“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….”
—THOMAS JEFFERSON ET AL., THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
The Founding Fathers were wrong.
It is not self-evident that man is endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights. Colloquially, “self-evident” simply means obvious. Something that is self-evident, according to the dictionary, is something that does not require demonstration. The existence of gravity is self-evident and that is a very easy thing to prove. It is obvious that fire burns, and if you need a demonstration, I can provide one on request.
Meanwhile, how does one demonstrate that we are endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights? People have been trying to demonstrate that our Creator exists for thousands of years. If that cannot be done to everyone’s satisfaction, it seems a daunting task to prove He created unalienable rights. The simple fact is that the existence of natural rights, like the existence of God Himself, requires a leap of faith. Meanwhile, the vast history of mankind provides one endlessly dreary demonstration after another that people can be alienated from their rights quite easily, starting with their right to life.
The first and most glorious achievement of the American founding was to assert in writing—not argue for, claim, or suggest—that all men are created equal and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights. It’s a bit of a strained analogy, but in the context of the Miracle, one can think of the English people as the Jews. The Jews introduced a moral monotheistic framework into the world. But in ancient times, it only applied to Jews. Christianity took those precepts and universalized them. Similarly, the English introduced an understanding of rights and liberty into the world—and made it work. But initially it only applied to the English. America universalized these English ideas.
It is a common response to such claims to point out that the Founders didn’t mean it. They were hypocrites who denied the rights of slaves, women, and, to a lesser but still significant extent, the propertyless. But this is an exercise in looking through the wrong end of the telescope, which robs the heroism of every soul who made the world a better place. We judge the strides we make in the present by the extent of our improvement over the past. But we have an annoying tendency to judge the past by the standards of the present. “The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history, starting with the simplest of them, the anachronism. It is the fallacy into which we slip when we are giving the judgments that seem most assuredly self-evident,” Herbert Butterfield observed. “And it is the essence of what we mean by the word ‘unhistorical.’ ”1
The Founders advanced the “wheel of history” as none had before. They started a revolutionary new chapter in the story of humanity by broadening the principles laid out by Locke and the English people generally. Consider the evolution of the Declaration of Independence.
Some ninety years before Jefferson put pen to paper, the Glorious Revolution had cemented the English commitment to ancient English rights. That revolution had a huge impact on the politics and popular attitudes in the American colonies. Just as the threat of absolutism in the mother country had been thwarted, it was curtailed in the New World as well, allowing for representative institutions to develop organically.2 That English notions of rights and liberties would intensify only makes sense, given that the yoke of the crown felt tighter, or at least more unjust, across the Atlantic. As the case for independence grew in the hearts and minds of the colonists, the argument inevitably shifted from the rights and liberties of Englishmen to the rights and liberties of men generally. Events, in other words, forced the Americans to shed allegiance not only to the English crown but also to the idea of English particularism.
A good illustration of this evolutionary process is the expression “A man’s home is his castle.” The original saying was “An Englishman’s home is his castle,” and it was more than just a slogan for husbands trying to get out of doing chores. The idea that even the king himself could not enter a man’s home without an invitation is precisely one of those ancient English rights and liberties. It was a common understanding centuries before the Glorious Revolution. Sir Edward Coke wrote the cultural custom into the common law 1628: “For a man’s house is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium [and each man’s home is his safest refuge].” In 1763, William Pitt clarified the meaning of “castle”: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail—its roof may shake—the wind may blow through it—the storm may enter—the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter.”
Now, in practice, this did not mean that the home was an inviolable sanctuary in which one could break the law or escape from its reach. What it meant was that the state needed a good reason to enter a home. And the state needed to make its case to a judge, who would issue a writ or later a warrant. This, in short, is where the Fourth Amendment right “of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” comes from. What began as English custom over time became an inalienable right.3
The Declaration of Independence follows a similar pattern. It is chockablock with echoes of Locke, from the “life, liberty and happiness” line to the talk of unalienable rights. But the Declaration is less indebted to Locke than it is to the American people, who, at the time, had only recently stopped thinking of themselves as Englishmen. Years later Jefferson would write that, “neither aiming at originality or principles or sentiments, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American Mind.”4 Proof of this can be found in the fact that the Declaration was not quite as original a document as we’ve come to be taught. Pauline Maier found that there were in fact some ninety Declarations of Independence written up by various groups, from county conventions to New York mechanics’ guilds and Massachusetts town halls. Jefferson wasn’t inventing anything in the Declaration. Rather, a brilliant writer on deadline, he contented himself with eloquently summarizing what was little more than American conventional wisdom.5
As Gordon S. Wood has observed, when the Declaration was issued, the important part was the conclusion: the break with England. Only later did the beginning “all men are created equal” take on philosophical and metaphysical significance. “Certainly no one initially saw the Declaration as a classic statement of political principles,” Wood writes. “Only in the 1790s, with the emergence of the bitter partisan politics between the Federalists and the Jefferson-led Republicans, did the Declaration begin to be celebrated as a great founding document.”6 And that celebration evolved into sacredness.
“Let us revere the Declaration of Independence,” Abraham Lincoln insisted.7 “Let us readopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it the practices and policy which harmonize with it.”8 That is what he did in the Gettysburg Address when he proclaimed, “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”9 Lincoln essentially rewrote the meaning of the Founding and consecrated it with the blood of Americans. It didn’t matter that Southerners had a plausible argument that they understood the Declaration better. What mattered was the new meaning breathed into it. The Founders may well have believed in the Lockean notion of natural rights, but it is not news that they didn’t apply it consistently. They risked their lives and sacred honor for more worldly reasons. But Lincoln sifted a golden idea from the currents of our story and molded it into an icon. That idea of human equality took deeper root in American life because of it. A century later, Martin Luther King Jr. did the same thing once again. In 1963, in his “I Have a Dream Speech,” he said:
In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”10
Both Lincoln and King were appealing to the story—the best story—we tell about ourselves. That our story begins with Americans falling short of the ideals embedded in the Founding is not an indictment of the ideals; it is testament to the nobility of America’s story arc. Without even considering the material prosperity that the American miracle created not just for its own citizens but for billions of people around the world, if America had done nothing else but this, it would be a glorious leap forward for humanity.
Let us now look more closely at how the story begins.
It is something of an article of faith, particularly among some American conservatives, that the Founding Fathers were deeply influenced by John Locke. For generations, this was the consensus opinion of most leading historians as well.11 Some recent scholarship is more skeptical. The skeptics have a much better argument than I thought when I set out to write this book. For instance, I searched the National Archives’ wonderful online database of writings from the Founding, thinking it would be a simple task to find one encomium after another to the man often described as the father of the English Enlightenment, the “philosopher of freedom” and the “founder of liberalism.” There are some, to be sure, but far fewer than you might think.
Perhaps most shocking: There are no references to Locke in the Federalist Papers (though he does have a brief cameo in the Anti-Federalist Papers). Oscar and Lilian Handlin note that, even though Locke dedicates an entire chapter to slavery, there’s no record of any Founder invoking his work in the many debates about the subject during the period.12
One of the few unequivocal accolades from a signatory of the Declaration of Independence comes from James Wilson, a prominent drafter of the Constitution and one of the first (six) Supreme Court Justices. At the ratifying convention Wilson said that “the truth is, that the supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable authority remains with the people…[T]he practical recognition of this truth was reserved for the honor of this country. I recollect no constitution founded on this principle; but we have witnessed the improvement, and enjoy the happiness of seeing it carried into practice. The great and penetrating mind of Locke seems to be the only one that pointed towards even the theory of this great truth.”13
We do know that Thomas Jefferson was a great admirer of Locke. Indeed, in a letter to Benjamin Rush, Jefferson tells a story of Hamilton’s visit to his home. On Jefferson’s walls hung portraits of John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon. Hamilton asked who they were. Jefferson replied that they were his “trinity of the greatest men who ever lived.”14 Still, there’s not much evidence in his papers that he read Locke’s Two Treatises. Nor was there a copy in the book collection he bequeathed to the Library of Congress.
On the other hand, Jefferson took copious notes from Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, which served as the inspiration for his own Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.
The statute is another good example of how ideas drive a story on the ground and how the unfolding story refines those ideas to the point of creating new ones. Locke had argued that Catholics and atheists could not be loyal subjects or citizens. “All those who enter into [the Catholic faith] do thereby ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince.” Atheists could not be trusted because “promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist.”15
Jefferson, meanwhile, took the internal logic of Locke and extended it to its final conclusion. The statute begins:
An Act for establishing religious Freedom. Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do…16
The statute not only disestablished the Church of England as the official faith of Virginia but also guaranteed religious liberty for Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and even pagans.
This is just one facet of the transformation wrought less by Locke himself than by what I call the Lockean Revolution. The intellectual historians who want to play connect-the-dots miss the broader revolution in rhetoric that transformed the world. As the Enlightenment unfolded across the landscape of Europe and America, Locke’s name became a kind of shorthand for liberty and natural rights, even among people who never read or fully understood him.
What’s indisputable is that Locke was routinely invoked in sermons by pro-revolution pastors, which were often turned into pamphlets. (Sermons were at least 10 percent of all the pamphlets published at the time.)17 So great was Locke’s influence among pastors, and so great was the influence of the pastors with the people, that the historian Clinton Rossiter concluded: “Had ministers been the only spokesmen of the American Cause, had Jefferson, Adams and Otis never appeared in print, the political thought of the Revolution would have followed almost exactly the same line—with perhaps a little more mention of God, but certainly no less of John Locke.”18
As counterintuitive as it might seem, the Founders’ intellectual debt to Locke may have had more to do with his philosophical (then considered scientific) writings on empiricism than with his political work in the Second Treatise. In 1760, John Adams remarked of Locke’s epistemological writings that he “steered his Course into the unenlightened Regions of the human Mind, and like Columbus has discovered a new World.”19
As discussed earlier, Locke’s argument for the blank slate helped to undermine the case for hereditary power by arguing that all men were born equally free with the same natural rights. The American founders carried the Lockean argument even further (though not far enough). They declared unremitting war on hereditary aristocracy in all its unnatural or unjust forms (hereditary slavery excepted, unfortunately). Just as Locke and the Glorious Revolution overturned the divine right of kings, the Founders—particularly Thomas Jefferson—took dead aim at the divine rights of nobles and aristocrats. If all men are created equal, and if government is established by the people, not by God, then the government cannot recognize rankings of men. As Thomas Paine put it, “Virtue is not hereditary.”20
The Founders understood all too well that mediocre men were capable of being born to high stations and exceptional men were often born to low ones. But even then, just because some men proved themselves to be superior to other men, that does not mean they have any special privileges or authority under the law. As Thomas Jefferson explained, just “because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.”21 A man entering a courtroom in the newly formed United States of America may have had some piece of paper saying he was a baron or duke, and he’d be free to brag about it at a local tavern. But the judge would give that no weight in his dispute with a bricklayer.
The project was more Lockean than anything Locke imagined could happen in England.
Strictly speaking, aristocracy doesn’t mean “rule of the nobility” but “rule of the best,” which is how the Greeks first conceived of the term. It was only later, when the corrupting influence of human nature worked its will and aristocrats tried to lock in their power for posterity, that this notion became infused with notions of hereditary status. What the Founders wanted was a return to the original Greek conception, which Jefferson called a “natural aristocracy.” He wanted to rake “from the rubbish annually” in search of the “best geniuses.”22
Public education, the founder of the University of Virginia argued, elevates “those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights of their fellow citizens, and…should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth, or other accidental condition or circumstance.”23 (This is what the “liberal” in “liberal arts” is supposed to mean.)
After the Revolution, Jefferson fought to rid America of entail (the system of irrevocable trusts that barred the sale or division of landholdings) and primogeniture (requiring all property to be left to the oldest son), which tended to concentrate landed estates, elevating some families and their offspring beyond their merit. Jefferson considered his successful effort to abolish entail and primogeniture to be among his greatest accomplishments as a legislator. He saw these efforts as essential to eradicating “every fibre…of ancient or future aristocracy” and to lay “a foundation…for a government truly republican.”24
Identity politics will be a recurring theme in the pages that follow. But, for now, it’s worth making this simple observation: Notions of inherited nobility are an ancient form of identity politics. Identitarianism holds that a person has special status based upon criteria not of his or her own making. The Founders didn’t follow through on this logic when it came to slavery—though many wanted to—but they lit the fuse on the bomb that would demolish such thinking, at least for a time.
It’s difficult to appreciate today how radical a departure all of this was from the way the world had worked until that moment. George Washington could have been a king. He declined. He even had to be persuaded to be president. When King George III asked his American portraitist, Benjamin West, what Washington would do after winning independence, West replied, “They say he will return to his farm.”
“If he does that,” the gobsmacked king replied, Washington “will be the greatest man in the world.”25
But even though the Founders were creating something new in the world, they did not believe that they could repeal the laws of human nature. The Founders knew that one could not eliminate the natural human tendency to form factions, including aristocracies of wealth, status, and power. But the system of government they established, they hoped, would make it impossible for any faction to attain lasting concentrated power.
The structure of the federal government itself was designed to divide power in all the ways we learned in civics class: checks and balances, divided government, separation of powers. In one of the most famous passages in the Federalist Papers, James Madison writes:
But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.26
This was a great advance on Locke, who never gave a persuasive and cogent explanation for why majority rule could not be tyrannical.27 Meanwhile, the Founders understood that the majority could be a threat to liberty too. Obviously they couldn’t see Napoleon coming, but they understood the threat of Bonapartism entirely.28 Close students of history, they appreciated how a conquering general, like a Caesar or Cromwell (two names that appear often in the Federalist Papers), with the masses on his side, could take over the republican government. “Brutus,” one of the anonymous writers in the Anti-Federalist Papers, put it this way:29
In the first, the liberties of the commonwealth were destroyed, and the constitution over-turned, by an army, led by Julius Caesar, who was appointed to the command by the constitutional authority of that commonwealth. He changed it from a free republic, whose fame…is still celebrated by all the world, into that of the most absolute despotism.30
The Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, took certain vexatious political questions and made them off-limits (at least in theory) from the politicians. Free speech, freedom of worship, freedom of assembly, the right to bear arms, the right to property (including intellectual property)—these are all massive bulwarks against despotic power. Even the phrasing of the key amendments is essential. “Congress shall make no law” [abridging this right or that]. In other words, the restrictions are all on the power of the state. The rights of the people, collectively and individually, are upstream of the powers of the government.
This, in short, is the difference between Lockeanism and Rousseauism. For Locke, the individual is prior to the state. For Rousseau, the state—or the general will—is prior to the people. For the Lockeans, our rights come from God, not from government. For the disciples of Rousseau, our rights are indistinguishable, or at least inseparable, from our duties to the state.
Perhaps the Constitution’s most important contribution is its most prosaic quality: It’s written down and very hard to change. Being written down for all to read gives ownership to everyone and creates what economists call “path dependence” for how political disputes are resolved. It reminds us that our fundamental laws are outside the authority of men. It creates the space necessary for institutional pluralism to flourish. The fact that the Constitution is hard to change—a great frustration to passionate political movements of every stripe—automatically confers deep democratic legitimacy to any successful alterations and provides assurance that we will not sacrifice some fundamental liberty in the heat of a given moment. We may, in such moments, ignore the Constitution, but it sits there, outside the time and space of any political moment, as a national conscience, reminding us that such transgressions must be rectified.
There is a decidedly deist flavor to the American founding. Deism holds that God or, “the Creator,” is like a watchmaker who makes his creation, winds it up, and then interferes no more. Some of the Founders were indeed deists, and many more were influenced by deism. And, in a sense, they did set up the machinery of liberty and then got out of the way.
But I think there is a better way to understand the Founders’ vision and how it differed from other Enlightenment projects, specifically those of Revolutionary France. America borrowed a great deal from French thought, but we cherry-picked the best bits without subscribing to their entire worldview. The philosophes and revolutionaries of Paris were far more ambitious than their counterparts in America. Partially thanks to the influence of Rousseau, they wanted to create, guide, and direct a whole new path for humanity. For all their hatred of religion, they nonetheless set out to create a new religion, a whole system of meaning for the French people.31 Taking after Rousseau, the French believed in the perfectibility of man. The scientific revolution had granted the new intellectuals the power to create perfect societies and perfect men. As Nicolas de Condorcet put it, there is “a science that can foresee the progress of humankind, direct it, and accelerate it.”32
The Americans rejected the perfectibility of man, believing the best government could do was take man’s nature into account and channel it toward productive ends.
Yuval Levin argues that you can see the differences in these two worldviews in the metaphors the two camps used in explaining what the state should do. The French strain emphasizes movement. The state is there to deliver the people somewhere, advance the “wheel of history,” etc. In the English version, the state is there to create a zone of liberty for people to choose their own direction.33
One of my favorite illustrations of how this is as much a cultural disagreement as a philosophical one can be found in the differences between French and English gardens. For instance, the French gardens at Versailles, with their ornate, geometric, nature-defying designs, illustrate how the gardener imposes his vision on nature. Nature is brought to heel by reason. The classic English garden, on the other hand, was intended to let nature take its course, to let each bush, tree, and vegetable achieve its own ideal nature. The role of the English gardener was to protect his garden by weeding it, maintaining fences, and being ever watchful for predators and poachers.
The American founders were gardeners, not engineers. The government of the Founders’ Constitution is more than merely a “night watchman state,” but not very much more. It creates the rules of the garden and the gardeners and little more. This does not mean the government cannot intervene in the society or the economy. It means that, when it does so, it should be to protect liberty, which Madison defined in Federalist No. 10 as “the first object of government.”34
As that quintessential Scottish Enlightenment thinker, Adam Smith, wrote in 1755:
Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel or which endeavor to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.35
I think the garden metaphor works better than the watchmaker image, because so many of the Founders were active participants in the unfolding American experiment, as George Washington called it. From Shays’ Rebellion to the First Bank of the United States, the Louisiana Purchase, and the War of 1812, the Founders were attentive gardeners in this new nation, creating the conditions for prosperity, fending off predators, and even expanding the garden itself.
We should turn now from the Founders to the inhabitants of the garden itself, for the architects of the Constitution were ultimately their servants, both reflecting and guided by their spirit. Although the American colonists were culturally indebted to Britain, by the time of the Revolution, a new, distinct American character and culture began to manifest itself.
One reason the Founding generation could sift the gold from the dross of the English tradition was that they were alienated from it, literally and figuratively. Living thousands of miles across an ocean from their ancestral home, many of the cultural assumptions that seemed live and immediate when living in London or Manchester felt dead or distant in Boston or New York. Just as Texans don’t immediately look to Washington to solve their problems, the idea of looking across the Atlantic seemed increasingly irrational and cumbersome.
This alienation from the mother country had an added psychological component. As discussed, British primogeniture laws required that the firstborn son of an aristocratic family get everything: the titles, the lands, etc. But what about the other kids? They were required to make their way in the world. To be sure, they had advantages—educational, financial, and social—over the children of the lower classes, but they still needed to pursue a career. “The grander families of Virginia—including the Washingtons—were known as the ‘Second Sons,’ ” writes Daniel Hannan.
“Many of the younger brothers who had founded their lines in the New World had borne with them a sense of injustice that they had been denied any share of their ancestral lands through an accident of timing,” Hannan adds. This idea that primogeniture was a violation of natural justice was expressed by Edmund in King Lear:
Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
Lag of a brother?…36
In fact, Hannan and Matt Ridley suggest that much of the prosperity and expansion of the British Empire in the eighteenth century can be ascribed to an intriguing historical accident. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the children of the affluent nobility had a much lower mortality rate, for all the obvious reasons. They had more access to medicine, rudimentary as it was, but also better nutrition and vastly superior living and working conditions than the general population. As a result, the nobility were dramatically more fecund than the lower classes. Consequently, a large cohort of educated and ambitious young men who were not firstborn were set free to make their way in the world. If you have five boys, only one gets to be the duke. The rest must become officers, priests, doctors, lawyers, academics, and businessmen.
This is not an abstract point but a vital cultural and sociological one. European and English societies were drenched in notions of class. The English who valued that system often returned home to England or moved to Canada. The Americans who stayed kept the English attachment to natural rights and popular sovereignty, but they also rejected the cultural obsession with rank and status—and had a powerful attachment to liberty.
Seymour Martin Lipset, the great political sociologist and probably the greatest student of American exceptionalism since James Bryce or Tocqueville, had a wonderful observation about America. (I heard him share it many times.) At the time of the Founding, if you were a loyalist or royalist with no interest in severing ties with the British crown, you often moved to or stayed in Canada. If you believed in the principles of the Founding, you either stayed in America or moved there. This was one of the greatest natural experiments in political history. These were two populations with the same basic ethnic makeup, the same religious beliefs, and, for the most part, the same language. And yet these two nations produced two very different political cultures. Lipset loved to point out that, two centuries later, both the U.S. government and the Canadian government mandated that all of their citizens switch to the metric system. The Canadians, with their deeply ingrained deference to political authority, obliged almost instantly. “Drive around Canada,” he’d chuckle, “and everything is kilometers.” Not so in America. The U.S. government asked, but the answer was “No.”
This points to the revolution in culture the American founding represents. I think Gordon Wood is surely right that the significance of the Declaration of Independence at the time lay largely in the conclusion—independence!—rather than the introduction. But that does not mean the American Revolution was seen as just another conflict between empire and colony, or that America’s founding did not represent an earthquake in Western thinking even at the time. Europe’s monarchs and emperors recognized the American war for independence was not just another grubby revolt—though they often said it was, for propaganda purposes. “The rulers feared that their subjects would see the American action not as a rebellion against a rightful monarch in his own territories—there had been plenty of rebellions against European sovereigns—but as the proclamation of a revolutionary doctrine of universal application, as the Declaration indeed announced it to be,” wrote the late, great journalist Henry Fairlie.37 “Any notion that the War of Independence was only a rebellion falls to the ground. Both rulers and their subjects saw it as a revolution of universal appeal.”38
And the Revolution was not merely political. It also had economic motivations and consequences. “What the rebellious Americans wanted,” writes economic historian Robert E. Wright, “and with ratification of the Constitution obtained, was what today we call ‘economic freedom.’ In other words, they wanted to engage in entrepreneurial activities, subject only to necessary regulations and taxes, and credible assurances that they could keep whatever wealth those activities generated.”39
This is why, for the young Americans, economic and political liberties were indivisible. This was a radical expansion of even the British understanding of liberty, which, in practice, always tended to take the economic rights of nobles more seriously. Meanwhile, the rulers of Europe were aghast at the idea that merchants and strivers should undermine their sovereignty, which is why King George III lamented that his rule was being threatened by a bunch of “grocers.”40 Even Karl Marx declared that “the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class.”41
“The public here is extremely occupied with the rebels [in America],” the Danish foreign minister A. P. Bernstorff wrote to a friend in October of 1776, “not because they know the cause, but because the mania of independence in reality has infected all the spirits, and the poison has spread imperceptibly from the works of the philosophes all the way out to the village schools.”42
America had created a culture of liberty and equality never before seen. Paris, London, and Vienna each had their claims to financial, intellectual, or artistic freedom. But that freedom was often the freedom of the elites—of intellectuals, artists, writers, and aristocrats. In America, cultural freedom had been democratized. (This probably explains many of the differences between the French Revolutionary project and the American one. The French, accustomed to absolutism, were more inclined to replace one form of absolutism with another. In America, the people acquired a taste for liberty and demanded more of it than the English were willing to provide.)
In the Old World, your clothes, your accent—even your last name—were freighted with notions of superiority and inferiority. Sumptuary laws—codes for what garments people could wear and what products they could use—were largely repealed by the eighteenth century, but they endured as a kind of cultural and social uniform. Even in Britain’s comparatively democratic culture, people were still expected to dress in accordance with their station.
Not so in the United States. Thomas Colley Grattan, the British consul in Boston in the 1840s, disdained the peculiar culture of equality in the former colonies. Servant girls, he complained, were “strongly infected with the national bad taste for being over-dressed, they are, when walking the streets, scarcely to be distinguished from their employers…”43 Ferenc Pulszky, a Hungarian politician touring America in 1852, was dismayed to discover that Americans rejected the unofficial uniforms of class. In Europe, there was “the peasant girl with the gaudy ribbons interlaced in her long tresses, her bright corset, and her richly-folded petticoat; there the Hungarian peasant with his white linen shirt, and his stately sheepskin; the Slovak in the closely fitting jacket and the bright yellow buttons; the farmer with the high boots and the Hungarian coat; the old women with the black lace cap in the ancient national style, and none but the young ladies appareled in French bonnets and modern dresses.” But in New York, he complained, “no characteristical costumes mark here the different grades of society, which, in Eastern Europe, impress the foreigner at once with the varied occupations and habits of an old country.”44
“Before the end of the nineteenth century,” Daniel J. Boorstin writes, “the American democracy of clothing would become still more astonishing to foreign eyes, for by then the mere wearing of clothes would be an instrument of community, a way of drawing immigrants into a new life. Men whose ancestors had been accustomed to the peasant’s tatters or the craftsman’s leather apron could show by a democratic costume that they were as good as, or not very different from, the next man. If, as the Old World proverb went, ‘Clothes make the man,’ the New World’s45 new way of clothing would help make new men.”46
Boorstin chronicles how the very idea of income was reinvented in the New World. “Before the nineteenth century the concept of ‘income’ had very little importance in the Old World; it was used indirectly to measure property ownership or stake-in-the-community or as a basis for election reform.”47 In Europe—and virtually everywhere else—the important metric was property ownership, specifically land, because that was the measure by which the state and the society assigned status.
In America, where nearly everyone was an immigrant or the recent descendant of an immigrant, wealth had become disassociated with inherited status or nobility. “Among mobile Americans, a nation of recent immigrants moving from one place to another up and down the social scale, ‘income’ was a more convenient and more universally applicable standard of measurement than wealth or property. Income was as close as one could come to quantifying the standard of living, and it provided a simple way of telling who was above or below the standard.”48 Even the concept of “standard of living” took on new meaning in America, because that standard was constantly and rapidly improving for nearly everyone.
This explosive growth owed much to plentiful natural resources, especially land. But the indispensable ingredient was, and always has been, people. In this case, a certain kind of individual and specific class of people: the entrepreneur and the bourgeoisie. In Europe, the entrepreneur aroused fear and distrust. Again, innovation had a negative connotation throughout Europe—and much of the world—until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In England and Holland, business innovators, like scientific ones, were more honored than anywhere else in the Old World, but in the New World the inventor became a hero. Likewise, in England and Holland, the middle-class merchant was more respected than anywhere else on the Continent, but in America the whole country was being built around a fundamentally bourgeois worldview. The middle class, and those who strived to be in it, for the first time had a government that reflected their interests and aspirations.
In the Old World, the right to form a legal corporation was entrenched in politics and status. It was a special privilege, akin to being granted a title to land. In America “the corporation was democratized by being made a standardized product, available to anyone who followed the simple steps prescribed and paid a small registration fee.” Now, as Boorstin notes, “instead of businessmen anxiously seeking the special privilege of incorporation, the states competed for the favors of businessmen. The enticements offered by land speculators, city boosters, and railroad promoters to natural persons and their families were matched by enticements to these artificial persons.”49
The old iron triumvirate of class, guild, and throne that made economic advancement an act of rebellion against the status quo had been overthrown.
It is a testament to how largely the legacy of slavery hangs over our thinking today that it is difficult to write any of this without constantly offering the balefully accurate caveat “except for blacks” and, to a lesser extent “except for women.” It is an entirely accurate point. But, as discussed earlier, slavery was a nearly universal human institution across the world and throughout the ages. Against the yardstick of the present—at least in the democratic, liberal West—every advance in human liberty fails to measure up.
My point here is not to justify or diminish the evil of slavery or Jim Crow. It is simply to argue that we should read the chapters in human history in their correct order. The American Revolution, as Barack Obama has argued, unleashed a new argument for new principles that, when carried to their moral and logical conclusion, commanded the end of slavery and Jim Crow. No one can argue that it shouldn’t have happened sooner—or not have been necessary in the first place. But the principles we invoke to condemn the past for its misdeeds are the very principles that the past bequeathed to us.
In the century and a half following the Revolution, America experienced the greatest run-up in material prosperity of any nation in human history. In the four decades from 1860 to 1900, our population more than doubled, from 31 million to 76 million. When Daniel Webster died in 1852, America was a third as wealthy as Great Britain. Five decades later, it had grown fivefold, with America one and a quarter times richer than the British.50 From 1890 to 1910, the U.S. GNP grew at 6 percent a year. According to historian Burton W. Folsom Jr., in 1870 America was creating 23 percent of the world’s industrial goods, while Britain and Germany produced 30 and 13 percent, respectively. By 1900, America was in first place with 30 percent; Britain fell to 20 percent, and Germany rose to 20 percent. In 1870, Britain was the world’s chief steel producer; by 1900, Andrew Carnegie alone made more steel than all of Great Britain.51
In 1775, real GDP per capita was $1,968.24; by 1820, it was $2,173.78. By 1929, it was $11,020.48.52 Life expectancy rose by leaps and bounds. Workweeks became shorter. Diets improved. “In the Old World, beef was the diet of lords and men of wealth. For others it was a holiday prize. But American millions would eat like lords,” writes Daniel Boorstin.53
America defied the Malthusian curse that bedeviled societies for all of human history: Even as its population exploded, it got richer even faster. (I wrote an appendix on human progress so I would not have to clutter up later pages with economic statistics. You can refer to it to get a greater appreciation of the explosion of wealth, prosperity, and health that came with this unprecedented experiment in human affairs.)
But while the Miracle repealed Malthus’s Law of Population, it did not repeal human nature. The natural tendency of man to form coalitions, factions, guilds, and aristocracies manifested itself continually throughout American history. But the combined power of the constitutional order and sheer economic growth tended to keep it at bay. We’ll return to that later.
One last point needs to be made here. The triumph of the Miracle in America isn’t simply a story about economics or law. The economics are important because that is the measurement of human material improvement. It is also the chief metric that many of those who despise and revile capitalism invest with the most moral authority. It must be said again and again: The free market is the greatest anti-poverty program in all of human history. In a very real sense, it is the only anti-poverty program in all of human history. The legal system is important because it provides the guardrails for continuing human improvement.
But focusing on economics gives short shrift to another kind of entrepreneurialism that America unleashed upon the world more than any other nation: the entrepreneurialism of the self. The pursuit of happiness is not an inherently or exclusively an economic concept. It is much bigger than that. America’s culture of liberty, its legal doctrines of natural rights, and perhaps most of all its staggering material prosperity made it possible for the masses to define happiness on personal and individual terms, to earn their own success as they defined it. This fact is a double-edged sword, for by removing the idea of external authority like never before and exalting the sovereignty of the personal, we have opened a door for human nature to come rushing back in.