← Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast
Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast
Kathleen O’Toole and Charles R. Kesler: The Declaration of Independence
00:39:21
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On the new episode of the Larry Arn Show, Hillsdale College President Larry Arn sits down with senior journalism fellow at Hillsdale College and Editor in Chief at the Federalist, Molly Hemingway, for a one on one conversation.
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You only have a self governing republic if you can trust the outcome of elections. Who's eligible to vote? How do you make sure that the people who are on your list of being eligible to vote are the voters themselves? What do you do to clean up a list? What are you doing to make sure people aren't registered? Multiple jurisdictions? What are you doing to ensure the integrity of control of the ballots? Is there custody of the ballots from the moment they're printed to the moment they're counted and beyond?
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Listen to this exclusive interview with Molly Hemingway right now, only available on the Larry Arn Show. Find it on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at Podcast hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio and subscribe to receive new episodes delivered right to your device. That's Podcast hillsdale. Edu.
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C
Welcome to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula and teacher led classrooms. Now your host, Scott Bertram.
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D
Thanks for listening. Today we hear a conversation between Dr. Kathleen O', Toole, Associate Vice President for K12 Education at Hillsdale College, and Dr. Charles Kessler, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute and Editor of the Claremont Review of books. Here's Dr. O'.
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Toole.
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C
Well, I am so pleased to be joined by Professor Charles Kessler, my teacher. Professor Kessler is a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute, the editor of the Claremont Review of Books, the host of Claremont's the American Mind video series, and a Distinguished professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. Charles, thanks for joining me.
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E
Well, I'm delighted to be in the presence of a former student, but an old friend. So glad to be here. Thank you.
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C
We are kind of old friends at this point, aren't we? Increasingly, that's how it goes, I guess. I guess. Well, happy semiquincentennial. I'm so pleased to have you because we get to talk about the Declaration of Independence, a subject about which you know a great deal.
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E
Well, thank you. Happy to be here and to discuss a great document. I, I should say that how to exactly to translate the semi quincentennial is itself an interesting question. I mean, literally it's half of 500 years, the Latin. But I have friends who insist that we should call it the Quarter Millennial, which seems to me too optimistic you know, I mean, a thousand year republic would be a very long lived republic if we turn out to be that. And I of course hope we would. But you know, the Romans only managed about 500 years and it was a pretty touch and go for the last hundred of them. So. And they sort of are the famously most long lived republic before us. And so, you know, a quarter millennial is kind of out there. I say, I would say if we make it that long, half of 500 is more modest.
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C
Yeah, right. If we make it that long, it will be because we have principles at the beginning of our founding, as Publius says, we are not the product of accident and force, but the product of reflection and choice. And as you taught me and many others, it's in the Declaration that we get to see that political philosophy of the American founding most clearly and powerfully stated.
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E
Yes, and it's not. Many countries have a beginning like ours, a documentary beginning, and not only just a, an impressive founding document, but a document that founds a whole genre of documents. There was never a Declaration of Independence before ours. There have been hundreds since, especially in the 20th century, as former colonies declare their independence in Africa, in Asia and other places all around the globe. Many of them imitated or maybe emulated the American Declaration of Independence and composed one for themselves. So what was something unique is now in a way a standard for a whole category of diplomatic communications.
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C
Yeah, this Declaration is. I don't know about the others, but it seems like this one touches something eternal and it aims to do that. It wants to state something not just about why we Americans are separating ourselves from those British right now, but something about the nature of man and why these eternal truths about the nature of man require us to do that.
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E
Yes, and also why some potential allies of ours might want to join us in this just war for independence against the British Empire. And so the Declaration of Independence is a diplomatic document addressed to the world, but it's also very much a domestic political document addressed to Americans, because Americans have to know what they're fighting for. This is a declaration of war, after all, in many terms, in many ways. And so you can't really have government by the consent of the governed or republican government, unless the people have an informed opinion about what policy is and why this policy has been adopted. And that's what the Declaration strives to, to do and why it, you know, written very carefully by Thomas Jefferson, of course, mostly as the principal writer, but a very high powered committee of five drew it up officially and, you know, three geniuses were three of five, which is pretty good, were sort of certifiable political heroes and geniuses of the American Revolution. Even then. You had John Adams, and you had Benjamin Franklin as well as Thomas Jefferson, all on this subcommittee of five to draw up a draft Declaration of Independence, which is often said to be an expression of Thomas Jefferson's political beliefs, which, of course it was. But that wasn't his job. His job was not to express why he was in favor of independence. It was to express why the Convention was taking this vote. It had the power to decide it, and it did. And he had to write as a draftsman for the Second Continental Congress. So nothing too personal to Jefferson survives in this Declaration, I guess you could say. There are certainly elements of it that are colored by him and his gifts, but it wasn't meant to be his document. It was meant to be America's.
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C
When you teach the Declaration of Independence, what method do you use? How do you draw out for students the meaning, especially of the first few paragraphs, which contain these eternal truths?
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E
Yes. Well, it's the only method that I use, if you can call it a method, is close reading, you know, and questioning every sentence, every word that was selected to go into the Declaration. I would say that in teaching the Declaration, that's the way to go, because you need to show contemporary students that it's not antiquated, that the issues raised in it are still very alive and very essential to political life, and that we. To have an opinion about them, an informed opinion about them, is still a kind of prerequisite of citizenship to be an American. And so there's a lot at stake in it. Practically, when you teach the Declaration, I'd say there are. There's one problem which immediately appears, which is if you proceed slowly and carefully and you don't have forever in which to teach this document, you will end up spending almost all your time on the first two paragraphs, and particularly the second paragraph. You'll never get to the long middle section, which is the indictment of George iii. He did this, he did that, or did not do this, or did not do that. And you won't get. If you're not careful, you won't even get to the final paragraph, which is the Great Peroration and which has been sort of forecast at several earlier points in the document, and without which the document is not really complete. You don't get the actual Declaration of Independence till the very end. And so you have to. As a teacher, you have to pace yourself, and you will be tempted to dwell incessantly on the first two paragraphs, and you have to do justice to them, but you have to try to get to the end of the Declaration as well, and that may you meet, you need to husband your time wisely. That's. I find often, you know, to the extent I have regrets when I teach the Declaration, it's that I probably spent too much time at the beginning and skipped too rapidly through the rest of it.
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C
Yeah, I have had the same problem myself. Yeah, that second paragraph.
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No, and it is. It's, you know, classic, and it's fundamental. And so all the time you spend with it is, in one sense, certainly justified and called for. But on the. On the other hand, you know, there's a lot of history in addition to the theory, you might say, in the Declaration of Independence, and there's a lot of prudential decision making, you know, and it's useful. The Declaration is useful not only because it does give you a classic statement of the sort of the philosophy of free government or republican government, but also because it shows that government in action, making decisions about war and peace and justifying them to a national and an international audience. And so we want to try to understand the practical side of it as well as the more theoretical side.
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C
The Declaration begins with a statement about equality. What kind of equality does the Declaration say we have as fellow citizens of this new country?
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Yes. Well, even before that, as human beings, we have a natural equality. And another temptation of teaching the Declaration, which was never my temptation, but it does afflict a fair number of people, is to run away from these ringing phrases at the beginning of the second paragraph, the ones to which you're pointing right now, rather than confronting them and taking them seriously. So the Declaration says, you know, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So each clause, each part of that sentence is interesting. We hold these truths. Where do you put the emphasis in that sentence? Is it on we? You know, we, this group, hold these truths? Is it on hold? You know, we really, really believe in these things, even if you don't. But we really believe in them. We hold these truths. Why these, not others, to be self evident? And of course, that's the big. That's the $9,000 question or $90,000 question. What does it mean to say that a truth is self evident? And there's no reason to duck that question or to elide it by saying well, we hold these truths to be self evident means we really, really believe in these truths. That's all it really means. That's all we're claiming. You, your society, benighted as it is, may not believe in them, but that's, you know, different strokes for different folks. We are lucky enough to believe in them, and as a result we've written this Declaration. But self evident really means more than that in logic and in, you know, the history of logic, which history of philosophy with which the Declaration's writers were quite familiar. A self evident truth is, is a very specific thing. It's a truth in which the, the meaning of the predicate is expressed in the subject. So we hold these truths means when you say, or let's say, all men are created equal is a self evident truth, because in the notion of all men already, the idea of created equal is assumed. It's expressed in the subject before you even get to the predicate.
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C
To say all men is to say that they are equal.
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Yes, exactly equal in their status as human beings. We're all equally human. That's in effect what that means. And of course, that raises the question, what does it mean to be human? And that is a question which the Declaration has a lot to say about, but which common sense also is obviously an authority. We're not cats, we're not dogs, we're not trees, we're not rocks. We're humans. And that means we understand what common nouns are. We make sentences, we make arguments, and we have a kind of moral openness or consciousness to us by which we recognize that you shouldn't. Eventually, at least, we recognize that you shouldn't treat human beings as if they were dogs or as if they were not human beings, but something lower or this doesn't happen as often, something higher than human beings. You can't make a God out of human beings or treat them, you know, give them the perquisites and the power that one would give to a divine being or the divine being. All that is argued in those opening propositions. And we get rights. You know, all goldfish are created equal too. They're equally goldfish, but goldfish don't have the power of reasoning that humans do. And therefore they don't have the capacity to hold moral rights and duties in the same way that human beings have to hold concepts of rights and duties. We don't have government by nature, unlike a beehive, let's say, bees are very social and very political in their own way, but human beings have to make our own governments that's where consent comes in later in this paragraph in the Declaration of Independence. So if you read some good. And there are a lot of good treatments of the Declaration of Independence in recent historical and philosophical sources, it's easy to teach and it is very gratifying to teach. And so I encourage all of those teachers listening to don't give up. If you find it difficult, persevere. And I think you'll find it extremely rewarding.
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It's very helpful, I've found, for understanding the Constitution, for understanding other things that I've read from the American founding, to have this statement about human nature, the relationship between citizens and government, the relationship between our natural rights and the rights that we have as citizens. It's very helpful to have all of that framework in mind. How should we think about the Declaration with respect to the Constitution? There's sort of two sides of the same coin.
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No, that's right. And you know, the Declaration one could think of as setting the ends of our politics. And the Constitution is an attempt to craft the means to those ends. And it's a difficult task. We failed once. I mean, in the same Continental Congress that considered the Declaration, the committee to write the first American Constitution, the Articles of Confederation was also appointed, one delegate per state. And it wasn't until 1777 that that that the Articles were reported out of Congress. It wasn't until 1781 that the articles were ratified and they became the first sort of Constitution of the United States. But famously, it didn't last very long. It was approved in 1781. It was under replacement by 1787, 88, when the Philadelphia Convention met to write the new Constitution. And so when we think of the Constitution, we sort of are embarrassed to remember that there was a previous one that failed. We like to think, you know, that only French republics fail and have to be numbered as. As they are. But in fact, America's first attempt didn't go so well. And why it didn't go so well is one of the great themes of the Federalist and of the debate in 1787 and 88 over the wisdom of adopting a new Constitution. And it isn't. It turns out experience and thoughtfulness are even are. Are needed to make a Constitution well and to make it work. And fulfilling the commandments of the Declaration are not as. That's. That task is not as straightforward or as uncontroversial as you might think. And the political history of America in the 1780s shows you how rare it is to answer those questions well. And in a way that will last. And then the political history of the 1790s shows you, even after you've succeeded, how controversial the actions can be. I mean, we have rarely had more bitter partisan warfare in American history than we had in the 1790s between the. The Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans. And these were, you know, former bosom buddies and political friends like Madison and Hamilton, 2, the two main authors of the Federalists, who concluded that work in 1788. By 1791, they were, you know, very stark partisan foes. So. And it isn't that something went wrong exactly. It's that the business of self government is tough and requires foresight and compromise and political skills which don't spring up just by nature. It requires a certain kind of education to find them and to shape them.
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Hmm. Speaking of that, what did the founders think about the education that would be necessary of the citizens? It seems to me that this effort to put thought and political philosophy into the founding asks a lot of the people who are going to populate this country and lead this country. What consensus was there, if any, among the founders about what the citizens were going to have to do?
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There was a wide and a deep consensus that without education, without information and the habits that go with information, the habits of reflection and of course, choice, you can't sustain a republican government because the. In our kind of a republican government at least, that means there's no hereditary aristocracy, there's no monarch, there's no one to save the people from themselves. The people really are, in the final analysis, the government. And the burden is therefore on us to strengthen ourselves and prepare ourselves through a certain kind of education which America helps to invent. Public education, common schools and so forth, those are almost an American creation. But we also had many private schools and a deep tradition of private education in the country. And the two together made America one of the most highly educated societies in the world, even though we were still a frontier country. But we, precisely because we were traveling through the woods to, you know, land and to spread the influence of the government and of science and learning, education was even more necessary for us. Without education, we would just have been, you know, barbarians spreading westward, but really not citizens and not free people because we weren't prepared for our own freedom.
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I want to ask you about a question that many teachers will have about the Declaration of Independence and an obstacle in teaching. It states, all men are created equal. And it was written by Thomas Jefferson, among others, but drafted initially by him, and then I think he probably went back to his home and discovered his slaves. So how are we to understand this paradox? And what is the appropriate response of a citizen to this seeming incompatibility between what Jefferson is writing and what he is doing?
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E
Well, that's a great question, of course, and a very necessary question to raise. There are different ways one can approach it. One way is to read the original draft of the declaration, which Jefferson himself wrote out, which contains a long paragraph on the slave trade, slavery, which was taken out in the editorial process by the second continental Congress. You can find this missing paragraph, this stricken paragraph in, you know, most books on the declaration of independence and most many editions of the declaration of independence mention it as well. This is what it said, the paragraph that was struck out. Let's see. Oh, he. He has waged. This is. Begins with he, because it's in that central. At the end of that central section indicting George iii. He has waged, writes Jefferson, cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where men, capital M, capital E, capital N, where men should be bought and sold. He has prostituted his negative, his royal veto by suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. Okay, I'll stop there. But notice what Jefferson says, indeed, in capital letters, that the slaves are men. That is, they're not male men. They're human beings. And the fact that they are black has nothing to do with their humanity or with the sacred rights of life and liberty that they possess. And slavery is a violation of those rights. From the very beginning, he's complaining in this paragraph, Jefferson, is that the states or the colonies before the revolution had made requests of the British to stop slavery or the importation of new slaves, which the king of Great Britain had disallowed by using his royal veto, which is something that. The royal veto hadn't been used in England since the time of queen Anne, but it was a regular part of the management of the colonies by the. Part of the British administration. And one of the things the king vetoed was our own attempts to stop the further importation of slaves. And so Jefferson accuses him of this, you know, misadministration, this sin against good government, which is also a sin against human rights. There's no doubt from what Jefferson wrote and the committee approved, though the Continental Congress declined to approve it. There's no doubt that he and Adams and Franklin and the rest of the committee thought that slaves were human beings, that they had rights to freedom and life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which were in principle and in reality denied and erased by the institution of slavery. And that slavery was, in other words, a great moral evil. What to do about slavery now that it's here is of course, the huge stumbling block for America and the young American nation. And it was not an easy question to answer because it involved many, many interests. It was part. You couldn't run the south and its economy without slavery. Everyone thought, or almost everyone thought. But it didn't lessen the moral crime of slavery, that it was practically indispensable over large parts of the country. And slaveholders like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and George Washington were all aware of the sinfulness of slavery. They never said anything really to the contrary. They never defended the justice of slavery. They defended the necessity of slavery here and now in the world in which they lived and in the political world in which self government was possible in the 18th century in America. But as we know, George Washington in his will, freed all of his slaves as soon as his wife agreed to it or died. He didn't want her to be left, you know, bereft at Mount Vernon. But she began to free the slaves before her death. And Washington provided for the education of the children of slaves and indeed of the younger slaves on his dime once the process of emancipation had begun. So he was doing what he could in his personal life to atone for that slavery. Jefferson, you know, died bankrupt. And so his. He could not free his slaves as a practical matter, because he didn't own them anymore. They were sold off along with the furniture and the, you know, the, the Monticello's, the building of Mont. That we call Monticello, to pay his debts after he died, which is a tragic thing. And it's an additional moral indictment, you might say, of the way Jefferson conducted his life. But it doesn't change the fact that he would have liked to have freed them if he could have freed them. And then there were, of course, founders who never owned slaves, like Alexander Hamilton, like John Adams, and who condemned the practice more critically and more openly perhaps, than the Virginians did. But it's a good thing to remember, alongside the crystalline clarity and purity of the morals of the Declaration of Independence, that even when even domestically, it was very difficult to live up to those principles. And slavery was in fact A continuing contradiction of all the principles, all of the truths that the Declaration sets out. But, you know, politics is. Builds on morality, but it's not morality itself. It's very hard to do the right thing in politics, especially when there are so many interests and established institutions that require special compromises or cures which are not always forthcoming.
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C
When slavery was eventually abolished after the Civil War, in Lincoln's presidency, he relied on the text of the Declaration.
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Yes. And one thing we should keep in mind is that, you know, there had never. Slavery had existed, of course, throughout human civilization. But what is less well known is that there never was an organized movement to abolish slavery as an institution until, roughly speaking, the time of the Declaration of independence, late 18th century and 19th century. These are the periods when abolition societies were born, when religion, led by the Quakers in most cases on this question, turned its attention to the sinfulness of slavery and to the solution of abolishing slavery. But there was never such a thing really as a public movement to abolish slavery until very late in human history. And the Declaration is part of the story of the rejection of slavery, which really, you know, the ball gets rolling right at about the time of the Declaration of Independence, and it gains momentum as it rolls through the 19th century, but it still requires a great civil war to recapture that truth and to make it operational, you might say, in American society and in American government. But it is, you know, when you think back to ancient slavery, which of course, was a familiar in history in historical terms to the Americans there, you know, Spartacus led a famous revolt of the slaves. But there was, it was not a revolt for the abolition of slavery. It was a revolt against. By slaves who didn't want to be slaves anymore, but they weren't. It wasn't a philanthropic exercise to free any other slaves. And in fact, many, you know, ancient slaves, as soon as they got their freedom, the first thing they did was purchase slaves. And they were experts, after all, in, in the practices needed for slavery. And they sort of put that to use, which is a very sad commentary on human nature. But if you wish to understand human nature, you should, you know, not eschew knowledge of that, of those facts.
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C
Yeah, that's right. That's very helpful, Charles, if we want to, if we want to learn more about Jefferson, the founders, their attitudes towards slavery, their thinking about slavery. What should we read?
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E
Well, we're blessed because there are a lot of good books that one could recommend. Let me. I'll just sort of randomly throw out some names. You could begin with Matt Spalding's new book about the Declaration of Independence, which is just coming out from Encounter Books. It's very well written, very clear, and marvelously illuminating, I think. And if I could only.
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C
Making of the American Mind.
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The Making of the American Mind.
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D
Thank you.
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I was blanking on the title. It's a very good book. There is Harry Jaffa, his book how to Understand the American Revolution, which came out several decades ago, but is a kind of classic, argumentative account of the American founding and its principles and its implications. Danielle Allen has a book which is based on a close reading of the Declaration called Our Declaration. She teaches at Harvard and does, I think, a good job of speaking to contemporary students and readers of the Declaration, engaging them in her pursuit of the meaning of the document, and I would certainly recommend that. And then, as far as the writing of the Declaration and the internal conflicts of the Committee, and especially the Congress in approving it, there is the old book by Carl Becker called simply the Declaration of A Study in Political Ideas, which is still in print. It came out originally in 1922. Beautifully written. Its scholarship is a little creaky now, but it's still one of the best volumes to quickly pick up what was going on in 1776. And then, 75 years after his book, we have another book on the writing of the Declaration of Independence, which much updated scholarship and including the discovery of many local documents that are sort of anticipations of the Declaration of Independence, and that's by Pauline, the late Pauline Mayer. M A I E R. Her book is called American Making the Declaration of Independence, and that came out in 1997.
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C
Well, thank you. I would expect no less. No less than a list of excellent books from the editor of the Claremont Review of Books.
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E
It's my job, as I like to say, not to read books. It's my job to review books, but I have read a few, and those are among the ones I recommend, certainly, to everyone.
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C
Well, let me add to that list one more piece, speaking of editing. Charles most recent piece on the Declaration is called Editing the Declaration. It's available online and also in a new book published by the American Enterprise Institute, and it contains some of this argument that he mentioned about understanding Jefferson's original intention for the Declaration by reading his original draft. There's much more in that piece than we talked about here, and it's kind of fascinating and helpful, particularly if you're interested in understanding Jefferson. Charles, it's been such a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you for the conversation.
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E
I'll see you in 250 more years.
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C
Stay tuned.
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D
Let us pray You've been listening to a conversation between Dr. Kathleen O', Toole, Associate Vice President for K12 Education at Hillsdale College, and Dr. Charles Kessler, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute and Editor at the Claremont Review of Books. Thank you for tuning in to the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast. I'm Scott Bertram. We invite you to like us on Facebook search for Hillsdale College K12 classical education. You also can follow us on Instagram hillsdalek12. That's Hillsdale K12 on Instagram. Thank you for listening to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio.