THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AND WHAT IT MEANS

Speaker Newt Gingrich

The Revolutionary period is in many ways the richest and most important period of American history. It’s almost the DNA of modern America and the way in which we have evolved since then. With the possible exception of Lincoln’s resurrection of the Declaration of Independence, there’s no period after 1800 that is quite as dynamic intellectually in setting the stage for the America that evolved during that period.

Think of this as a story in which there were a group of people who discovered themselves being in a particular situation. They were living a life of freedom. They were living a life of community. They were living a life of self-government. They were living a life of enormous practicality. And all of a sudden, the British Empire began to disrupt their ability to continue living that life.

You have to see the American Revolution, in a remarkable way, as a conservative reaction to British imperial tyranny, actually protecting a past status quo. It was unlike the French Revolution, in that the American revolutionaries weren’t trying to rebel to create a different future. They were trying to sustain what they saw as a powerful past.

There are a couple of reasons that this occurs. Part of it is captured by Paul Johnson in his wonderful History of the American People, where he says that by the 1770s, Americans were probably the lowest-taxed people in the history of the human race, and they resented every penny.

One useful organizing model for how real Americans have acculturated is DNA. America can absorb people from other countries, and literally in a matter of years, immigrants can learn to be American in a way you never learn to be French or to be German or to be Chinese. America has a unique intellectual and cultural DNA, and this is the core of the American experience.

THE BRITISH HISTORY OF AMERICA

What is that American experience? It began with a very long evolution of a British or English sense of personal freedom, going back in many ways to the Magna Carta, in some ways going all the way back to Angle and Saxon laws preceding the Norman invasion. There’s a lengthy sense of individuality and a lengthy sense of individual rights that is expressed as “I have some rights that even the king can’t take from me.” In the Magna Carta in 1215, the barons had the king sign a document that says there are certain rights he can’t take from them, and he can’t get extra money without their approval.

Early on, this is actually a deal for the great lords that gradually, over hundreds of years, spreads also to be a deal for the commoners. By the seventeenth century, this is beginning to be a real power struggle. Michael Barone has written a terrific small book on the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in which he describes James II seeking to establish absolutist power. That was combined with a sense that he was Catholic; the country was largely Protestant. So the British act to stop him. They bring in a Dutch prince who is coming from a country that has such a thoroughly screwed-up governing system that almost nobody can make it work. And the Dutch pride themselves on being this little bastion of self-government in which the oligarchs protect themselves through all sorts of constant arguments and pettiness and cheapness.

When William arrives in the Glorious Revolution, he arrives with a sense of the limitations of kingship. He is himself comfortable manipulating the Parliament rather than trying to run over it. Thus, you begin to get into charters and agreements that create a very deep framework for what followed.

That back-and-forth created modern government People like John Locke began trying to figure out a solution to the last several hundred years of governance. They said to themselves, “We don’t want to go back to the English Civil War because that was horrible; we don’t want to go back to Cromwellian dictatorship because that was terrible; we don’t want to see European absolutism—that violates who we are as English.” Instead, they pushed for a nationalist sense of liberty that is deeply tied into the sense of being English.

THE NEW WORLD

Now, this wasn’t all good. People were subordinated and, if necessary, killed because they didn’t understand the British view. The period engenders sending people to the New World. Somebody once said the most important thing to understand about America is we’re the people who left, and the Europeans are the people who didn’t. There’s almost this pattern; you’re getting very aggressive, very risk-taking people, who come here in very small boats. If you ever go to Williamsburg and to Jamestown and you see the size of the boats that came across the Atlantic, you understand why, when the first permanent colony was established, they stopped at Cape Henry and they put up a cross to thank God for having gotten across the Atlantic. They were really shaken by how hard it was to get here.

When they got here, they were in the New World, and they felt it was a new world. There’s a famous story of Captain John Smith opening a letter to discover he’s been put in charge of the colony by the people who paid for the colony. This is a private enterprise operation. It is one of the things I hark back to in thinking about alternative ways of organizing similar great adventures like space, because these colonies are being founded by private entrepreneurs with grants from the king. The king doesn’t have the power and the bureaucracy to do it, so he says, “Here, you go see if you can make it work.”

So Smith was put in charge. The aristocrats who were there came to him and said to him, “We’ve already paid our way over here. You cannot make us work. We’re aristocrats.” (I always tell my liberal friends, it’s ironic: the people who don’t want to work are the aristocrats, not the poor.) And Smith looked at them and he said, “Look, we don’t have a big enough surplus of production in the New World to take care of you, but I can’t make you work. You’re right; you signed this document. So here’s the deal: if you don’t work, you won’t eat,” which is actually a paraphrase of Paul. They thought about it for a couple of hours and came back and said, “Okay, tell us some more about this work stuff.”

This is the beginning of the whole American DNA that is very work-oriented, very self-reliant, very inquisitive. We’ve always been a country that wanted to have private property rights. Jefferson wrote not “the right to pursue happiness” but the “right to private property” in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. The reason is, if you have private property rights, no tyranny can take away from you what is yours. The rule of law begins to be protected from the smallest property up; it’s not protected by the largest theory down. So this is the context in which you see the development of these ideas of freedom.

ORIGINS OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS

The Founding Fathers, by the time they began to argue seriously with Great Britain around 1770, were inheriting 160 years of practice in which they were routinely governing themselves. Washington started very early in life on the frontier. He went out at sixteen or seventeen as a surveyor in the Wild West—which back then was western Virginia. He then engaged in leading military expeditions, the first of which was a disaster, the second of which was Braddock’s Expedition, where they got slaughtered by the French and Indians. He learned an immense amount about trading along the frontier. He led the Virginia militia in a successful anti-Indian and anti-French campaign.

Then Washington announced for the legislature and wanted to go to Williamsburg to serve in the provincial assembly. The tradition was that you bought drinks for all of your neighbors and they then elected you. Washington announced grandly that he was a military hero and above the indignity of buying drinks. He promptly came in last, because he didn’t understand the rules of the game. The next time he ran, he bought more drinks than anybody in the history of Virginia.

Washington did not make the same mistake twice. When he was a young man on the frontier, he surrendered Fort Necessity. Nobody who knew anything about military strategy would have done it. Washington screwed up. He went back home; he actually wrote a pamphlet explaining why he surrendered. Then he was asked to be the senior colonial adviser to Braddock’s Expedition, which left Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He told Braddock, “You know, I personally would not advise marching forward in a row in bright red uniforms down a road. The French and Indians are going to fire from behind trees, and you’re just setting yourself up as a big target.”

Braddock answered, “You’re obviously a colonial; you don’t understand British or European tactics. This is a great, professional army. We don’t fight like bandits. We’re not going to do the things you do.”

Well, of course, exactly what Washington suggested is what happened: they were ambushed from every side. Braddock was killed almost at the very opening of the battle. Washington was the senior officer remaining. He had roughly 1,500 troops. Washington rallied all the troops, and he got them off the field without having a total massacre. Washington had two horses shot out from under him; there were four bullet holes in his coat at the end of the day. Ten years later, he ran into an Indian chief at a powwow and the chief said to him, “God must want you for something. Every one of us was trying to shoot you. You’re this huge guy. I personally shot at you six times. I do not understand why you’re here.”

Washington wasn’t just lucky; he knew how to work a room. Governor Byrd used to make money because he would bet strangers a shilling that Washington could break a walnut between his thumb and his first finger. Try it sometime at Christmas when you have lots of walnuts; you’ll see: it’s virtually impossible. Washington was so physically strong he’d break them. And Washington was quite personable; he was a guy who sat around with the guys.

He was also an advocate of liberty. Everyone should read Addison’s play Cato. Cato is a play about Cato the Younger, who refuses to give in to Caesar, ultimately flees Caesar during the civil war, and goes all the way over to North Africa. His son is killed by Caesar. And Caesar eventually finds him and tells him, “Look, if you’ll just accept that I’m the leader, then you get to live the rest of your life happily. I’ll give you honors. I’ll give you money. It’s important to validate my government that you concede.” And Cato says, “No, I’d rather die a freeman than live having put my knee down to you.”

Now what makes it interesting is that Cato was Washington’s favorite play. He read it repeatedly. It was deep in Washington’s being; there was a sense of nobility.

Then they began to notice this cloud on the horizon. The cloud came from two directions. It came first of all because the British monarchy was increasingly dictatorial and increasingly arrogant. And it came second because the British governing class was increasingly successful and increasingly arrogant. Now these are two different, parallel problems.

The rise of the British government in the eighteenth century followed the period when William takes over in 1688, at which point it was a very weak central monarchy. But with the rise of the Hanovers, the centralization of the monarchy began anew. They learned that they could manage the government by corruption. For them, corruption was public resources for something other than the public good. For them, it meant, “Would you support my government? By the way, I happen to have a job in the treasury” or “I need to get this done; your cousin, I understand, needs to be an ambassador somewhere.”

All of these things begin to permeate the society. About 1740, there is an enormous intellectual explosion, which asserts itself in the Whig critique of the British government. One of the arguments that Gordon Wood in particular makes is that you cannot understand the American revolutionaries unless you understand that they are the Whig critique. They are taking up the same exact critique that the Whigs had.

The Whigs were deeply criticizing large government, and saying large government is inherently corrupt government. They said large government breeds favoritism and centralized power, and violates the rule of law. They said that it violates the notion that private property rights should be equally protected, because now people were being taxed in order to give power and money to people who weren’t. It became a very bitter fight. Remember, this was still an era when you had to be very careful how you phrased things, because to overtly criticize what is “the king’s government” was to criticize the king, and it wasn’t far from there to treason, and it wasn’t far from there to getting hanged.

So there was a fairly delicate game under way.

THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR

By 1776, Washington’s army drove the British out of Boston. They got to Brooklyn, but were beaten by the British army. A divine intervention occurred. This is Washington’s language; he said, “Providence intervened.” The reason was the British navy, which was going to massacre them, was in the East River. But their back was to the river. A huge fog came in. The Marblehead fishermen who would later take Washington across the Delaware rowed the entire army at night across the river, escaping the British.

Now there were 30,000 effectives in Brooklyn. They lost in Brooklyn; they lost in Manhattan; they lost in White Plains; they lost in the Palisades; they were driven across New Jersey. By the week before Christmas, they were down to 2,500 effectives, a third of whom did not have shoes. They were wearing burlap bags, leaving a trail of blood when they marched.

The generals met with Washington and there was this great hashing back and forth between Washington and the council of war. The generals all said to him, “We’re in deep, deep trouble. We don’t know what to do. There aren’t many of us left.” Washington said, “I’ve got this idea. We’re going to cross the river at night, during a snowstorm. We’re going to march nine miles at night. We’re going to surprise the Hessians. We’re going to capture all of them. It’s going to be a great victory; it’ll revive the morale of the war. It just requires a three-pronged assault across an icy river at night.”

And every single one of the generals said, “We can’t do that.” And finally Washington said, “Look. If we don’t win something, this army will disappear in two or three weeks. When the army disappears, the revolution will be over. When the revolution is over, everyone in this room will be hanged. Therefore, we have nothing to risk, because we have certain death on one side and a chance to win on the other, crossing the river.”

Washington was someone who’s actually very subtle. He understood the Napoleonic principle “Morale is to material as three is to one.” So anytime you have a choice between an army with high morale and low equipment, or an army with low morale and high equipment, always pick high morale.

They crossed the river that night. Their password was “victory or death”—and they meant it. They marched nine miles. They found that there were two ravines. They thought there was one; there were two. They had to manhandle the artillery. They had a driving snowstorm from their rear. If you were war-gaming this, if you were doing this in a classroom, you would have the Hessians mobilized and they would annihilate Washington about eight o’clock that morning. But because the snowstorm was so enormous, the Hessians didn’t post guards. Here’s part of the problem: Europeans had coerced soldiers; you couldn’t put them out in a snowstorm because they’d go berserk. They were really trapped into fighting in open weather where sergeants could keep track of your men. Americans were fighting for freedom, plus Americans were all deer hunters. They just thought of this as a snowstorm. They had been out in snowstorms their whole lives.

The result was a crushing victory. They captured 800 Hessian professional soldiers at the cost of one American. Within two weeks, word of the victory had brought 15,000 volunteers. Washington drove the British across northern New Jersey, and the war was saved for the moment.

Washington was in the field for eight years. He spent one week at Mount Vernon. I wear Washington’s commander-in-chief flag from Valley Forge to remind myself and other people. When the Founding Fathers met at the Constitutional Convention and they wrote “commander in chief,” the guy presiding over the convention was Washington, the commander in chief.

THE FOUNDING PHILOSOPHY

Now why were they doing all this? They were doing all this because they were really angry. And the reason they were so angry is they had grown up accustomed to what they thought of as the natural rights of Englishmen. They all thought of themselves as English. They all thought that they were part of this extraordinary worldwide empire. They identified with the Parliament. They even identified with the king and the House of Lords.

Back in 1770, the British, out of arrogance and ignorance, began to behave in a way that said to the Americans, “No. You’re not us.” Benjamin Franklin went to London to petition for the provinces, left as an American Englishman, and returned an American, because he realized that even though he was a world-class scientist, independently wealthy, a very successful businessman, a writer of considerable note, and the founder of various institutions, he was a provincial. And he would never, ever be accepted in British high society. So he said, “Fine. You want to make me an American? I’m an American. Now that I’m an American, I want my independence because I don’t trust you to govern me.”

And so around 1770, starting with the Boston Massacre, you really began to see a ramping up of organization. You got committees of correspondence. This was not some highly centralized, organized product. This was a mass movement. For example, five months before the first shot was fired at Lexington and Concord, the New Hampshire folks went to the British fort in New Hampshire, surrounded it. There was a very small garrison and a very junior officer who looked out and said, “Okay, I quit.” This small garrison leaves, leaving all the guns and all the ammunition to the New Hampshire militia. It doesn’t become the first shot heard round the world because there were no shots fired. The guy just surrendered. And that didn’t bubble up. It didn’t become part of the folklore. But, in fact, New Hampshire also wrote its first state constitution before the Declaration of Independence. Out here in the wilderness, they were saying, “We’re not paying to London.”

Thus, the British now had this escalating crisis. The Americans were starting to know one another; they were driven together by one common theme, a Burkean one: “We have inherited rights that are coming to us from God and that constitute a fundamental contract. You, the king, and your government, are breaking our rights.”

So from their standpoint, the revolutionary behavior was the king and his government, because they were simply living out what they already believed, in a sense.

Here’s what the Americans would have told you in the mid-1770s: “The royal government is corrupt. The royal government is violating our rights.” Interestingly, while the number one complaint was no taxation without representation, the number two complaint was judges who were dictators on behalf of the king. There were more complaints about judges than any other single problem except taxation. And why was taxation so big? It’s ironic. The British, who didn’t understand at all what was going on—this is how you get into establishment revolutionary environments—believed that they had footed the bill for the French and Indian War, and that the colonies should pay for that. The Americans believed that the British behaved like an empire, and should pay like an empire.

But instead of saying, “Gee, this is a political conversation. Maybe we’d better find a way to talk with each other,” the British imperial government decided on coercion. Now why were they doing this? Because they’d done it everywhere. They coerced the Irish; the last great massacre was in 1693. They just finished coercing the Scots with the Battle of Culloden in 1744. They made it a hanging, drawing, and quartering offense to wear a kilt. They had crushed the Welsh earlier.

And this is why, by the way, the Second Amendment ended up being so important. In a terrific book called Paul Revere’s Ride, it’s pointed out that the British had routinely coerced peasants. They marched out of Boston in April of 1775 to coerce peasants. Except they didn’t find peasants. They found citizens. And they didn’t find people who were unarmed—they found an armed, trained militia that had spent over six months preparing for the battle. And they got beaten, badly, and they had lost men all the way back to Boston. And now they had a crisis, because how can you be the greatest empire in the world and have a rabble in America stand up to you?

That’s how this process begins.

Now what did the Americans think they were doing? They were protecting themselves from an aggressive attack. They were not on offense. They were not asking anything new. They were defending the rights that they had been living for 160 years. And they were saying to the British government, “What are you doing to us? We’re just being who we are. We’ve always had the right to vote. We’ve always had the right to decide our taxation. We’ve always had the right to solve our problems locally. You’re sending us these foreigners to judge us; they’re confiscating our houses; they’re imposing troops to live in our homes; you’re taking away our money.” And here’s the underlying core idea that is at the heart of this: it goes back to Addison’s Cato: “If I concede that you have the arbitrary power to take a penny from me, then I have conceded that you have the arbitrary power to take everything from me.”

In a sense, if you read Lincoln on slavery in the 1850s, Lincoln was capturing the rhythm of the Founding Fathers’ argument with the English, which was to say, “I can’t allow you to cross this line.”

There were two different conversations under way. The British were saying to themselves, “Aha! Americans are cheap. So what we’ll do is we’ll give tea to the East India Company. The East Indian Company, in return for a monopoly, will reduce the price of tea. So although we’ll still have a tax, it will now be cheaper than it was. Therefore, the Americans will have no complaint because, after all, tea will now be cheaper.”

But the Americans were saying, “Wait a second. The argument isn’t about money. The argument is about rights. We’d rather pay more for a tea without a tax than less for a tea with a tax.” Which totally confused the British, and that’s why you have the Boston Tea Party. They were making a moral point. They were not going to tolerate British taxes being seductively brought in with a monopoly that lowers prices. This was now a political fight over the very nature of our rights. And that’s what then led to the Declaration of Independence.

THE NATURE OF THE REVOLUTION

There’s a very important thing to recognize about the Founding Fathers, who were truly one of the most remarkable groups, if not the most remarkable secular group, in history. They began by saying, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” These were pretty pious people. A surprising number of them were actually preachers. They weren’t trying to find a theory. They weren’t trying to find a philosophy. They weren’t trying to find an ideology. They were trying to understand the truth by which humans are able to govern themselves.

They said that all men are created equal. At a time when you have a king, think about how radical this was. This document arrived in London and the king and his ministers and the dukes and the earls and the barons and the lords were all sitting around reading this document that says, “All men are created equal.” They just drove a knife into the heart of the British hierarchal structure and every European hierarchal structure.

It was completely different from the French Revolution, in which the revolutionaries changed the calendar. They were determined, in every way, to create a new world. The Founding Fathers, in the Burkean tradition, said, “This is crazy!” The greatest of all sins is hubris, the idea that you can replace God. The French were explicitly doing that, saying, “Let’s drive out God. Let’s eliminate the Christian calendar. Let’s invent a brand-new world; we’ll have a brand-new language. Brand-new titles.” It is a disruption comparable to the first cycle of the Soviets and the Maoist Chinese, or the Nazis. You have this relentless effort to create the new person. The Founding Fathers would say—and did say, pretty routinely—“There are no new people. We are all children of God. We all represent an organic tradition.”

Next, think about “they are endowed by their Creator.” This was a direct assault on kingship. Under the historic medieval system, power comes from God to the king. The king lends power to those he favors, but the king is absolute. The Americans just said the exact opposite: power comes from God to the citizen. So in America, the citizen is sovereign. Now, they didn’t think they were saying something radical. They were saying something “self-evident.” This is how they’d been living for six generations.

And the rights were unalienable. That meant no judge, no king—in the modern world, no president, no bureaucrat—can get between us and God. These were people living in a culture of liberty, in a culture of practical common sense, in a culture of getting things done. They ultimately absorbed Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. And they sort of understood this model, this new model of a free society with a free market with an invisible hand, and they were amazingly practical people.

This is where our modern academic classes are such a mess. These were not folks sitting around thinking in the abstract. They were sitting around thinking, “What is going to work?” and they blended two things: “What are the historical truths and what are the practical requirements, and how do we blend them?”

THE CONSTITUTIONAL SYSTEM

The Declaration is a freestanding document. It’s an idealistic document. It states the “why” of America. Then the Founders had their first cut at the “what” of America, the Articles of Confederation. They did not work very well. Valley Forge vividly illustrates what a mess it was, how impossible the Congress was, how incompetent the system was. But it held together enough to win the war.

Washington went home, ready to be a private citizen. King George III said, “If he gives up power, he’ll be the greatest man of the century.” Washington’s officers came to him at Newburgh and said, “Let’s mutiny. Let’s take over the government. They’re not paying us; they’re impossible; the Congress is irrelevant.” Washington came to their meeting in a schoolroom, pulled out his glasses slowly—to illustrate that he had grown old in the service of his country—and read a letter. And he says in the decisive turning point in American history, “I did not rebel against George III to become George I.” Period. The officers all said, “Got it. We’re for you.”

He went home. The system still wasn’t working. His friends said to him, “We’ve got to do something.” He said something very profound. He said, “We’re not ready. The American people have not grown tired enough.” And so he waited several more years. They then met and decided that they should amend the Articles of Confederation. They gathered in Philadelphia. Washington presided. And in fifty-five days of closed meetings with no press, they virtually all decided to remake the document.

Now remember, Washington spent eight years trying to get the Articles to work. So you had a guy who had both the prestige of the revolutionary leader and the experience of having tried to do it. After a couple of days they decided, “This is stupid. We’re not going to reform the Articles of Confederation. We’re writing a new document.”

This was, in fact, a coup d’état. They didn’t have the authority to do this. But they said, “We are the leadership class of the country, and we’re going to do what we think is right.” And then they said something that is central: “Although we’re the leadership group and we’re going to go ahead and write this document, it will work only if the people ratify it. So we now have an obligation to go out and say to the people, ‘This is what we believe we should do but we cannot do it without your approval.’ ”

And so they went into every single state and they waged a campaign. They wrote the most elegant campaign pamphlet in history. Someday just pick up the Federalist Papers and think to yourself, “In a country where only a third of the people were literate, this was a campaign pamphlet.” Not a thirty-second TV commercial—an enormously complex, sophisticated book that came out as a series of newspaper articles for the purpose of winning an election. And they slowly, gradually won it.

By the way, the people who were opposing them were very honorable people. Patrick Henry, for example, was the leader of the anti-Federalists in Virginia. And the argument of the anti-Federalists was very simple: you do not want centralized power; it will inevitably over time grow too big, too corrupt, too tyrannical. And I would suggest to you that Patrick Henry would look at the current Obama administration; he’d look at the recent ruling against the Catholic church; he’d look at the two trillion dollars in deficits; he’d look at the corruption of Solyndra; and he’d say, “See, I told you. Took a couple of hundred years, but the mess has now occurred.”

You can make an argument that the anti-Federalists stuck closer to the Whig critique than did the Federalists, but the Federalists were trying to solve a really big problem. How do you have just enough government to be effective and not enough government to be a tyranny? And that is the permanent balance of tension in the American system.

WHO AMERICANS WERE AND WHO WE ARE

The American Constitution was designed for a volunteerist society of people who were profoundly religious, and who were bound by their culture to behave in certain ways. All the Founding Fathers believed this. And when you go back, if you look at de Tocqueville, when you contextualize the culture within which they were operating, they had certain invisible assumptions about life. They assumed that people would have some sense of virtue. They assumed that there would be some overriding religious belief system. Washington describes it; John Adams describes it; even Jefferson describes it. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, they wrote, “Religion, morality, and knowledge being important, it is essential that we have public schools.”

Recently at the Capitol Visitor Center, some secular staff person cut out the first three words and put up, “Knowledge being essential . . .” But that’s not what the Founding Fathers said. They said “Religion, morality, and knowledge being essential.”

This was an unusual moment in history when the historic background gave the Founders a sense of rights that were being threatened, and they were actually conservatives fighting to retain the rights that the emerging British tyranny was threatening. They were culturally committed to a limited government with a big citizenship. In other words, they would have argued, you want big citizens and small government; you don’t want big government and small citizens.

Our move away from this started with the Progressive movement and the effort by the intellectual class to begin to take power away from politicians and turn it over to bureaucracies. There was a growing belief among the intellectual class that only they knew how to take care of the poor. Therefore, with each passing year, they aggregated more and more power to do for us what we weren’t smart enough to do for ourselves. That grew, starting in the late 1890s and then accelerating through Woodrow Wilson. There was a brief hiatus in the 1920s, then it reaccelerated with FDR, took a break again, accelerated again with Lyndon Johnson, and then Obama is the apotheosis of this whole movement. He seems to be prepared to take over every aspect of your life and tell you what, in his personal opinion, you would do if only you were as smart as he was. I think that the country is finally beginning to act in revulsion at that kind of centralized power.

Revolutionary philosophy actually had grown out of the experience of the time. It was then driven into our DNA. Now we’re in danger of losing it with the rise of the modern welfare state and the scale of modern bureaucracy. And that’s one of the great issues of our generation: Are we, in fact, going to continue to be Americans in the sense that Paul Johnson described them? Or are we gradually going to become subjects in the European tradition, rather than citizens in the American tradition?

Americans believe that citizens control the government, and the government is their servant. Subjects are controlled by the government, and they are the servants of the government. It is a fundamental dividing line; it is a dividing line that all of the Founding Fathers believed was real. They all believed that historically, they had inherited citizenship and that it was the British government that was acting as a revolutionary force in trying to take it away from them. And that’s why you end up with the model we have today.

I always say that the Declaration of Independence guarantees us the right to pursue happiness. Now, in the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment where it comes from (and I’ve actually seen in the Library of Congress the book from Jefferson’s library, which is underlined on this topic), the pursuit of happiness is wisdom and virtue, not hedonism and acquisition. The Founding Fathers believed that a wise people could remain free, but a foolish people would become part of a dictatorship. In that framework, I always tell audiences, they guarantee the right to pursue happiness; they don’t guarantee you the attainment of happiness. This is a good example of the distinction with the French, the Nazi, the Soviet, and the Chinese revolutions. There’s no provision for happiness stamps for the underly happy. There’s no provision for the Federal Department of Happiness. I always tell audiences, if you had told the Founding Fathers that someday we’d have a politician walk into a room and say, “I’m going to take away from the overly happy and redistribute to the underly happy,” they would have thought you were crazy. Their very society was based on inequality. It was based on a meritocratic opportunity to rise.

I would argue that organic conservatism, not some abstract intellectual theory, but organic conservatism, asserts that our rights come from God, that we are a community of equally sovereign people, that we have an obligation to solve things and we shape government to fit those things that we conclude government can solve better, but we do not owe government. Government is, in fact, a subordinate to us. This entire model is an organic, cultural, historical model that can be carried back into the British tradition but that really flourishes in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as the Whig tradition. And then it becomes captured in the DNA both of American government and of American citizenship and American culture.

De Tocqueville captured it remarkably well in the 1830s, and I think he was stunned by it. We were different. We were Americans; we weren’t just the western wing of European civilization. We were something new, and that’s why we could absorb people from anywhere, because you can learn the culture of being American. And it’s not the structure. The structure is just this fabric within which the American culture operates, but it’s the culture that really has made so much difference.

THE CONTINUING REVOLUTION

I’ll just close with one last observation, which gives you a flavor of how deep this is. When the British were conquering the Scots, they drove many of them to flee, and they fled off into Philadelphia and then came down the Great Wagon Road and ended up in South Carolina and North Carolina, along the Appalachians. One of them was a young man in South Carolina named Andrew Jackson. At thirteen years of age, he refused to clean the boots of a British cavalryman, who slashed his face, leaving a permanent scar that he would have said was from “a British oppressor.” So you have this really deep sense of toughness and hostility that’s personal.

The Battle of Cowpens is another example. What was happening with the British in the South is they were just gradually getting ground to pieces, and at Cowpens the American militia turned and decisively defeated a British unit in a way that sent a shock through the entire British system in North America. At King’s Mountain, the British repeat Washington’s mistake of being down in a valley, surrounded by high hills. And word went out across western Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Carolinas to the Scottish Americans that the people who defeated us at Culloden are now available. And the slaughter at King’s Mountain was truly bitter and personal, and it’s a fascinating part of this war that the war in the South was much more personal than the war in the North. In the North, you had a much more regular army fight. In the South, what you had is all these folks who had fled the British and hated them and their children and grandchildren; all see this as a moment of personal revenge. And so you have built into our DNA a toughness that is very, very striking.

The American Revolution was an amazing confluence. We had a history that gave people a sense of absolute security that all they were doing is defending their rights. They were not in any way trying to change things; they were trying to sustain things. We had a very clumsy British government that did not realize how much out of sync with the culture it was and that was clumsily forcing people to choose, and with each passing year, more and more people chose independence and chose freedom over subordination to a tyranny. We had very practical leaders who were, on the one hand, very intellectual, but on the other hand, astonishingly pragmatic, and who could weave those two strands together into a system that actually worked, and has continued to work for almost 250 years now.

Finally, we had a period of learning. This is where our similar modern micro-critiquing is just stupid. They didn’t get it right. Washington lost a lot of battles. This was a long, hard process. The Articles of Confederation didn’t work very well. Many states write three or four constitutions. But what they did have is a general sense of direction, a general sense of principle, and a commitment that together, they were going to keep changing things until it worked. The American experience is one of the most remarkable achievements in human history. It is clearly the most remarkable in terms of government and well worth studying. And I think at its heart, it is the definition of American conservatism: the application of principle to the real world in order to effect a better life with the realization that it involves both universal rights and practical, everyday realities.