WEBVTT NOTE Themes and Lessons from Colonial America 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.000 Well, thanks both to WC, to Jeff, to George Crispin, and ladies and gentlemen. 2 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:15.000 Well, what I'd like to do, starting off here talking about the colonial period, 3 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:18.000 is to focus on a few themes of importance. 4 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:23.000 Because the colonial period is a period of really staggering, 5 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:27.000 that's staggering in terms of the amount of information that one would have to cover. 6 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:33.000 It was far and away the most difficult, challenging course I took as an undergraduate in history 7 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:39.000 because I remember that in order to cover the history of these 13 separate societies 8 00:00:39.000 --> 00:00:45.000 we were reading in this one course 400 pages of non-fiction reading a week 9 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:49.000 which was heavier than the usual course load at Harvard. 10 00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:52.000 My professor I don't think is any longer there, David Hancock. 11 00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:54.000 They'd probably get rid of him for being too soft on us. 12 00:00:54.000 --> 00:00:56.000 The Theory of Money and Credit 13 00:01:24.000 --> 00:01:31.000 This actually starts off by obliquely referring to a book by a man named David Hackett Fisher, 14 00:01:31.000 --> 00:01:36.000 wrote a book called Albion's Seed in the early, I believe it was early 90s, 15 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:39.000 Albion's Seed, Four British Folkways in America. 16 00:01:39.000 --> 00:01:42.000 Now Fisher's name is referred to on page two of the book, 17 00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:48.000 but I begin in effect describing his thesis on page one. 18 00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:55.480 What Fisher is arguing is that between 1629, which is when the Puritans who come to Massachusetts 19 00:01:55.480 --> 00:02:01.840 Bay are going to begin their migration, all the way through 1775 and the eve of the revolution, 20 00:02:01.840 --> 00:02:09.800 there appear to be four major waves of migration of peoples who come to what becomes the United 21 00:02:09.800 --> 00:02:12.000 States from various parts of England. 22 00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:16.120 Now that's not to say that nobody else other than Englishmen came to America, but these 23 00:02:16.120 --> 00:02:23.000 These are the four migrations that Fisher wants to examine because he argues that these particular 24 00:02:23.000 --> 00:02:29.360 groupings had certain identifiable characteristics that then characterized the regions in which 25 00:02:29.360 --> 00:02:30.560 they settled. 26 00:02:30.560 --> 00:02:37.240 So he begins by discussing the English Puritans who settle in what becomes New England, which 27 00:02:37.240 --> 00:02:39.640 is where I'm from. 28 00:02:39.640 --> 00:02:44.900 He then goes on to talk about the settlement of Virginia, and this is all, as I say, pretty 29 00:02:44.900 --> 00:02:49.900 on page one, but he says that in the south of England, you've got a migration that takes place. 30 00:02:49.900 --> 00:02:56.900 The major migration to Virginia really gets going in the 1640s and then several decades afterward. 31 00:02:56.900 --> 00:03:02.900 Jamestown is founded in 1607, but the major migrations don't really occur for some years after that 32 00:03:02.900 --> 00:03:09.900 because the early years of Virginia are an absolute horror show, people dying of disease and starvation. 33 00:03:09.900 --> 00:03:14.900 So we have that second group. So we've got New England, we've got Virginia. 34 00:03:14.900 --> 00:03:19.900 The third migration he refers to originates in the North Midlands of England and Wales, 35 00:03:19.900 --> 00:03:26.900 terminating in the Delaware Valley around 1675 to 1725, and that would include the Quakers of Pennsylvania. 36 00:03:26.900 --> 00:03:32.900 And then finally, going from about 1718 to 1775, we have a fourth group 37 00:03:32.900 --> 00:03:36.900 consisting of immigrants from the borders of North Britain and Northern Ireland, 38 00:03:36.900 --> 00:03:42.340 in Ireland who made their way to the Appalachian backcountry. And what Fisher is going to argue 39 00:03:42.340 --> 00:03:47.780 is that the various characteristics of these peoples that are evident in England will become 40 00:03:47.780 --> 00:03:53.380 evident also in America. Now, John Jay, who became the first Chief Justice of the U.S. 41 00:03:53.380 --> 00:03:58.340 Supreme Court when he wrote one of his few contributions to the Federalist Papers, Federalist 42 00:03:58.340 --> 00:04:03.060 number two, he made the observation that the peoples of America were in fact relatively 43 00:04:03.060 --> 00:04:06.300 very similar culturally and religiously. 44 00:04:06.300 --> 00:04:09.060 So he argued, he said, these are John Jay's words, 45 00:04:09.060 --> 00:04:12.180 Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country 46 00:04:12.180 --> 00:04:13.700 to one united people, 47 00:04:13.700 --> 00:04:17.940 a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, 48 00:04:17.940 --> 00:04:19.700 professing the same religion, 49 00:04:19.700 --> 00:04:21.940 attached to the same principles of government, 50 00:04:21.940 --> 00:04:25.580 very similar in their manners and customs. 51 00:04:25.580 --> 00:04:29.660 So these peoples have enough common characteristics to make it possible for them to join together 52 00:04:29.660 --> 00:04:31.240 in a single union. 53 00:04:31.240 --> 00:04:36.360 But what Fisher is arguing in this book from the 1990s is that nevertheless the differences 54 00:04:36.360 --> 00:04:43.960 that are beneath these similarities were nevertheless enduring and that the differences were significant 55 00:04:43.960 --> 00:04:48.960 enough that what began to happen around the time of the Constitution was that the various 56 00:04:48.960 --> 00:04:56.340 regions of America in which these four major migrations terminated in effect wanted to 57 00:04:56.340 --> 00:04:58.980 and defend themselves from one another. 58 00:04:58.980 --> 00:05:03.780 Each one wanted to be sure that no one particular grouping of these peoples would be able to 59 00:05:03.780 --> 00:05:08.300 take hold of the U.S. government and impose itself on the rest of them. 60 00:05:08.300 --> 00:05:12.180 So this was a consideration when the Constitution was drawn up, that we want to keep the central 61 00:05:12.180 --> 00:05:16.320 government relatively weak because, for heaven's sake, what would happen if the descendants 62 00:05:16.320 --> 00:05:17.520 of the Puritans took over? 63 00:05:17.520 --> 00:05:20.260 For heaven's sake, we wouldn't want that, or what would happen if this group took over? 64 00:05:20.260 --> 00:05:23.080 So we have to keep the whole thing relatively weak. 65 00:05:23.080 --> 00:05:27.460 Now I give in my book examples of some of the insults that early Americans threw at 66 00:05:27.460 --> 00:05:31.860 each other. What Puritans thought of Virginians and what Virginians thought of Puritans and 67 00:05:31.860 --> 00:05:37.200 what everybody thought about the Quakers. All of this over and over we see repeated. 68 00:05:37.200 --> 00:05:42.580 Even into the 1790s we have one Quaker referring to New England in general as being the flock 69 00:05:42.580 --> 00:05:49.740 of Cain. The Quakers incidentally were a pacifist group. They were in effect like left-wing 70 00:05:49.740 --> 00:05:55.500 by William Puritans, who settled Pennsylvania in the early 1680s, but the Quakers, before 71 00:05:55.500 --> 00:05:59.580 they settled Pennsylvania, lived in, a lot of them lived in Rhode Island, which was a 72 00:05:59.580 --> 00:06:05.220 place of relative religious freedom, and I note in my book that although the Quakers 73 00:06:05.220 --> 00:06:09.300 believed in religious toleration and they did not believe in the use of force against 74 00:06:09.300 --> 00:06:14.220 people who disagreed with them on matters of religion, nevertheless the Quakers believed 75 00:06:14.220 --> 00:06:18.300 they were right, they believed theirs was the true religion, so living right to the 76 00:06:18.300 --> 00:06:40.300 In the south of Boston Puritans, the Quakers could not restrain themselves from going up and heckling Puritan ministers in Boston and disrupting their services or, my particular favorite, walking naked up and down Puritan church aisles as a way of just trying to jolt these people out of their excessive rigorism of their faith. 77 00:06:40.300 --> 00:06:48.300 And of course you can just imagine the Puritans who have made such sacrifice to come all this way wondering who in the world are these people, why won't they just leave us alone. 78 00:06:48.300 --> 00:06:53.300 So there was in effect a certain antagonism between the various peoples. 79 00:06:53.300 --> 00:07:01.300 Now of course when you're fighting against the British beginning in the 1770s, well that has a tendency to dissolve some of this antagonism. 80 00:07:01.300 --> 00:07:06.300 But nevertheless there was real cultural particularity that persisted in America. 81 00:07:06.300 --> 00:07:16.300 And what I've suggested in the book is that this kind of antagonism or mutual suspicion contributes to the development of the tradition of American liberty. 82 00:07:16.300 --> 00:07:25.300 Because as I say, they're so suspicious of each other, nobody wants there to be a strong enough federal government that if one of these groups took power, it could impose its own views on the rest. 83 00:07:25.300 --> 00:07:32.300 So for instance, when it came time to decide what will the religious policy be under the U.S. Constitution? 84 00:07:32.300 --> 00:07:36.180 Constitution. Are we all going to have the same established religion? Are we going to 85 00:07:36.180 --> 00:07:41.060 establish no religion at all? What is the policy going to be? What Fisher suggests is 86 00:07:41.060 --> 00:07:45.820 that this was a regional compromise. What was reached in the First Amendment of the 87 00:07:45.820 --> 00:07:50.780 U.S. Constitution was a regional compromise because in Virginia you had religious liberty 88 00:07:50.780 --> 00:07:56.740 by the time of the 1780s, but in New England you still had taxpayer-supported religious 89 00:07:56.740 --> 00:08:04.740 until 1833, Massachusetts, its congregational churches still were in effect taxpayer supported institutions. 90 00:08:04.740 --> 00:08:11.740 So how are you going to have a common union with such disparate examples of social order? 91 00:08:11.740 --> 00:08:16.740 And the answer was, the Federal Government should have no role in religion whatsoever. 92 00:08:16.740 --> 00:08:18.740 No role, absolute non-intervention. 93 00:08:18.740 --> 00:08:23.740 We let each colony and then later each state decide its religious policy for itself. 94 00:08:23.740 --> 00:08:28.300 for itself. Because if the federal government tried to impose one, well, there would never 95 00:08:28.300 --> 00:08:32.820 have been a union in the first place. People favoring religious liberty would have seceded 96 00:08:32.820 --> 00:08:36.700 if there was an attempt to impose religion on them. And likewise, if there was a federal 97 00:08:36.700 --> 00:08:41.140 attempt to dissolve the establishments of Massachusetts and elsewhere, then those would 98 00:08:41.140 --> 00:08:45.540 have seceded. So the answer was leave the federal government out of it. Leave the local 99 00:08:45.540 --> 00:08:51.360 people free to decide these questions for themselves. So again, the diversity of peoples 100 00:08:51.360 --> 00:08:56.760 in America in that case leads to more liberty in effect because it leads to a federal government 101 00:08:56.760 --> 00:09:03.400 that decides it better keep out of these quarrels and let each local area make its own policies. 102 00:09:03.400 --> 00:09:09.760 We also note another I think significant theme about early America is that we don't see 103 00:09:09.760 --> 00:09:16.920 among either the colonists in the early period in the early 1600s or in the 1770s and 80s 104 00:09:16.920 --> 00:09:20.720 at the time of the break with Britain and the drafting of the Constitution, we don't 105 00:09:20.720 --> 00:09:26.720 We don't see any sense among Americans that, as you do see, for instance, during the French Revolution, 106 00:09:26.720 --> 00:09:30.720 that the American people, or the people who constitute what becomes the United States, 107 00:09:30.720 --> 00:09:33.720 are just clay in the hands of legislators. 108 00:09:33.720 --> 00:09:39.720 That it is the role of legislators to remake human nature, or to impose a blueprint on society. 109 00:09:39.720 --> 00:09:43.720 We don't see that. We do see that in the French Revolution. 110 00:09:43.720 --> 00:09:47.720 And you do see that in a great many other 20th century examples. 111 00:09:47.720 --> 00:09:54.720 The idea that human nature can be changed and that it is up to the political class to carry out these changes. 112 00:09:54.720 --> 00:09:59.720 We can make people less selfish by re-educating them in the need to share with everybody. 113 00:09:59.720 --> 00:10:04.720 We can do this and that. We can abolish traditional marriage. We can do this and that. 114 00:10:04.720 --> 00:10:10.720 You don't see that in the American example. You see practical people looking to solve practical problems. 115 00:10:10.720 --> 00:10:14.720 You don't see visionaries looking to impose a single blueprint on all of society. 116 00:10:14.720 --> 00:10:23.720 You don't see, as I say, what you saw in the French Revolution in which the idea was that we are going to make a radical break with our past and try to construct a brand new France. 117 00:10:23.720 --> 00:10:26.720 We're going to try to construct a non-Christian France. 118 00:10:26.720 --> 00:10:32.720 We're going to abolish the traditional seven-day week and replace it with a ten-day week that contains no Sunday. 119 00:10:32.720 --> 00:10:38.720 So people won't be able to know what day should they rest and honor God. That's to be removed. 120 00:10:38.720 --> 00:10:44.040 to be removed. We're going to date the calendar from the year one. The year one will be the 121 00:10:44.040 --> 00:10:48.920 year that we executed our king. So we're going to leave behind the whole Christian inheritance 122 00:10:48.920 --> 00:10:53.320 of France and again begin anew with a brand new blueprint. We're going to come up with 123 00:10:53.320 --> 00:10:58.720 a crummy metric system from scratch because we hate all the silly measurement systems 124 00:10:58.720 --> 00:11:04.720 we had before. This will be more even and rational. All of this implies the idea that 125 00:11:04.720 --> 00:11:08.880 The legislator is someone who carries out a blueprint to impose on society, but you don't 126 00:11:08.880 --> 00:11:12.800 have that in the American example. 127 00:11:12.800 --> 00:11:19.160 Now I actually edited a volume of the political writings of Rufus Choate. 128 00:11:19.160 --> 00:11:22.640 The first question that arises from that is who is Rufus Choate? 129 00:11:22.640 --> 00:11:28.480 Rufus Choate was a 19th century congressman, sometimes congressman and senator from Massachusetts. 130 00:11:28.480 --> 00:11:33.160 I want to quote him because he makes the same sort of observation that I'm making about 131 00:11:33.160 --> 00:11:36.160 the sobriety of the American experience 132 00:11:36.160 --> 00:11:40.560 and that you don't see politicians getting caught in flights of fancy 133 00:11:40.560 --> 00:11:42.760 about how they're going to remake human nature 134 00:11:42.760 --> 00:11:46.440 or they're going to establish an anti-Christian blueprint on society. 135 00:11:46.440 --> 00:11:49.880 This is what Rufus Choate said looking back on the American experience. 136 00:11:49.880 --> 00:11:51.560 He said, 137 00:11:51.560 --> 00:11:54.560 There was another great work different from this and more difficult, 138 00:11:54.560 --> 00:11:57.280 more glorious, more improving, which they had to do. 139 00:11:57.280 --> 00:12:00.240 And that was to establish their system of colonial government, 140 00:12:00.240 --> 00:12:02.080 to frame their code of internal law 141 00:12:02.080 --> 00:12:06.080 and to administer the vast and perplexing political business of the colonies 142 00:12:06.080 --> 00:12:10.080 in their novel and trying relations to England through the whole colonial age. 143 00:12:10.080 --> 00:12:13.080 Of all their labors, this was the grandest, the most intellectual, 144 00:12:13.080 --> 00:12:16.080 the best calculated to fit them for independence. 145 00:12:16.080 --> 00:12:20.080 Consider how much patient thought, how much observation of man and life, 146 00:12:20.080 --> 00:12:24.080 how much sagacity, how much communication of mind with mind, 147 00:12:24.080 --> 00:12:28.080 how many general councils, plots and marshalling of affairs, 148 00:12:28.080 --> 00:12:33.420 How much slow accumulation, how much careful transmission of wisdom that labor demanded. 149 00:12:33.420 --> 00:12:37.800 And what a school of civil capacity this must have proved to them who partook in it. 150 00:12:37.800 --> 00:12:41.960 Hence, I think, the sober, rational and practical views and conduct 151 00:12:41.960 --> 00:12:46.260 which distinguished even the first fervent years of the Revolutionary Age. 152 00:12:46.260 --> 00:12:49.520 How little giddiness, rant and foolery do you see there. 153 00:12:49.520 --> 00:12:55.020 No riotous and shouting processions, no grand festivals of the goddess of reason, 154 00:12:55.020 --> 00:12:57.320 an obvious reference to the French Revolution, 155 00:12:57.320 --> 00:13:03.000 No impious dream of human perfectibility, no unloosing of the hoarded up passions of ages 156 00:13:03.000 --> 00:13:07.600 from the restraints of law, order, morality and religion, such as shamed and frightened 157 00:13:07.600 --> 00:13:10.640 away the newborn liberty of revolutionary France. 158 00:13:10.640 --> 00:13:17.640 Hence, our victories of peace were more brilliant, more beneficial than our victories of war. 159 00:13:18.680 --> 00:13:24.820 Now yet another theme that I note in my initial chapter is that the colonial period is in 160 00:13:24.820 --> 00:13:31.820 is in effect a kind of an incubator of the tradition of American liberty, even in places where you least expect it. 161 00:13:31.820 --> 00:13:36.820 If you study the history of colonial Massachusetts, you find that it's not technically a theocracy. 162 00:13:36.820 --> 00:13:41.820 The textbooks are not correct about that. A theocracy involves when the clergy are running the government. 163 00:13:41.820 --> 00:13:46.820 Clergymen were not allowed to participate in the government of Massachusetts, so it's technically not a theocracy. 164 00:13:46.820 --> 00:13:50.820 But the government and church worked very closely together. 165 00:13:50.820 --> 00:13:59.820 It is true that they sought to exclude from the settlement people who were going to not only disagree with them in matters of religion but do so boisterously. 166 00:13:59.820 --> 00:14:06.820 Those people were to be removed. Anne Hutchinson is an example. She was driven out of colonial Massachusetts. Roger Williams was driven out. 167 00:14:06.820 --> 00:14:15.820 Many of them settled in colonial Rhode Island, Providence, which naturally became a haven of religious liberty because this is where you go if nobody can stand you in Massachusetts. 168 00:14:15.820 --> 00:14:17.820 Everybody winds up in Rhode Island. 169 00:14:17.820 --> 00:14:26.820 But the point I'm making is that you think of that example of Massachusetts, an example where they did not hold the modern view of religious toleration. 170 00:14:26.820 --> 00:14:32.820 What they believed is that our community is going to abide by certain values and if you don't like these values then don't live here. 171 00:14:32.820 --> 00:14:41.820 That was their view. So sometimes people have been inclined to say that well therefore colonial Massachusetts made no contributions to the development of American liberty. 172 00:14:41.820 --> 00:14:49.140 and Liberty. Well, in a country and in a series of colonies where you saw consistent and repeated 173 00:14:49.140 --> 00:14:54.500 statements of rights, the first such one is the Massachusetts body of liberties, drafted 174 00:14:54.500 --> 00:15:01.700 in 1641. For a long time, the governor of Massachusetts, who was governor for a good 175 00:15:01.700 --> 00:15:07.100 many years and then would go out of office and then come back, was a man named John Winthrop. 176 00:15:07.100 --> 00:15:10.580 And Winthrop was of the opinion that there should be as few laws on the books in Massachusetts 177 00:15:10.580 --> 00:15:16.980 is possible because that way the colonial judges in Massachusetts would have more leeway, 178 00:15:16.980 --> 00:15:23.120 would have more discretion in their application of the Bible to particular incidents. 179 00:15:23.120 --> 00:15:26.600 The people of Massachusetts were not so convinced that was such a good idea because they thought 180 00:15:26.600 --> 00:15:29.580 that gives the judges far too much discretion. 181 00:15:29.580 --> 00:15:34.300 So they wanted to establish a body of liberties, a statement of what exactly the colonists' 182 00:15:34.300 --> 00:15:39.900 rights were and what exactly constituted that sphere that government was not allowed to 183 00:15:39.900 --> 00:15:42.540 to penetrate around the individual. 184 00:15:42.540 --> 00:15:46.660 And so they actually voted Winthrop out of office because he refused to accept this. 185 00:15:46.660 --> 00:15:52.740 And with him out of office in 1641, citizens of Massachusetts drafted and approved the 186 00:15:52.740 --> 00:15:58.420 Massachusetts Body of Liberties, which consists of about a hundred provisions, many of which 187 00:15:58.420 --> 00:16:03.500 sound very familiar to us because they're part of the English tradition really. 188 00:16:03.500 --> 00:16:08.180 For example, the principle of no taxation without representation is right there in 1641 189 00:16:08.180 --> 00:16:13.600 in the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, or the right to a trial by jury is likewise reflected 190 00:16:13.600 --> 00:16:18.420 in this document, or the guarantee that no one shall be deprived of life, liberty or property 191 00:16:18.420 --> 00:16:22.740 without due process of law is recognized in the Massachusetts Body of Liberty. 192 00:16:22.740 --> 00:16:28.900 So this is a significant step even in a place that seems inimical to some, at least some 193 00:16:28.900 --> 00:16:31.100 modern ideas of liberty. 194 00:16:31.100 --> 00:16:33.940 And then finally, I always point out in the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, just because 195 00:16:33.940 --> 00:16:42.940 There is also a statement in there prohibiting wife beating with the exception of when the husband is acting in self-defense. 196 00:16:42.940 --> 00:16:47.940 They make an exception for that. I don't know who these women or men are. 197 00:16:47.940 --> 00:16:51.940 It would be very interesting to find that out, but they put that in there in the Massachusetts Body of Liberties. 198 00:16:51.940 --> 00:16:55.940 Let me say a brief word about Virginia. 199 00:16:55.940 --> 00:17:02.940 Again, I'm sorry we have to sort of be a bit haphazard here, but that's the nature of talking about the colonial period in 30 or 40 minutes. 200 00:17:02.940 --> 00:17:21.940 I want to say a word about Virginia because I think one of the great virtues of Virginia is, in our day and age, considered to be its greatest debit, its attachment to its own plot of earth, the Virginian's attachment to their locality. 201 00:17:21.940 --> 00:17:29.940 Today, that's viewed as not very progressive and sort of backward that you're supposed to think of yourself as a citizen of the whole country. 202 00:17:29.940 --> 00:17:34.940 You're not supposed to be confined exclusively to thinking about just Virginia or whatever state. 203 00:17:34.940 --> 00:17:37.940 But there is something that's valuable about this. 204 00:17:37.940 --> 00:17:47.940 Daniel Borsten, who is not a conservative or a libertarian to my knowledge, but he's an acknowledged historian from the, he was writing in the 60s, 205 00:17:47.940 --> 00:17:49.940 Boorstin said this, he said, 206 00:18:17.940 --> 00:18:29.940 I think it's safe to say that all the colonies had an attachment to the practice of self-government, 207 00:18:29.940 --> 00:18:34.940 to making their own political decisions by and large without outside interference. 208 00:18:34.940 --> 00:18:38.940 The British more or less left them alone with a few notable exceptions, 209 00:18:38.940 --> 00:18:43.940 and so each of these colonies developed, with the potential exception of Georgia, 210 00:18:43.940 --> 00:18:46.940 which is kind of a special case, developed a tradition of self-government. 211 00:18:46.940 --> 00:18:51.940 of Government that they did not want to see interfered with. 212 00:18:51.940 --> 00:18:55.940 And so any time, and this is a final theme from my first chapter, 213 00:18:55.940 --> 00:18:59.940 any time it was proposed that two or more of the colonies should join together 214 00:18:59.940 --> 00:19:03.940 in an inter-colonial confederation for some purpose, 215 00:19:03.940 --> 00:19:07.940 each of those colonies was always careful to make sure that that confederation 216 00:19:07.940 --> 00:19:11.940 did not go beyond the bounds that were originally established for it, 217 00:19:11.940 --> 00:19:15.940 that it didn't attempt to exercise powers that no one had envisioned in the beginning. 218 00:19:15.940 --> 00:19:18.300 This is an important theme in American history. 219 00:19:18.380 --> 00:19:21.780 For example, I note the Confederation of New England 220 00:19:21.860 --> 00:19:25.980 that was founded in around the 1640s and 50s. 221 00:19:26.060 --> 00:19:29.100 This was a confederation of the New England colonies 222 00:19:29.180 --> 00:19:34.340 that joined together as a defensive alliance in case of Indian attacks. 223 00:19:34.420 --> 00:19:36.420 It makes reasonable sense that they would do this, 224 00:19:36.500 --> 00:19:41.340 but what's noteworthy is that around 1652, 225 00:19:41.420 --> 00:19:45.780 England and the Netherlands were at war in Europe 226 00:19:45.780 --> 00:19:49.340 And so any time there's any war going on in Europe, 227 00:19:49.460 --> 00:19:52.220 it always has the potential to spill over into the colonies. 228 00:19:52.340 --> 00:19:56.340 If you're at war with England, its colonial possessions are fair game for you. 229 00:19:56.460 --> 00:20:00.380 Well, the Dutch had possessions in what becomes the United States. 230 00:20:00.500 --> 00:20:02.820 They had New Netherland, they had New York. 231 00:20:02.940 --> 00:20:05.700 And so in 1652, they were at war with each other in Europe. 232 00:20:05.820 --> 00:20:09.700 There's a possibility that there could be war, 233 00:20:09.820 --> 00:20:13.580 there could be a colonial clash between English and Dutch here in the colonies 234 00:20:13.580 --> 00:20:16.580 with each side arming its Indian allies. 235 00:20:16.580 --> 00:20:19.580 So this is where the Confederation of New England comes into play. 236 00:20:19.580 --> 00:20:22.580 Well, Connecticut and New Haven began to argue 237 00:20:22.580 --> 00:20:24.580 that we need to go on an offensive war. 238 00:20:24.580 --> 00:20:26.580 We need to, in effect, have a preemptive war, if you will, 239 00:20:26.580 --> 00:20:29.580 to prevent any such Indian attacks 240 00:20:29.580 --> 00:20:31.580 inspired by the Dutch here in the colonies. 241 00:20:31.580 --> 00:20:35.580 Massachusetts, on the other hand, was not so eager for such a war 242 00:20:35.580 --> 00:20:39.580 and immediately noted that in the Confederation of New England 243 00:20:39.580 --> 00:20:41.580 there was no provision for an offensive war. 244 00:20:41.580 --> 00:20:48.580 These were only strictly, in the strictest sense, defensive wars for which this confederation had come into existence. 245 00:20:48.580 --> 00:20:55.580 Massachusetts did not want to be dragged into a war that was initiated by a couple of particularly zealous members of the confederation. 246 00:20:55.580 --> 00:21:02.580 So she chose that moment, Massachusetts, to stand up and say, we have a veto over this, or we have the right to say, 247 00:21:02.580 --> 00:21:05.580 we're not going to take part in something that's not strictly defensive. 248 00:21:05.580 --> 00:21:10.580 So that's an example of a confederation whose powers were challenged by one of its members, 249 00:21:10.580 --> 00:21:14.580 suspicious that it was going beyond what its original mandate had been. 250 00:21:14.580 --> 00:21:20.580 A second example of a confederation that failed or that was at least challenged 251 00:21:20.580 --> 00:21:23.580 is the Dominion of New England in the 1680s. 252 00:21:23.580 --> 00:21:27.580 The King of England grows a little tired and impatient with the colonies time after time 253 00:21:27.580 --> 00:21:34.580 because they oftentimes refuse to abide by the trade regulations that have been imposed on the colonies. 254 00:21:34.580 --> 00:21:36.580 The New England Colony 255 00:22:04.580 --> 00:22:10.580 and then even other colonies later and in effect collapse these colonies into a single blob in effect 256 00:22:10.580 --> 00:22:15.580 into one single governing unit governed by a governor chosen by himself. 257 00:22:15.580 --> 00:22:22.580 So this is obviously the most grave threat to colonial self-government that has ever been posed up to that point. 258 00:22:22.580 --> 00:22:25.580 Well again you can imagine how people feel about this. 259 00:22:25.580 --> 00:22:29.580 They have this attachment to self-government and now their legislatures are closed 260 00:22:29.580 --> 00:22:33.580 and everything is shut down or replaced by one single governor appointed by the king. 261 00:22:33.580 --> 00:22:38.080 This particular governor, the best known of them who govern the Dominion of New England, 262 00:22:38.080 --> 00:22:41.080 is a man named Sir Edmund Andros whom everyone hated. 263 00:22:41.080 --> 00:22:45.580 Now, even if he had been Mother Teresa, it would have been a difficult mission to carry out 264 00:22:45.580 --> 00:22:47.580 because nobody likes the Dominion of New England. 265 00:22:47.580 --> 00:22:52.080 But they picked Sir Edmund Andros who may as well have had horns on his head from the colonial point of view 266 00:22:52.080 --> 00:22:55.580 because he would, for example, levy taxes just on his own say-so. 267 00:22:55.580 --> 00:22:57.580 I think we should raise taxes. 268 00:22:57.580 --> 00:23:02.080 Well, you know, there happens to be an old and venerable British tradition against doing that. 269 00:23:02.080 --> 00:23:05.640 And when people would point this out to him, they'd get thrown in jail. 270 00:23:05.640 --> 00:23:09.040 Well, again, you're not really supposed to do that either. 271 00:23:09.040 --> 00:23:12.760 So what finally happened is that when in England the Glorious Revolution occurred 272 00:23:12.760 --> 00:23:15.640 and James II had to flee, 273 00:23:15.640 --> 00:23:20.480 when this news got back to the New Englanders that the man who had established this dominion of New England 274 00:23:20.480 --> 00:23:24.240 and imposed this Sir Edmund Andros over them was no longer the king, 275 00:23:24.240 --> 00:23:27.200 they decided now is our chance to act, 276 00:23:27.200 --> 00:23:31.920 and they threw out Andros, they put him in jail along with many of his assistants 277 00:23:31.920 --> 00:23:35.200 and ended up shipping him back and the dominion of New England was no more. 278 00:23:35.200 --> 00:23:39.520 William and Mary had no desire to carry this on against the colonists. 279 00:23:39.520 --> 00:23:44.000 So that's an example of a confederation that was brought down by the colonists. 280 00:23:44.000 --> 00:23:47.120 Or you have the example of in the early 1750s, 281 00:23:47.120 --> 00:23:51.400 Benjamin Franklin said, why don't we all come together and have a union of the colonies? 282 00:23:51.400 --> 00:23:54.920 And when he proposed that, in effect, you could hear crickets in the background. 283 00:23:54.920 --> 00:23:59.240 Like there was no, nobody seconded it, no colony supported it. 284 00:23:59.240 --> 00:24:07.740 So at the time that the Constitution was drafted, you had already had three major colonial confederations that in one way or another had been challenged. 285 00:24:07.740 --> 00:24:14.740 The Confederation of New England, the Dominion of New England, and finally the Albany Plan of Union, which was Ben Franklin's plan. 286 00:24:14.740 --> 00:24:27.240 So it's not surprising that when the states decided to ratify the Constitution, they did so, but they also got guarantees that this new federal government would not interfere with its rights to govern itself. 287 00:24:27.240 --> 00:24:32.240 The Theory of Money and Credit 288 00:24:57.240 --> 00:25:01.600 That the U.S. Constitution, which we're going to talk about next time, was intended to be 289 00:25:01.600 --> 00:25:06.600 what some people have called a living, breathing document, that it's supposed to change with 290 00:25:06.600 --> 00:25:07.600 the times. 291 00:25:07.600 --> 00:25:12.600 Like, hey man, we know we can't live in 1787 forever, we've got to get with the times, 292 00:25:12.600 --> 00:25:18.060 you know, we can't live according to what James Madison wanted forever, we have to change 293 00:25:18.060 --> 00:25:19.060 with the times. 294 00:25:19.060 --> 00:25:22.960 And so it's been thought that the Constitution was intended to sort of change with the times, 295 00:25:22.960 --> 00:25:23.960 The Theory of Money and Credit 296 00:25:23.960 --> 00:25:24.960 The Theory of Money and Credit 297 00:25:24.960 --> 00:25:29.960 The Theory of Money and Credit 298 00:25:52.960 --> 00:25:54.960 Who's doing this living and breathing? 299 00:25:54.960 --> 00:25:57.960 Who's deciding what the new interpretations are? 300 00:25:57.960 --> 00:26:00.960 In effect, when you say, well, hey, man, the Constitution has to change with the times, 301 00:26:00.960 --> 00:26:04.960 what you're really saying is judges get to decide what the Constitution means. 302 00:26:04.960 --> 00:26:10.960 It means that a judge in 1944 can say, well, up till now we've interpreted this clause this way, 303 00:26:10.960 --> 00:26:12.960 but I now interpret it that way. 304 00:26:12.960 --> 00:26:16.960 Nobody knew it was going to be interpreted this way until I said it, 305 00:26:16.960 --> 00:26:18.960 and you're all stuck in this Constitution. 306 00:26:18.960 --> 00:26:23.960 Well, you know, that is the sort of thing that would have given somebody like Thomas Jefferson pause. 307 00:26:23.960 --> 00:26:25.960 Somebody like Jefferson would not have said, 308 00:26:25.960 --> 00:26:28.960 the Constitution can never be changed in any way. 309 00:26:28.960 --> 00:26:30.960 It is holy writ come down from heaven. 310 00:26:30.960 --> 00:26:32.960 He would not have said that. 311 00:26:32.960 --> 00:26:35.960 What he would have said is that if there's something you want to change, 312 00:26:35.960 --> 00:26:38.960 then you do so through the process that we've inserted in that document, 313 00:26:38.960 --> 00:26:40.960 namely the amendment process. 314 00:26:40.960 --> 00:26:42.960 The worst thing you can do is simply say, 315 00:26:42.960 --> 00:26:45.960 well, gosh, we'd sure like to do X, Y or Z, 316 00:26:45.960 --> 00:26:50.960 Jefferson said that if you do that, you may as well have a blank piece of paper for a constitution. 317 00:26:50.960 --> 00:26:52.960 What's the point of having one? 318 00:26:52.960 --> 00:26:58.960 What I want to suggest is that the colonial period, in effect, helps us to appreciate this point. 319 00:26:58.960 --> 00:27:02.960 Because when we look at the relationship between the colonies and Britain, 320 00:27:02.960 --> 00:27:05.960 particularly from the 1760s onward, here's what we see. 321 00:27:05.960 --> 00:27:10.960 We see that up until that period, with the exception of the colonial period, 322 00:27:10.960 --> 00:27:16.160 1760s onward. Here's what we see. We see that up until that period, with the exception of the 323 00:27:16.160 --> 00:27:20.400 Dominion of New England and a few minor exceptions here and there, the colonies have more or less 324 00:27:20.400 --> 00:27:25.840 been allowed to govern themselves. The 1760s come along and the British government, which is in 325 00:27:25.840 --> 00:27:31.040 tremendous debt at the time because of the French and Indian War, turns to the colonies looking for 326 00:27:31.040 --> 00:27:36.000 revenue. Now you all know this and they began to impose more regulations on the colonies and they 327 00:27:36.000 --> 00:27:41.680 and begin to impose acts that seem to violate the tradition of local self-government among the colonies. 328 00:27:41.680 --> 00:27:46.920 The colonies had levied their own taxes and they had governed themselves variously. 329 00:27:46.920 --> 00:27:52.800 Now, all of a sudden, it's being demanded of them that they pay this or that direct tax, 330 00:27:52.800 --> 00:27:57.360 that they do this and that, that if they're suspected of violating one of these tax acts, 331 00:27:57.360 --> 00:28:01.440 that they are presumed guilty and they are not entitled to a jury trial. 332 00:28:01.440 --> 00:28:04.880 That was the case under the Sugar Act of 1764. 333 00:28:04.880 --> 00:28:09.360 So there are all kinds of things that British began doing in the 1760s, that from a traditional 334 00:28:09.360 --> 00:28:15.120 British point of view seemed to violate, well, traditional liberties. 335 00:28:15.120 --> 00:28:17.900 Well the colonial position pretty much is this. 336 00:28:17.900 --> 00:28:22.940 They argue that if the British do something that violates tradition, that is just out 337 00:28:22.940 --> 00:28:28.600 of the blue, that has no roots in the British past, then that is unconstitutional. 338 00:28:28.600 --> 00:28:31.960 Now when the colonists say unconstitutional, obviously they don't mean the U.S. Constitution 339 00:28:31.960 --> 00:28:58.960 The British Constitution is technically not a written document. It's a collection of customary practices, traditional liberties, some documents, the Magna Carta would be considered to be part of the constitutional tradition, but there isn't any one document you can point to. You can't say that's unconstitutional because it violates Article 7. There is no Article 7. 340 00:28:58.960 --> 00:29:04.960 So the colonists, when they say something is unconstitutional, they mean it violates tradition, it breaks with tradition. 341 00:29:04.960 --> 00:29:10.960 Now the British response to this was, they thought that was kind of a quaint and cute little view, 342 00:29:10.960 --> 00:29:17.960 but by the 18th century in Britain, the mainstream view was that if Parliament proposes something, then that makes it constitutional. 343 00:29:17.960 --> 00:29:22.960 If Parliament approves of something, then it's automatically constitutional because Parliament said so. 344 00:29:22.960 --> 00:29:29.960 And so the colonists and the British had a fundamental disagreement with each other about the nature of the British Constitution. 345 00:29:29.960 --> 00:29:34.960 The colonists argued that if something violated tradition, it violated the British Constitution, ipso facto. 346 00:29:34.960 --> 00:29:38.960 The British argued that if we say it's constitutional, then it is. 347 00:29:38.960 --> 00:29:42.960 This kind of sounds familiar, a little bit like what our Supreme Court does all the time, right? 348 00:29:42.960 --> 00:29:46.960 Well, wait a minute, I didn't think that the Constitution meant this. Well, we say it does, and that's the end. 349 00:29:46.960 --> 00:29:49.960 Well, in effect, that's what the dispute was about. 350 00:29:49.960 --> 00:30:08.960 In 1761 there was a dispute in Massachusetts involving the general writs of assistance, which were general search warrants that were pretty much granted to British officials at the drop of a hat to search your home or your warehouse for contraband, for goods you'd smuggled in and so on. 351 00:30:08.960 --> 00:30:13.960 And what's interesting is that the colonies opposed these writs of assistance for two main reasons. 352 00:30:13.960 --> 00:30:18.960 One, they're all guilty. They've got tons of contraband in their houses. Of course they don't want you to go in and look around. 353 00:30:18.960 --> 00:30:23.360 But secondly, on these grounds, that when in the world, in the history of Britain, 354 00:30:23.360 --> 00:30:27.960 has the government invaded our privacy in this way, it's a violation of tradition. 355 00:30:27.960 --> 00:30:31.960 It's an innovation. And when they said innovation, that was not a compliment. 356 00:30:31.960 --> 00:30:34.960 And innovation is something we need to take note of. 357 00:30:34.960 --> 00:30:39.560 Their argument was that the government must be restrained by tradition. 358 00:30:39.560 --> 00:30:41.960 This is an old medieval view. 359 00:30:41.960 --> 00:30:45.960 The idea of the medieval king was not that he could simply do whatever, 360 00:30:45.960 --> 00:30:50.660 Act, however, his whims dictated, but that he was subject to tradition. 361 00:30:50.660 --> 00:30:53.860 He had his certain customary rights, but beyond that he could not go. 362 00:30:53.860 --> 00:30:56.560 That was the colonial view of the British government. 363 00:30:56.560 --> 00:30:59.060 And so these writs of assistance violate tradition. 364 00:30:59.060 --> 00:31:03.160 And the colonial lawyer James Otis got up and argued in Massachusetts that a man, 365 00:31:03.160 --> 00:31:05.860 he actually said, a man's home is his castle. 366 00:31:05.860 --> 00:31:07.960 Sort of reminds me of Ralph Crandon. 367 00:31:07.960 --> 00:31:10.460 In this castle, I'm the king, Alice. 368 00:31:10.460 --> 00:31:13.260 Well, in any event, a man's home is his castle, 369 00:31:13.260 --> 00:31:21.260 and the British do not have this right traditionally to violate my liberty to be free of unreasonable searches and this sort of thing. 370 00:31:21.260 --> 00:31:24.260 Well that's the nature of the argument, that's the nature of the dispute between them. 371 00:31:24.260 --> 00:31:29.260 The British view we might even call legal positivism and if I may oversimplify this a bit, 372 00:31:29.260 --> 00:31:37.260 legal positivism in effect says that the legislator does not have to give a reckoning as to why he's made the law the way it is. 373 00:31:37.260 --> 00:31:41.260 If the law is a certain way then that's all there is to it, you can't judge the law. 374 00:31:41.260 --> 00:31:46.780 Law. No institution can stand in judgment of the law. So for instance, when I was growing 375 00:31:46.780 --> 00:31:50.260 up and my mother would say, okay, it's nine o'clock time for bed, you know, let's say 376 00:31:50.260 --> 00:31:56.500 I was, I don't know what age that was, 17 maybe, I don't know what age that was, young. 377 00:31:56.500 --> 00:32:02.420 But I would say, I would say, well, why? Why do I have to go to bed? And what was her answer? 378 00:32:02.420 --> 00:32:06.860 Because I said so. Because I'm the mother. Well, that's legal positivism. I don't need 379 00:32:06.860 --> 00:32:10.660 to give you any reckoning of this. You don't have any leg to stand on. You don't have any 380 00:32:10.660 --> 00:32:12.260 Alternative Tradition to Appeal to. 381 00:32:12.260 --> 00:32:13.460 I couldn't have said to her, 382 00:32:13.460 --> 00:32:16.180 well mom, I believe that your bedtime, 383 00:32:16.180 --> 00:32:18.900 it violates longstanding tradition in this household 384 00:32:18.900 --> 00:32:20.720 and so I'm not going to stand for it. 385 00:32:20.720 --> 00:32:24.060 Or I believe that your bedtime violates 386 00:32:24.060 --> 00:32:26.300 traditional Christian principles. 387 00:32:26.300 --> 00:32:27.820 Well, that would have just made it worse. 388 00:32:27.820 --> 00:32:28.660 Let's just put it that way. 389 00:32:28.660 --> 00:32:30.660 If I tried to argue on those, it would have just made it worse. 390 00:32:30.660 --> 00:32:33.020 I'm going to bed at 8.30 at that point. 391 00:32:33.020 --> 00:32:35.860 So in effect, if you were to say to a legal positivist, 392 00:32:35.860 --> 00:32:37.580 well, I'm not going to obey such and such a law 393 00:32:37.580 --> 00:32:46.740 Law, because a higher law, in effect, like Antigone, exactly right, the example of Antigone, 394 00:32:46.740 --> 00:32:51.220 the king says I'm not supposed to bury my brother, but there's a higher law involved 395 00:32:51.220 --> 00:32:56.680 in kinship that says that I owe him this filial obligation of burying his body, not just allowing 396 00:32:56.680 --> 00:33:03.520 it to rot and be eaten. That's legal positivism. Legal positivism is the idea that you have 397 00:33:03.520 --> 00:33:12.520 And so, if the colonists are saying that British activities violate tradition, well, they're doing something the British consider to be illegitimate. 398 00:33:12.520 --> 00:33:17.520 They're taking some outside institution, namely tradition, and using it to judge the law. 399 00:33:17.520 --> 00:33:22.520 But a legal positivist would say, you can't judge the law. The law is what it is and live with it. 400 00:33:22.520 --> 00:33:30.520 So this is the nature of the dispute, and you see this repeatedly, that there is so much in the colonial idiom that is conservative. 401 00:33:30.520 --> 00:33:33.520 The colonists are saying the British are engaged in innovation. 402 00:33:33.520 --> 00:33:38.520 John Adams, when he's complaining about the Stamp Act, says this is an innovation. 403 00:33:38.520 --> 00:33:41.520 And again, that's not a compliment. It violates tradition. 404 00:33:41.520 --> 00:33:45.520 So that's when I say that the colonists were conservative. 405 00:33:45.520 --> 00:33:50.520 I mean it in that sense that they are distrustful of innovation. 406 00:33:50.520 --> 00:33:54.520 And what they want to do is just simply conserve the way they've been living up to about 1760, 407 00:33:54.520 --> 00:33:57.520 where they've been more or less left alone, 408 00:33:57.520 --> 00:34:00.760 where the British have abided by long-standing tradition. 409 00:34:00.760 --> 00:34:03.240 And in fact, the colonists were beginning to argue that, 410 00:34:03.240 --> 00:34:05.640 look, we've been over here for a century and a half 411 00:34:05.640 --> 00:34:07.720 and we've been governing ourselves. 412 00:34:07.720 --> 00:34:12.360 So our own self-government has become part of long-standing tradition. 413 00:34:12.360 --> 00:34:14.320 And so if you violate it, 414 00:34:14.320 --> 00:34:16.440 you are automatically violating the Constitution. 415 00:34:16.440 --> 00:34:19.040 So there is this fundamental constitutional dispute 416 00:34:19.040 --> 00:34:22.240 that seems difficult to see how you can resolve it. 417 00:34:22.240 --> 00:34:25.600 And in fact, of course, it did finally come to arms. 418 00:34:25.600 --> 00:34:29.600 Now, what does all this have to do with the living, breathing Constitution stuff? 419 00:34:29.600 --> 00:34:37.600 Well, this is my super-duper last point, and that is that when Jefferson advised in the 1790s 420 00:34:37.600 --> 00:34:42.600 that our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution, 421 00:34:42.600 --> 00:34:47.600 by, of course, the 1790s, the U.S. Constitution, which is written, had been drafted, 422 00:34:47.600 --> 00:34:51.600 and he warned Americans not to make it a blank paper by construction, 423 00:34:51.600 --> 00:34:54.600 by your own broad interpretation of it. 424 00:34:54.600 --> 00:34:58.600 This is the background we need to have in mind to understand these remarks. 425 00:34:58.600 --> 00:35:02.600 Again, the amendment process can be used if there's some defect in the Constitution. 426 00:35:02.600 --> 00:35:07.600 But simply to approve the exercise of federal powers that were never delegated to the federal government, 427 00:35:07.600 --> 00:35:12.600 just on the grounds that a really strained interpretation of the Constitution allows them, 428 00:35:12.600 --> 00:35:15.600 or the amendment process is too time consuming or cumbersome, 429 00:35:15.600 --> 00:35:18.600 you may as well have no written Constitution at all. 430 00:35:18.600 --> 00:35:20.600 You may as well go back to the British system, 431 00:35:20.600 --> 00:35:24.600 Where they have no written constitution and the constitution is whatever the government says it is. 432 00:35:24.600 --> 00:35:28.600 There's your living, breathing constitution. The constitution changes with the times. 433 00:35:28.600 --> 00:35:32.600 Unfortunately, it also means that the protections of your rights change with the times. 434 00:35:32.600 --> 00:35:35.600 Because who gets to decide what the constitution means today? 435 00:35:35.600 --> 00:35:42.600 Well, typically the government itself, the very institution that is supposed to be restrained by constitutions. 436 00:35:42.600 --> 00:35:48.600 Joseph Story, the great 19th century American jurist, himself said, 437 00:35:48.600 --> 00:36:03.600 Even though he believed in a fairly broad interpretation of the Constitution, he nevertheless said the Constitution must quote have a fixed, uniform, permanent construction, not dependent upon the passions or parties of particular times, but the same yesterday, today and forever. 438 00:36:03.600 --> 00:36:14.600 So the evolution of this unwritten British Constitution, the colonists learned, basically always seemed to move in the direction of more power for the British government and fewer liberties for the colonies and the people. 439 00:36:14.600 --> 00:36:19.600 The written American Constitution, on the other hand, was intended to say what it meant 440 00:36:19.600 --> 00:36:25.600 and not to allow for the kind of insidious evolution that the colonists had found so dangerous in the British Constitution 441 00:36:25.600 --> 00:36:28.600 whose authentic meaning had proven so hard to pin down. 442 00:36:28.600 --> 00:36:35.600 So Americans therefore gave their lives fighting against a living, breathing Constitution, 443 00:36:35.600 --> 00:36:39.600 which is a fact worth bearing in mind the next time such a thing is invoked. 444 00:36:39.600 --> 00:36:42.600 Okay, thank you for your kind attention, ladies and gentlemen.