, but that isn’t to deny that cops should be held accountable when they do wrong or to say that no U.S. jurisdiction could stand to incarcerate less. (Senator Tim Scott’s policing bill and the FIRST STEP Act are both good examples.) Perhaps most important for long-term integration, which is the surest way of breaking down racial barriers, a war on local zoning regulations would shrink the scope of government and make it easier for poor families to live in thriving neighborhoods.

All of these policies would help to address racial inequities and speed up our agonizingly slow pace of integration, both of which deserve to be conservative priorities.

ROBERT VERBRUGGEN is a policy writer for National Review. @raverbruggen

America’s Racial Progress

By DAVID FRENCH

July 9, 2020 11:48 AM

It is remarkable, and it continues

There are two things that I believe to be true. First, that America has a long history of brutal and shameful mistreatment of racial minorities — with black Americans its chief victims. And second, that America is a great nation, and that American citizens (and citizens of the world) should be grateful for its founding. Perhaps no nation has done more good for more people than the United States. It was and is a beacon of liberty and prosperity in a world long awash in tyranny and poverty.

In much of our modern political discourse, it seems to be taken as a given that the existence of one truth has to negate the other. A nation simply can’t be great and also inflict such immense pain and suffering on so many millions of black and brown citizens.

And so the public debate warps and twists. Speak about the greatness of the nation, and critics immediately accuse you of minimizing the undeniably hideous sin of white supremacy. Emphasize white supremacy, and opponents will accuse you of minimizing the immense sacrifices of black and white soldiers in the Union Army, the undeniable progress in civil rights since Jim Crow, and the obvious fact that black and brown citizens from across the globe flock to our shores in search of the American dream.

Let’s dodge that back-and-forth and go back and ask two more-fundamental questions. What is the nature of man? And what does that nature imply for the history of nations and cultures? Absent truthful answers to those questions, it’s not possible to accurately analyze a nation’s worth. And the answers are grim.

Human beings, to quote no lesser authority than Jesus Christ, are evil. As G. K. Chesterton observed, original sin is the “only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” It doesn’t take a historian to know that a survey of human civilization over the ages leads us to conclude that social justice has been hard to find. Indeed, there isn’t even a straight line between, say, Athenian democracy and American liberty, or the Magna Carta and the American Constitution. Instead, there were times when three steps forward were followed by nine steps back.

The American republic was thus founded against the backdrop of millennia of conquest, oppression, slavery, monarchy, and tyranny — all of it an expression of humanity’s dark nature. That doesn’t mean there weren’t pockets of virtue or periodic prophetic condemnations of wickedness, but the presence of evil in human affairs has been persistent and often overpowering.

Noting that the evils of slavery and conquest have been pervasive doesn’t make them less evil. It does, however, help us to explain our appreciation for the American founding and the trajectory of the American nation.

That founding and that trajectory were hardly inevitable. Indeed, the introduction of slavery to our shores in 1619 showed that there was nothing particularly special about our new civilization. It was more of the dreary human same. The signing of the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution (and the Bill of Rights) were, by contrast, remarkable. They marked the beginning of something new.

It’s important to emphasize the word “beginning.” I’ve been struggling to think of the right analogy to describe the role of the American founding in world history. Let’s try a term from counterinsurgency warfare: “the ink blot.”

In counterinsurgency warfare, the strategist looks at a nation or countryside in chaos — one that’s descending into a state of nature — and attempts to establish an island of safety and security. The purpose is for that island of safety and security to spread across the map the way an ink blot spreads across the paper.

The American founding declared universal principles: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But then its constitution and laws granted only a particularized and narrow defense of those rights.

Even the Bill of Rights, sweeping in its language, was extraordinarily limited in its scope. It originally restrained only the actions of a small and relatively weak central government. The ink blot of liberty was tiny. The only people who could confidently assert those universal rights were a small class of white male property owners clustered on the Eastern Seaboard of the new United States.

Everyone else, to a greater or lesser extent, lived still within the ordinary state of nature, with slaves, as always, the most vulnerable of all. But the combination of a universal declaration of liberty — and the obvious joy and prosperity of its exercise — created an unbearable tension within the new nation. There was a tension between our founding ideals and our founding reality.

Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, understood this tension. These words, adapted from his writings, are engraved on Panel Three of the Jefferson Memorial:

God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.

It is absolutely true that too many of those Americans who enjoyed the blessings of liberty did not ponder the question Frederick Douglass posed: “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” Too many, once they cashed in their own “promissory note” of freedom, did not concern themselves with those who were still owed a debt of liberty. But in every generation, there were Americans — white and black, slave and free — who sought to close the gap between promise and reality.

And make no mistake, in the face of often violent resistance, the American promise is prevailing. The ink blot of liberty is spreading, blotting out the default human background of oppression and misery. Critically, that ink blot has jumped our borders. The mightiest military power in the history of the world has used its strength to defeat the world’s worst tyrannies, secure the existence of liberal democracies from Japan to Germany, and then maintained a long and prosperous peace.

But it’s a mistake to think that our chief task is to point backwards, to look at the immense gap between slavery and freedom, between Jim Crow and civil rights, and believe that our work has been done. One does not undo the consequences of 345 years of legalized oppression in a mere 56 years of contentious change. Instead, our task is to continue the struggle to match American principles with American reality. It’s to spread the ink blot — to continue the American counterinsurgency against the chaos of history.

In July of every year, I think of two seminal infantry charges. The first occurred on July 2, 1863, when Colonel Joshua Chamberlain led the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment on a desperate counterattack against Confederate troops on Little Round Top on perhaps the most fateful day in American history — day two of the Battle of Gettysburg.

The second charge happened just 16 days later, when the 54th Massachusetts Infantry launched its own desperate attack against the walls of Fort Wagner in South Carolina. The 54th was a black regiment, and its charge was a direct and physical manifestation that America’s black citizens were rising up to seize their inheritance.

The lesson of those two historic moments has been repeated time and again throughout American history. It took white Americans and black Americans to end slavery — and not through a revolt against the Founding but rather through a defense of the Founding. It took white Americans and black Americans to end Jim Crow. Again, not through a revolt against the Founding but rather through a defense of the Founding. Through appeals to America’s founding promise, every marginalized American community has muscled its way into more-complete membership in the American family.

It’s right to celebrate a nation that has — over time — combined courageous people with righteous principles to secure a “more perfect union.” Light the fireworks. Defend the monuments to the imperfect (though indispensable) people who in their turn and their time advanced human liberty and dignity.

It’s most important, however, that we run the race in our turn, that we look forward so that future generations can look back and say of us that we didn’t simply secure and maintain the gains of the past — we made our own payments on that promissory note of freedom. We continued to close the gap between American principles and American reality. We have far to go, but the courageous history of this great nation should give us confidence that the best part of the American story is yet to be told.

This article appears as “On Racial Progress” in the July 27, 2020, print edition of National Review.

DAVID FRENCH is a senior editor at The Dispatch. @davidafrench

Color Blindness Should Be the Norm

By ANDRE M. ARCHIE

July 9, 2020 12:00 PM

Not every idea deserves equal consideration

To defend America in these culturally turbulent times, conservatives must jettison an intellectual assumption popularized by the 19th-century British thinker John Stuart Mill. The assumption is that truth will emerge if competing ideas are equally entertained in the public square. Otherwise, according to Mill, we would be robbing the human race, if these ideas are right, of the chance to exchange error for truth, and, if they are wrong, of the chance to see more clearly because of the “collision with error.” Mill was committed to the belief that human progress is inevitable.

As a matter of fact, the inevitable triumph of good ideas or truth is not guaranteed, and certain ideas should not be allowed to gain a foothold in the public square at all. Among those who understand that ideas have consequences, conservatives in particular should be aware of the moral hazard of legitimizing certain ideas by thinking they can be defeated solely by open and rational discussion. One such idea that conservatives failed to challenge and debunk before it took root (in the early 2000s) in influential sectors and institutions of American society is the idea of anti–color blindness. Proponents of anti-color-blind pedagogy believe that the best way to navigate cultural differences in the United States is to openly discuss and highlight racial and ethnic differences. Highlighting differences of race, they argue, makes explicit the structural nature of white economic and social power, and how it is perpetuated at the expense of black Americans and other people of color. Any attempt to downplay ethnic and racial differences, or “homogenize” communities of color by offering platitudes about a supposed “American identity,” is seen as a pernicious form of color-blind racism.

Contemporary American conservatives failed to see just how corrosive and revolutionary the anti-color-blind pedagogy is. They took it for granted that the idea of color blindness was a bedrock notion that stood very little chance of being displaced. Legal precedent seemed to confirm conservatives’ complacency. The legal fight against those who opposed the idea that all people are equal before the law was difficult and bloody, but the fight was believed to be just and on the right side of history. In the 1850s, the Frederick Douglass wing of the abolitionist movement made the case for a color-blind reading of America’s founding documents. That reading led to a split with Garrisonian abolitionists, who agreed with Chief Justice Roger Taney’s pro-slavery interpretation of the Constitution. Most important, it was Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” and its attendant Civil War amendments that laid the conceptual groundwork for a color-blind interpretation of the founding documents. In 1896, Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson eloquently explained the relationship between color blindness and the Constitution of the United States:

But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.

Nearly five decades later, the civil-rights movement was effective because it sought equal, color-blind protection before the law, ensuring that black Americans would be judged not by the color of their skin but rather by the content of their character. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a Dream” speech are powerful indictments of segregation and its anti-color-blind position precisely because they appeal to the same founding American documents and Western philosophical texts that were also used erroneously to support segregation.

Given this historical effort in getting America to live up to its color-blind principles, one would think that any attempt to divide Americans along racial and ethnic lines for the sake of fomenting racial grievances would face stiff resistance. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The industry that undermines the idea of color blindness the most today is the diversity-training industry and the many experts it employs to further its goals. The ease with which diversity training has gained wide institutional support, both on campus and off, has been mind-boggling. The sad fact is, diversity experts have been very successful at promoting racial and ethnic consciousness among their clients.

Diversity training is an outgrowth of anti-color-blind pedagogy. It is intended to make white people aware of their unconscious racism towards people of color and lead them to accept that structural racism against blacks specifically is what accounts for the social disparities that afflict these communities. The training also tries to make an emotional impact on whites in order to encourage them to think sympathetically about the hard life experiences that communities of color face on a daily basis. The true intention of current diversity training in academic and corporate settings is not to offer a genuine understanding of the “lived experiences” of minorities, and blacks in particular. In many cases it is designed to promote intimidation and psychological control over concerned, but racially passive, white Americans.

There is a self-reflective component to diversity training as well. It requires that white Americans see how the lives they live actually work against all people of color in every way possible. For example, if a white person goes to college, gets a degree and a job, and then buys a home in an up-and-coming, affordable neighborhood, he is unwittingly contributing to systemic racism by pushing out people of color who rent in the neighborhood. As this thinking goes, the white person is racist for contributing to gentrification. When the focus on racism is as vague as “systemic racism” is, it is doubtful that the mandate of the diversity-training experts will ever be achieved. This lack of achievement is good for the experts because it keeps them employed, but bad for society because it stokes racial consciousness and, thus, resentment.

The virtue of color blindness is that it complements individual responsibility. Martin Luther King Jr. understood the transformative power of personal responsibility. His successful efforts in fighting racism during the civil-rights movement led to changes in the American political system by extending equal access to all Americans, but especially to black Americans and those who had been marginalized historically. To turn away from these changes is to undermine the integrity of individual choices and personal agency by simply judging others on the basis of their skin color.

For far too long, American conservatives have been too willing to give a fair hearing to points of view and ideas that are contrary to core American beliefs. In a heterogeneous society such as America, very few ideas or points of view have been as destructive as the anti-color-blind pedagogy. To highlight the racial and ethnic differences among Americans is to devalue the unifying elements that have traditionally defined the American identity. The color-blind approach is more integrative than self-regarding identities based on race, gender, or sexual orientation, and more effective at promoting a sense of American identity. The homogenizing role that faith, family, and tradition have played and continue to play in the evolution of the country, both politically and culturally, should be promoted by conservatives.

Black Americans would especially benefit from this homogenizing effort. As one of the oldest minority groups in America, the black community has already debated the merits of color blindness versus anti-color-blind pedagogy in the fight for racial equality. Unfortunately, given the history of blacks in America, it is difficult for some in the community to see that real racial advancement has steadily come through color-blind policies, not through the intimidation of white people.

ANDRE M. ARCHIE — Mr. Archie is an associate professor of ancient Greek philosophy at Colorado State University and the author of Politics in Socrates’ Alcibiades: A Philosophical Account of Plato’s Dialogue Alcibiades Major.

America, Nation of Misfits

By MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY

July 9, 2020 12:38 PM

From Luther Martin to Bob Dylan

In a short, punchy biography, the writer Bill Kauffman hailed the Anti-Federalist Luther Martin as our “Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet.” The historian Clinton Rossiter designated Martin “an influential pricker of egos and consciences.” A farm boy who got a good education at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) and became Maryland’s attorney general, Martin never internalized the inflated ambitions of his peers. According to the future chief justice Roger Taney, Martin showed “utter disregard of good taste and refinement in his dress and language and . . . manner of eating.” He was a serial small-debtor, forcing creditors to chase him for utterly paltry sums. He was a speculator in land confiscated during the Revolution. The historian Catherine Drinker Bowen called him “impulsive, undisciplined, altogether the wild man of the [Constitutional] Convention.” And another, Forrest McDonald, reflecting on Martin’s low birth and unwelcome manners, called him “a misfit in the Maryland aristocracy.”

That judgment was correct: Martin was a misfit. Almost in disbelief, in 1787 in Philadelphia, Martin witnessed Madison and Hamilton execute their coup against the state governments, constructing a Constitution he called “a misshapened heterogenous monster of ambition and interest” that would attract unscrupulous men to the new national offices and pay them from federal, not state, revenue. This was done in the open hope of transferring the affections of the people from their particular state governments to the national one. The New York Anti-Federalist George Clinton prophesied that the federal city that the Framers of our Constitution proposed “would be the asylum of the base, idle, avaricious and ambitious.” Was he wrong? One of the aims of the Framers was national greatness. At the Convention, Martin denounced just that. In one of his interminable jeremiads against the nationalist plotters, he let fly with a most lapidary critique of their project: “Happiness is preferable to the Splendors of a national Government.”

The legacy of Martin and his fellow misfit Anti-Feds was the Bill of Rights. Had there been no Constitution enabling and empowering the federal monster and its pretension of a relationship with “the people,” there would be no need for a charter of individual rights. Ever since its adoption, America’s misfits have had some protection from the power of mobs and the base idlers of the federal city.

If Madison’s work on the Constitution made D.C. into one kind of asylum, muggy with ambition and avarice, Martin’s work on the Bill of Rights allows the rest of the country to be a different kind of asylum, a freer one. The wheels of history are occasionally turned by genuine cranks, so it’s best to give them room.

In American arts and letters, there are always those who denounce the country as an oppressive place, which is exactly what a freedom-loving people would do in a free country. Doing so helps to maintain or expand their freedom. Sticking his own thoughts into the mind of an imagined Russian czar, Mark Twain held that the only true and rational patriotism is this: “loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.” Twain himself was a misfit and rascal who wrote about the same. A nation that had been saturated by two Great Awakenings naturally produced Twain, a scoffer, as its leading literary jewel.

The writer and literary editor Jessie Redmon Fauset, a protégée of W. E. B. Du Bois, not only nurtured writers of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, but, keeping her distance from the mainstreams of black and white political traditions, created her own literature of black American misfits, in a series of novels. Edith Wharton, born into a gilded home, managed to feel out of place in the Gilded Age, and in her forgotten novel Twilight Sleep a misfit finds an escape from the tyrannies of the rich and fashionable. Our first freedoms mean we can have the wild poets who double as political activists. Walt Whitman sang his song of himself, and his barbaric yawp aimed at free soil and free men. In America a misfit like E. E. Cummings made avant-garde poetry popular with the masses. Meanwhile, he was a staunch man of the Right who supported America First in the years before World War II, and Joseph McCarthy after it.

Pop culture is driven by misfits. The Laurel Canyon sound of rock groups like the Byrds was conceived as a deliberate provocation to the increasingly stuffy and formal world of folk music. It was a genuine American genius and weirdo like Brian Wilson who could transform pop music from mere formula into a surprise symphony, and provoke the Beatles to get weird too. Bob Dylan seemed to go through musical and religious conversions the way runway models at a fashion show change their clothes, so quickly you could blink and miss it.

By making government authority something dispersible and often ignorable, the volcanic energies of religion tend to be more pacific in America than what we find in our European forebears. During the Reformation, German-speaking lands produced the bloody peasant revolts, and the theocratic disaster of John of Leiden’s Münster, which flamed into a truly totalizing theocracy and ended in a melodramatic siege and elaborate executions in less than two years. In misfit America, the Shakers have all but died out, but we still buy their furniture. While things got a little hot out in Deseret, the legacy of America’s signature religious misfits Joseph Smith and Brigham Young is nothing more threatening than the Osmonds, the Romneys, and a tabernacle choir. The truly destructive cults in American life, like the Peoples Temple, had pledged loyalty to the Soviet Union. Their revolutionary suicide in Guyana was understood by those who undertook it as an Un-American Activity.

The sciences have their misfits too. One of those on-the-loose inmates in the American experiment was the late, great, and decidedly weird John C. Lilly. A physician and psychoanalyst who did government-funded research during World War II into the physiological effects of high-altitude flying, Lilly spent the supposedly buttoned-down and repressive 1950s investigating interspecies communication with dolphins, even building a seaside lab where dolphins and humans could cohabitate. He invented the sensory-deprivation tank. Within a few years he was studying psychedelic-drug use and promoting astral projections. He became a fixture of the alternative-medicine and New Age communities. But even as he failed to teach dolphins English grammar, along the way his oddball research yielded useable and durable insights into dolphin brains and the electrical stimulation of the nervous system in mammals. The sensory-deprivation tank is one of the hottest wellness trends six decades after he invented it.

The stories of America’s great innovators and entrepreneurs are almost always stories of breaking out against the authority of regulators (as did Howard Hughes), or rebelling against stifling corporate climates like IBM’s (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs). Some of the great American tech companies started as little more than garage bands for geeks.

Even the conservative movement was launched and nurtured by outsiders. William F. Buckley Jr. had a sui generis accent, a mashup of English boarding school, Texas, and Yankee. He was devoted to irascible odd-men-out like Albert Jay Nock, the essayist and peer of H. L. Mencken. It was reputed that Nock could be contacted outside his office only by leaving notes under a certain rock in Central Park.

Americans, it turns out, often turn their backs on Tocqueville’s feared tyranny of common opinion, whether a snobby Manhattan salon or some hipster music scene. There is almost always some grand ambition being cooked up in the madhouse of Washington, D.C. But the nation usually provides abundant frontiers in which misfits can run free. The misshapened heterogenous monster of ambition and avarice can never tame for good a nation of misfits like us. Whether we pursue a new way to make money, to talk to dolphins, or to worship the one true God, the pursuit of happiness remains preferable to other splendors.

This article appears as “A Nation of Misfits” in the July 27, 2020, print edition of National Review.

MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY is a senior writer at National Review Online. @michaelbd

Ray Gruszecki

July 10, 2020