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- [00:00]
A
Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads go to libsynads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today. History as it happens it is the summer of 1776. June 12th to be exact. At the Constitutional Convention in the colony of Virginia, the delegates adopt the Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason. Its first section says that all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity, namely the enjoyment of life and liberty with the means of acquiring and possessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. Well, that does sound familiar, doesn't it? The following month, Thomas Jefferson would incorporate that language into what would become the most famous document in American history, the Declaration of Independence, with its soaring appeal that Americans as a nation had the same rights to self government as other nations of the earth. Egalitarian ideals and political ideas are what made the revolution revolutionary. Our 18th century founders were influenced by the history, literature and political thought of ancient Greece and Rome, their more immediate heritage of English liberties and Enlightenment rationalism as they came into conflict and then decided to overthrow or break from the existing order. Other ideas were important too, such as religion and interests, such as acquiring western lands shaped the colonists attitudes toward their faraway government. This is the second installment in my occasional series on America 250 the Ideas of the American Revolution. Between now and July, we're going to hear a lot about how great our country is, how great the Founders were, and how important those 18th century ideas still are to us as a people living in a free society. There's never a bad time to refamiliarize ourselves with this history, but now seems like a very good time to do it, as American democracy is in crisis. Historian Kate Carte teaches this subject at Southern Methodist University. She is the author most recently of Religion and the American Revolution An Imperial History. Kate Carte, welcome back to the show.
- [03:01]
B
It's wonderful to be here.
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A
It's about time I revisit the 18th century. I'm stuck in the present moment too often lately.
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B
There's always a good lesson to pull from the 18th century. It's a good place to hang out.
- [03:11]
A
What did you think of Ken Burns documentary? I trust you watched it.
- [03:15]
B
I didn't watch all of it, but I watched a bit. It was interesting to watch. And I think that, you know, there's just so much of a compelling story of events, narrative events to the coming of the revolution and then sort of moving through the military story. And I was really pleased that he gave close attention to all the populations that were on, that were on the continent, that were in the field of battle and in the political conversation at the time of the revolution, because I think that's something that had often been left out to the detriment of arguments. The people on the ground certainly were paying attention to all of those issues and so pulling them into the conversation was important, and I think he did that.
- [03:50]
A
So I shared with you an article by the great Jack Rakove, written for Washington Monthly with the headline what's Wrong with the American Revolution By Ken Burns. In this article he says that it's heavy on war, but not enough about ideas, egalitarian ideas and political ideas. Did you share that criticism?
- [04:13]
B
I certainly see his point. Burns was in many ways following kind of the direction that scholarship has gone in the last number of years. And there's been a real discussion about how and where ideas matter and how and where contingency matters. And contingency for historians means when are people responding to unpredictable events? When, when should we look at sort of a fine grained narrative and when should we pull back and see larger structures at play? Right. That's what we kind of shorthand as contingency. We have in the last, you know, 15 or 20 years really dug into the way that all of these different populations on the shaped a changing story. And in that conversation we've moved away from some of the questions we were asking in the 90s and before that about the way that ideological questions brought Americans, some Americans, to the point of revolution. So that conversation focuses on the 60s and early 70s before the war breaks out, and then the conversation on the other end of building the Constitution. You can pull those two conversations together as one story about what Americans expected from government and how they built their government. When you knit those two too closely together, you drop out the war. So there's a tension between those two ways of approaching the question.
- [05:33]
A
Yeah, well, there was a war and there was also a revolution. Didn't Benjamin Rush make that comment?
- [05:39]
B
Is the American Revolution the same thing as the Revolutionary War? How important is the military struggle against Britain? How important even is independence from Britain? To the core questions we want to ask about the revolutionary era. Right. Which might be questions about, you know, and this goes back to progressive historians in the early 20th century, is the question, who would rule Britain or Americans or who would rule at home? Which group of Americans? So those are different ways of asking the question. And they. And they take different sources and have different assumptions about how united people were. Right. So we ask those questions differently at different times.
- [06:14]
A
So I can't say I'm up on the historiography, how it's evolved over the decades as you are, but to me, I mean, ideas here are essential. The ferment at the time is essential to understanding why the American Revolution happened and why it was fought and why the break was made. I mean, these ideas animate the American experience. We're living with them today. The role of government, the role of the citizen, rather than being the subject of a monarch having rights, all of that, when you shortchange the ideas, you kind of do lose out on. Well, the first question I'm going to ask you, Kate Carte, what made the American Revolution revolutionary?
- [06:52]
B
Oh, that's a great question. And I have to start by saying there are people who argue that we shouldn't call it a revolution, that we should call it a civil war.
- [06:59]
A
So it a revolution because it did overthrow the existing order.
- [07:03]
B
But even within that. So it's part of what we consider the age of revolutions. And, you know, classically, R.R. palmer wrote this book called, you know, the Age of His. He called it the Age of Democratic Revolutions. In that book, he takes great pains to look at the American Revolution and the French Revolution in particular. You know, the introduction to it goes to a great length to explain why these revolutions were different from the bugaboo he was worried about in the 50s. Right. Which is the Russian Revolution. Then there are other scholars who, when they're talking about revolution, really want to look at internal social change. It's off with their heads. It's the pitchforks. Right. What is the moment where the oppressed rise up against their leaders, and then they want to talk about the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution and, you know, maybe the Iranian Revolution. Right. So different set of stories. The American Revolution and the Haitian Revolution is Also, I think a really important one and part of that story too, right? The American Revolution is really awkward in that story because the American Revolution does not see the kind of financially based violence, economically based violence. It's not a revolution of the lower class against the upper class or the ruled against the local rulers. Although there is a lot of social violence in the revolution. I don't want to underplay that.
- [08:15]
A
A lot of property was destroyed too.
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B
Property was destroyed by both sides. It wasn't sort of a targeted, let's.
- [08:21]
A
Burn down the wealthy wasn't a Marxist revolution.
- [08:25]
B
It was not a Marxist revolution. And it's always awkward to talk about Marxism. Before Marx, they didn't have that language. They couldn't have articulated that way because he hadn't lived yet. So there are real questions about how the American Revolution fits into our understanding of what is a revolution. I think the American Revolution belongs in the age of revolutions because it starts that chain of events. And even though in many ways it was more conservative socially, many of its leaders were more socially conservative. They did a lot to protect property and their own property in particular. Even though all of that is true, they embraced its leaders, embraced and trafficked in ideas that then go other places and have other consequences in other places.
- [09:09]
A
Gordon Wood has argued, as have others, that it was radical in some ways.
- [09:13]
B
Yeah, that's an interesting book, and it makes an interesting argument.
- [09:17]
A
The fundamental change between at that time and this is all new, right? You're no longer a subject. You're a citizen with rights.
- [09:25]
B
Well, I mean, citizenship goes back to the classical era. Right. So Americans didn't invent citizenship. There is something really new about the nation in the early modern era. Right. So the creation of a nation from peasants into Frenchmen is the classic argument there. Right. So it happens in other places also. But in the United States, for example, first this idea that people should invest in this political structure, this national political structure, right. That goes beyond their sort of local historic governments, and then that they should invest it with ideals and feel a sense of commonality with people who are at a great distance from them. Right. And there's all kinds of theory about how that develops. I think that's revolutionary and new. When Wood talks about the radicalism of the revolution, what he's talking about is a kind of decline of deference and social leveling. The problem with that argument is that it really underplays how much the nation that develops, that builds the United States. And it's an older argument. I think he wrote that book in 92. The nation was built on ideas of who could be in the nation and who couldn't. You know, you just cannot walk away from the fact that indigenous people are not offered citizenship, are not allowed in, and they're perpetuating racialized slavery. Right. So there's a clear sense of who can be in this nation and who can't. So the leveling is happening within a narrow range.
- [10:50]
A
Sure. Although you can argue the American Revolution gave birth to the anti slavery movement.
- [10:56]
B
Absolutely. My wonderful colleague Ed Countryman used to say that no matter how conservative the American Revolution was, slavery was no more secure. Atlantic slavery was no more secure than it was in, say, 1760. By 1780, that whole world has been rocked. Even though the United States digs in on protecting slavery, that world has been rocked.
- [11:18]
A
So how do you teach it then? Because, you know, I've talked to a number of historians who don't think that Gordon Wood book, the one from the early 90s, is that great. They like his other book that I hold in my hands right here, the Creation of the American Republic. But how does Professor Cartay teach this, that it was a conservative revolution?
- [11:36]
B
So how you frame the narrative really matters. There's the question of when does the revolutionary moment start and when we're digging into those ideas that animate the leaders of the revolution. Right. So we're talking a very narrow group of people. When we're digging into those ideas, we're digging into. We can go back into the 1760s, in some ways even earlier. Right. And we can look at political philosophy and we can see that this group of leaders comes to believe that the British government is tyrannical and can't be trusted. And Gordon woods and Bernard Rayland's work is like, it's really good there in helping us understand how that, how that came to pass. Then there's a separate question. So that's how did a particular group of people get politicized? But we have to ask, how influential was that group of people? What made those people influential? And there I'm going to follow another great historian, Mary Beth Norton, and I'm going to say she wrote a book called 1774.
- [12:26]
A
I've got it here. I haven't read it yet.
- [12:28]
B
The events that follow the Boston Tea Party. And of course, those guys are instrumental in organizing the Boston Tea Party. The events that follow the Boston Tea Party and the British government's choice to respond. They debate coercive versus conciliatory measures. Those are their names for it. And then they respond with coercive measures. The Colonies must be brought to heel. When that happens, it changes the game completely. And you politicize an entirely different group of people, huge group of people. And then you have Lexington and Concord, you get even more people snowballing. Right. But we don't have any particular reason to believe that all of those people who Join in in 1774, 1770, are on board with the same project that those earlier people were thinking about. They have different reasons for joining in. You have to remember that when revolutions start or when war starts, the people who start it don't control the outcome. Events control the outcome. Sometimes those are battlefield events, sometimes those are other kinds of, you know, economic changes, all kinds of things.
- [13:25]
A
International chaos.
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B
Right. Just war.
- [13:28]
A
The French helping us or not helping us.
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B
Exactly. All of those things really, really matter. So the people who are in the conversation and the kind of conversations that people are having in 1787, right. When they're drafting the Constitution, like so the last act of this story, those people have lived through a whole lot of things that people who were starting to upset the apple cart in 1765 with the stamp act crisis. Someone like John Adams, who's in there from the beginning. Right. Those conversations have really changed. So we have to make sure we bring in all of those conversations. We don't want to draw a neat line from one to the other. We want to remember that they've had to do things along the way, including drop out. Serious discussions of abolition. There are people early on who want to talk about abolition. That's a no go if you want the south to go. So that conversation drops out. That's a consequence of the way the war unfolds.
- [14:21]
A
Our revolution did end, although these ideas are still very much alive and we're still trying to perfect our union. The American experiment in democracy doesn't reach an end point where you finally solved all the problems. Right. It goes on, but that doesn't mean the revolution did not end. I think that's maybe what you're getting at there with the writing of the Constitution was to consolidate the gains that were made, but then to put a lid on some of the ferment, like the abolitionist movement not ready for abolition in 1789 or whatever.
- [14:49]
B
Or economic liberalism. Right, Economic. So there were Shays Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion. There were a number of people who believed that they fought the rev in order to gain economic equality. The lower class people who were pulled in who were fighting for economic equality. The post revolutionary period, that story comes to an end.
- [15:09]
A
I need to correct what I just said. Sorry to interrupt, Kate, but I said not ready for abolition. Although the states, the Northern states, begin the process of getting rid of slavery. That was huge.
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B
Yes.
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A
If Sean Wilentz had heard me shortchange the early emancipation, was it called delayed emancipation? Gradual emancipation would have been very unhappy with me. Talk about ideas, then, because what may be audible at a certain level of society, as you said, there are many different reasons why people fought, picked up guns when they reached the tipping point and aim those guns at the redcoats. Ideas that might be driving people like George Mason and Thomas Jefferson of the Enlightenment may not be audible at a different level in society among, say, your average farmer or shoemaker or whoever. You wrote a book, you were on my show a couple years ago to discuss it, about religion in the American Revolution. How important was Christian belief in driving people to take up arms or to throw off the yoke of monarchy?
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B
It's a mixed bag, right. Because people who were reading the Bible, and these would be Protestants, biblically literate Protestants, which is a segment of the people, not all of them. Right. Those people who were choosing to look to biblical authority to understand what was going on had mixed examples. And loyalists and patriots offered both sides of the argument. The Bible provides strong arguments for why you should follow constituted authority, even when it's unjust. Right. And then the Bible also offers examples of unjust kings who are punished, of republics. It's an open conversation. So religion becomes a language through which people argue about it, and then individuals or communities are picking based on what makes sense most strongly within their community. But there isn't one Christian response or one Protestant response to the revolution that troubled them.
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A
But I thought we were founded as a Christian nation. Oh, no, not that one.
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B
I wouldn't go there.
- [17:05]
A
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's out there, of course. And you're going to hear a lot of that nonsense with America 250 this year, depending on who. Who's doing the celebrating. But if you want to tackle that here, the Ken Burns documentary does get into deism a little bit. Our most important founders, or many of our most important founders, are nominally Christian, are not Christian at all, and we're not trying to found some Christian nation. Right.
- [17:28]
B
So I think what's really impressive about the framers of the Constitution, but also some of the earlier leaders who weren't necessarily at the Constitutional Convention. You know, people like Jefferson, what's really interesting is how much work they put into understanding political philosophy, that they believed that government was a complicated question and that they had to do their homework. To figure out how to do it. Right. And they were open to questioning a lot of different ways of organizing government.
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A
Orthodoxies. They attacked orthodoxies.
- [18:02]
B
Yes. And they studied. Those men are generally not theologians. And so they are not particularly focused on the question of how to set up a godly republic, for instance, which is something that John Winthrop or Roger Williams, who come to radically different solutions to this in the early 17th century. Those men were thinking about what does it mean to have a godly Republican. The people who founded, who structured the American government and the Constitution, who decided it was right to rebel against Britain. Those people were thinking about the nature of sovereignty, just versus unjust laws. They were steeped in those, in those traditions.
- [18:40]
A
Yeah. These are political ideas intermixed with egalitarian ideals. Deism was an important idea for people like Jefferson. Right. The idea that, you know, you're not just given a lot in life by an all powerful being, but you know, people see the word Creator in the Declaration of Independence and they think that has something to do with Christianity.
- [19:01]
B
I mean, deism has everything to do with Christianity. It's not from a different tradition. It is Christian. Right. I think we have to remember how rare atheism, outright atheism was and to some extent is. So being agnostic, not really knowing what you believe, or not caring, those are really, really common. But actually making a statement that there is no divine order, it's a pretty dramatic statement. A lot of people even today won't go there. They may not have an opinion, but they don't want to come down on the side of nothing. Right.
- [19:32]
A
You know, it's funny though, today Christians might not consider deism to be Christian. I mean, Jefferson did not accept Jesus Christ's divinity.
- [19:40]
B
Neither do Unitarians or John Adams. Right. So what I tell my students is anytime you say someone is or isn't a Christian, you're making a political statement coming into it with a definition of what qualifies as Christian or not. That group of Christians today who say that you must believe X, Y or Z in order to qualify as a Christian are starting with a definition. I'm kind of using it in a more historical, although also, I suppose political context, which is to say derived from a Christian tradition. In the 18th century, people debated every aspect of Christianity that people today consider that some Christians today consider orthodox. Does that make sense?
- [20:16]
A
No. That's important. Yeah. I mean, Christianity was not a monolith then. No, it's not a monolith today either. Although based on some of the Christians I know, they would say that if you don't accept Christ's divinity, then you can't be a Christian. But Jefferson probably would have had a bone to pick with those people.
- [20:31]
B
Well, yeah, and so would John Adams, and so would Charles Chauncey, who's one of the leading ministers of the Revolutionary cause. He's someone who explicitly gets called out by King George, reportedly in a letter. He was before the Revolutionary Unitarian, and he publicizes that after, you know. So some of the people we associate most strongly with the. The idea that American patriotism is rooted in Christianity were themselves hesitant to argue for the divinity of Jesus. And these are actual theologians, right? Not someone like Washington who just doesn't want to talk about it.
- [21:05]
A
Jefferson, fundamental rights. He wasn't necessarily talking about individual liberties. He was talking Americans as a nation, among all the nations of the earth, has the same rights. In the Declaration, he was borrowing, though, from George Mason. I have George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights. Today, we would say Jefferson was plagiarizing. Here's. Here's section one of Mason. All men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity, namely the enjoyment of life and liberty with the means of acquiring and possessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. So who is Mason borrowing from? Or where do these ideas come from? I know that it's a sprawling subject, but I know you can tackle it in less than eight hours.
- [21:57]
B
I think what's important there. First of all, I wouldn't call Jefferson a plagiarist. I'm not a big Jefferson apologist. But Jefferson was writing for a committee, and Mason puts part of that in the resolution to move for independence. So Jefferson is doing a good job as a committee writer pulling on the excellent language of the predecessors of the committee. But I would say that one way to root this story is to look to the English Declaration of Rights that is included in the Glorious Revolution as part of the Glorious Revolution. And that's a statement that is both constrains the monarchy and also includes some provisions for individual rights. And there are other British precedents there, too. And so the idea that you would create a document explaining what you're doing and authorizing what you're doing and include in it some of these ideas is rooted in British tradition. You know, it's one of the reasons why historians, when we look to understand the ideas of the American Revolution, look pretty quickly back to British political philosophy, particularly from the Glorious Revolution forward. That's sort of the hearth where they're getting these ideas.
- [23:02]
A
Although the Declaration was referring to the American people as a nation, anyone who reads that can interpret it the way they want. And immediately people were saying, this is also a declaration of fundamental human equality. People citing the declaration to sue for their freedom. There were a couple of enslaved people, Quack Walker and Mum Bet. Right. Those are two great examples. During this period of time, did the ordinary person think of themselves as, you know, I actually do have rights. And that was a radical idea in those days. Is that the way of looking at it? Is that correct that these were novel ideas about the nature of human society, that I too, an ordinary person, have rights?
- [23:42]
B
I think we need to think of it as a statement of the rights of the citizen, slash subject in relationship to their government. And that that has been a very lively conversation in political circles in Britain and in. In the colonies for a very long time. What are the duties of the citizen slash subject to the states? What are the duties in the other direction? What it doesn't define is who is included in the political nation. There's a lot of unstated stuff there that's powerful, right. Because it doesn't limit the rights to a particular population. The language doesn't limit the rights to a particular population within the geographic boundaries that the United States hopes to control. It opens the space that maybe it is actually everybody. And I think sometimes in the public we argue, did they really mean everybody? Were they really so racist they were excluding this group or were they only partially sexist? They would have included women if they had thought about it. Right. Like so we, we have those arguments politically today. What's important is that we've been having those arguments since the beginning, that there have always been advocates, people like Quack Walker and Mom Bet and women, all kinds of people who have used that universal language to say these are our ideals. And many Americans bought into those ideals to understand themselves as part of an inclusive nation?
- [25:08]
A
Sure. And that's a radical idea. I wonder what the Loyalists thought of that because they didn't want to break from the crown. But that idea that you're not just some peasant in, you know, medieval times, I'm speaking here as a non scholar, you can obviously tell, you know, a peasant in feudalism. And this is my lot in life. This is as far as I can go. This is my horizon. I have no horizon versus sky's the limit. Not for everybody right away, of course, but the idea that you have the right to pursue those things what we.
- [25:38]
B
Need to think about there is the context in which those rights are expressed. So I would not say that those ideas are an attack on what Marx would call class. So the idea that you should stay in your station or that your future is bound by what your parents were.
- [25:59]
A
Able to do, your bloodline. Right.
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B
That idea included. By the time we get to the early modern era, enormous differences in wealth and possibility. So it's really more of an attack on the idea. And this is something that Wood talks about in creation. It's an attack on the idea that these segments of society that are balanced in the British Parliament or the British government. Right. King, nobility, people. Right. It's a movement against the idea that the government has a foundationally different relationship to different segments of society. Not so much a concern that you would change. Sort of the natural superiority of the wealthy can totally coexist with that. Because our wealthy are not noble. Right. Whereas nobles actually had a different category of law, the king had a different category of law, a different role in law.
- [26:52]
A
So fundamentally, a revolution that changed the relationship between the person and his or her government.
- [26:58]
B
Yes.
- [27:02]
A
The conversation continues. Tap. Subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads or go to history as it happens. Dot com.
- [27:13]
B
Hi, I'm Chris Gethard and I'm very.
- [27:15]
A
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- [27:18]
B
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A
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B
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A
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B
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A
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B
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- [27:39]
A
It's a great show. Subscribe today. Beautiful Anonymous. You mentioned the book. I have it here. Gordon Woods, Creation of the American Republic. See, Kate, I keep dragging these old books, old, old historians back into the conversation. The Creation of the American Republic, published in 1969. My gosh, what do I got here? I gotta get up to date. Scholarship. Page 10, chapter 2, the English constitution. Wood wrote, if any era of modern times found its political ideals incorporated in a particular national institution, it was the 18th century. For the Age of Enlightenment was also the classic age of the English constitution. Perhaps never before, and surely never since, has any single nation's constitution so dominated Western man's theorizing. About politics. The glorious revolution of 1688, says John Toland, the late 17th century editor of Harrington, had settled the monarchy for the future under such wise regulations as are most likely to continue it forever. Wood goes on to say, by the Beginning of the 18th century, the English government was obviously the most free and best constituted in all the world. That's in quotes with a footnote quoted in Zira Finck, the classical republicans, the most free and best constituted in all the world. By balancing within the confines of Parliament, the ancient contending interests of English society, and by mixing within a single government the several categories of politics that have been known to the Western world for centuries, the English, it seemed, had concretely achieved what political philosophers from antiquity on had only dreamed of. As Montesquieu put it, this beautiful system seemed to possess no national or cultural limitations. It had its foundation in nature. According to Samuel Adams, who becomes a.
- [29:33]
B
Revolutionary, part of the problem they have then is, and by they here I want to stress what we're talking about are the leaders of the revolutionary moment who are articulating these ideas. Right. And the governors of the revolutionary movement. Not the average person who, some of them agreed with it, some of them were very knowledgeable. But we don't assume that it goes that. That way when it comes to crafting American governments, the United States doesn't have the tools that the British had, Right. So we don't have a monarch, we don't have an aristocracy. We don't really want to create one because that would be a revolution in land holding that is not realistic and is not desired by either the wealthy or the poor in the United States. So to create that balance, and this is really what most of Wood's book is about, right. To create that balance, we have to understand the nature of sovereignty and the way to protect the good of the people and also the people from their government. We have to reimagine that. Right. So they don't disavow the idea of balanced government, and they don't disavow the. They don't really disavow the British constitution. The argument that they're having as they get into the revolution is why has this king become a tyrant? Why have his ministers done this? Right. And then of course, the issue that, an issue that you brought up before, does the British Parliament have supremacy over the colonies? Right. So they're arguing these questions within the confines of the British. Of the British system.
- [31:01]
A
Parliamentary sovereignty.
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B
Yes.
- [31:03]
A
You don't have anybody sitting here in London making these decisions on your Behalf what we are, we're sovereign over you. That was rejected. Ultimately, when it comes to monarchy, you said, why did this monarch in particular become a tyrant? Thomas Paine in Common Sense says, well, that's the nature of monarchy. You're always going to get a brute eventually because it's arbitrary and unchecked. There really is no check on a king. How do you think Paine's arguments stand up?
- [31:29]
B
Monarchy as unlimited was not something that very many people advocated for, for, or thought about. Right. So even the classical humanists going, you know, going back to the Renaissance period, see monarchy as nested in a lot of responsibilities to various commonwealths and to both biblical law. This is in a Western context, Biblical law and also traditions that would bind the monarch. So the idea that a monarch could go wrong and that there could be legitimate revolution against a monarch is also deep in tradition. So the question then is, at what point do people decide that the monarch that is ruling over them needs to be revolted against? That's one piece. And then the other piece is what should those restrictions that always exist on a monarch, what should those restrictions look like? Should they be legal? Should they be, what are the boundaries of the king's prerogative? Right. And that was also an open question.
- [32:34]
A
Well, King George was not a divine right monarch. He wasn't an absolute monarch either. He was different than Louis the. Was it 16th or 14th who got his head chopped off? I did take.
- [32:43]
B
Oh, 16th got his head chopped off. 14 is the. The. The state is me.
- [32:48]
A
Yeah, that's right. L'ta moi. C' est moi, c' est moi. I did take some French history courses many years ago. Apparently I did not remember everything from them, but as far as placing checks on the executive, these ideas were percolating. Right. I'm not sure which philosopher you would probably know had been writing about. Was that Montesquieu. You have three different branches of government. A judiciary, a legislative and an executive.
- [33:13]
B
I believe that's in Montesquieu. This is political philosophy, is not my.
- [33:16]
A
Yeah, but these ideas are out there. They didn't just draw this up in 1770 about how to structure a government. It actually started at the state level. Right before the Declaration of Independence. The states were already revolting, in effect, by. And declaring their independence by writing new constitutions.
- [33:33]
B
Yes. So the state constitutions are a really interesting place to look to understand the direction things are going, but then also the challenges people are facing. So the colonial charters, all but two of them, had a royally appointed governor and generally an upper House Massachusetts is kind of weird in its upper house, but an upper house that is a council that's appointed by the king. People had come to the sense that the governor represents royal authority, represents the king. The upper house represents kind of the aristocracy. The House of Lords and the lower house is the people, the House of Commons. Right. In the old system. But when you have the revolution, when they kick out the royal authority, what they end up kicking out is both the governor and the council. The council who have been royal appointees and they have to reconstitute these structures generally they still want two houses. What we now see is the Senate and the House. Although Pennsylvania goes to having a unicameral legislature. Right. The legislature represents the people because we don't have aristocracy and we don't have king. Other places, Connecticut and Rhode island, which did not have royal governors for quirks of their own histories, they don't even rewrite their constitutions because they don't have an immediate problem. And what that tells us is that these early constitutional projects are working in an environment where it's all kind of up for grabs. They don't necessarily know what problem is being fixed or exactly how it's supposed to be fixed. And they don't have a clear sense of where it's going to go. And it takes a long time for everything to kind of fall into line where things generally match the federal constitution that we have today.
- [35:15]
A
Yeah, I mean, they weren't just floating without a foundation, but yeah, they were working on some new terrain here and it did take time. And we're still trying to figure this out now.
- [35:24]
B
And I think it's important to remember that the people who are leading the revolution are constantly struggling for legitimacy because there are a lot of loyalists and a lot of non supporters. We used to say, John Adams said a third supported, a third resisted, a third were neutral. I think historical opinion has moved more to a fifth strongly supported, a fifth strongly opposed. Those groups would be probably ideological. Those are the groups that are like the. Where where we see our ideas function. And 60% of Americans are trying to figure out how to navigate this situation. They probably have opinions, but their choices are mostly being made for more practical reasons. And I think that makes sense to us as Americans today in the kind of crazy situation we're in. Right. A lot of us are just trying to make do.
- [36:06]
A
Well, revolutions are bloody and dangerous and when you make that step, there's no going back. So I can understand why most people were right.
- [36:13]
B
So there's just a lot of uncertainty. And how close is the conflict to you? What is your immediate. What is your immediate challenge? Right. So those colonial governments who only really represent about 20% of the population, that's going to vary. In some colonies, it's more. In some colonies, it's less. Right. So it's somewhere around 20%. They're working for legitimacy, so they are pulling on traditions of government every time they can. Why would they throw out everything from the Constitution or from the colonial charter if they can keep many of those rights or many of those practices stable? So, for instance, how people vote or where they vote or who's voting? Right. Just leave those things alone. Keep the same practices going. It lends itself to the legitimacy of the government that they're not throwing everything out.
- [36:58]
A
Well, the first Continental Congress was trying to reconcile, too, so that's important.
- [37:03]
B
And the Continental Congress is an entirely extralegal body until it convinces people or only. It only has power when people believe it has power. So they are also constantly trying to shore up their own legitimacy. And they do that with a combination of really good argument, like you get in Declaration of Independence and pulling on historic structures. They work through the colonies. Right. They don't try to supersede the colonies. You know, elections are done by colony.
- [37:30]
A
I'm glad you brought up the issue of contingency, too, because ideas, of course, are important, but we know that events can take on a life of their own.
- [37:40]
B
And violence, too, I think, is a really important part of the story. And we see it. Blood starts to spill in the South. The Patriots use aggressive violence to force people who are neutral to come to their side and to disarm or exile or legally hinder just imprison or sometimes just outright kill people who disagree with them. So when we think about the create what's revolutionary about this moment and the. The creation of the idea of the nation. Right. You have to be allied with the nation. One of the ideas that the Patriots bring into this is that everybody has to be with them or they will fail. They don't tolerate dissent in a way that the British system. There's active debate in Britain over how to handle the colonial question in a healthy, stable state. There is active debate about matters of policy and direction. The revolutionary government was not a healthy, stable state. Right. I mean, by definition, it was a nascent state that was trying to establish itself. It was at war against a much more powerful empire. Right. It was not a stable state. They used a lot of violence and threats of violence to compel uniformity. Eventually, they established legitimacy and they become. And by the time you get to the Constitution, you're talking about a government that's, that's got a lot of legitimacy. But when you're looking, you know, 1781 in place like Charleston, South Carolina or Savannah, Georgia, you're talking about a lot of violence.
- [38:59]
A
We didn't have the guillotine, but tarring and feathering is pretty nasty. There were lynchings. There were lynchings. Not always fatal, but yeah, I mean, Loyalists and dissenters got roughed up pretty badly.
- [39:10]
B
Yes. And it happens in the other direction when the British come through. Right. And I think when we talk about contingency, one of the most important factors is that patriot violence was directed at uniformity, but what they really wanted was support. The British were ultimately sort of bungling in their military affairs, but they were also, they did not have counterinsurgency theory. They disregarded the distinctions between Loyalists and patriots. And their violence was more likely. Their military violence was more likely to breed support for the patriot cause. And the Patriots looked like they were sticking around. We forget that the patriots were violent, so we need to remember that. But the British disregard for the well being of Americans was a really strong agent of revolution.
- [39:55]
A
Yes. When armies come tromping through, usually bad things happen.
- [39:59]
B
Yes.
- [40:00]
A
I mean, they take away your food, your feed, your horses. So I just want to add, it was Montesquieu 1748, the spirit of the laws.
- [40:08]
B
Yes.
- [40:08]
A
Arguing government should be divided between legislative, executive and judicial branches to prevent any one branch from becoming too powerful. What does that sound familiar? Looking at the United States in 2026, I wonder which branch has become too powerful today? The conversation continues. Tap subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads or go to history as it happens Dot com. Where do you come down, Professor Carte, on this debate that the revolution was to create a republic, not a democracy.
- [40:50]
B
I've been thinking about that a lot because when you and I were growing up during the Cold War, we heard that a lot. What we focused on, I think in that was the distinction between a republic where people where you had leaders who represented you, versus a democracy where everyone had a voice in everything. We talked about the skepticism of the framers about democracy, those kinds of questions. There are other meanings to the word republic. So juxtaposing republic to democracy talks about the relationship of the citizen to their, their ruler. But if we talk about what they meant when they created a republic, embedded in that were a lot of ideas about. So republican theory talks a lot about skepticism of political power, the dangers of tyranny I think when they created a republic. So first and most basically, they meant they didn't create a monarchy. Right. So it was a system without a king or queen. But it also meant that they were thinking about the responsibilities of citizenship and the dangers of tyranny. They were more concerned about the dangers of tyranny than they were wedded to pretty much any structure that went into the Constitution. They debate every piece of that thing, and they are open to lots of different ideas. When we say that we have a republic, what we need to do, I think, is think about where are the dangers, and they articulate them pretty clearly. Where do the dangers of tyranny, where are they manifest? And what are the responsibilities of a citizen, not to the democracy, to the republic.
- [42:34]
A
You get some idea by just looking at the Bill of Rights about what the government is not allowed to do to you.
- [42:41]
B
So I'm not sure if the Bill of Rights is the best example in that.
- [42:44]
A
Oh, wow. Just say the Fourth Amendment. We need a warrant to search somebody's house.
- [42:48]
B
Definitely that is true when we're talking about the dangers of tyranny. So one danger of tyranny is the tyrannical state against the individual. Other dangers of tyranny have to do with who is ruling. And those are not necessarily threats to the individual. Those are the threats of rule by an autocrat, rule by an oligarchy, rule by the demos, rule of democracy, rule of the mob. Right. There are lots of different kinds of tyranny, and only some of them have to do with needing to protect individual rights. I talked to my students. I think it was last semester. I was asking them what they wanted to know about the Constitution. So instead of giving them in my survey class, instead of just teaching the Connecticut Compromise, blah, blah, blah, I said, what do you want to know about the Constitution? One of the most interesting things that came back to me was that the students think of the Constitution. Constitution is the Bill of Rights. The framers did not think that the Constitution needed a Bill of Rights. They wrote a Constitution that did not have one that comes out of the ratification process, and it's passed by the first Congress. The Constitution is a structure of government that is supposed to balance three branches of government.
- [43:49]
A
Yeah. There was an idea that legislatures could be tyrannical as well.
- [43:53]
B
Absolutely. I mean, Pennsylvania didn't have an executive at one point. Right there. Or they don't have a single executive. Right. So there's. And they have a unicameral legislature, and that's also. The legislature can be tyrannical. Any piece of this can be tyrannical, and every piece has to be checked. And if we think that the most important thing about our Constitution is the limits of the federal government to the individual, then as long as the federal government is not touching your individual rights, you might miss the tyranny. Right.
- [44:20]
A
Yeah. We often think of it as just the person of a king. That's Thomas Paine. Common sense. Putting all this power in one person. He could just be a complete mediocrity and he's only there because of his bloodline. By nature, it's going to be abusive. But yeah, legislatures can also abuse the law.
- [44:38]
B
Judges and legislatures can abdicate their responsibilities. Right. Legislatures can allow. In our system, the legislature can allow tyranny.
- [44:46]
A
Are you saying that's happening now?
- [44:47]
B
I think there's. You can talk to 20th century people about this, but the rise of the imperial presidency and the decline of the legislature is a situation that goes way before the Trump administration.
- [44:58]
A
Yeah, I was kind of kidding there because I'm trying to stay out of punditry here. How about the notion of national greatness at the founding, that we're not just creating a new system and a new nation, but we're expanding simultaneously. Maybe there have been other countries also or other nations that have had that experience, but not too many, as far as I know. For instance, the Continental Empire taking lands away from the other European colonial powers and the Native Americans invading Canada right from the start, imbued with a sense of national greatness and expansion.
- [45:32]
B
Yeah. You know, you can root that in a lot of different things. You know, certainly colonists were land hungry just full stop. And they had high birth rates and they wanted more land. Right. So there's that piece of it. The part of it that I find really interesting is that the framers are simultaneously, they're the, you know, the early generations of leaders are simultaneously very anxious about the potential for failure, either of the political system they set up or just of their republic because it's so little. And another, a European empire could pick it off. Right. They know they're weak, so there's their insecurity and then there's like their bravado. Right. And I think the way you can bring these two together, and here I'm pulling on the work of a. Of a great scholar named Elijah Gould. They wanted to be treaty worthy. They wanted to be among the nations of the earth, to use the title of his book. And you see that in the Declaration. Right. They are asserting that they are going to be among the nations of the earth. And they don't want to be like an indigenous, indigenous polity that people don't take seriously. Right. They want to be among the European nations of the earth.
- [46:27]
A
Yeah. They're not provincials anymore.
- [46:29]
B
They want to be among the states that get to be at the big boys table. And so they are building that imperial strength in part to balance out the potential weakness that they have. And they'll do lots of things in order to do that. And that's, you know, it's a story that goes, you know, through the War of 1812 up into the Monroe Doctrine. Right. How do they assert themselves as a power that must be taken seriously and it's even, even relevant in Civil War diplomacy. Right. Because there are European powers that see a divided United States as useful to European agendas.
- [47:02]
A
Weak but geographically large. And in an idea that might strike some people as odd today, the founders were worried that a large, geographically large republic would fail.
- [47:12]
B
Geographically large and also population large because the models they had from Greece and Rome were small. You know, when we think about ways that our current system is challenged, we capped our legislature at 435 members in 1929 by statute. And we now have very, very. I say this as a Texan. Right. We have very large congressional districts, although some of the largest congressional districts are in the states with the fewest representatives. Right. This question of how do you balance the size of your republic and the level of representation that you have was a real question for them, and it's one we haven't really revisited in the last nearly 100 years.
- [47:50]
A
That's a great point. The Senate, this is a subject that, depending on who's in power. Right. Maybe you come down on which side. Two senators in Montana or Delaware. That's a blue state, Democratic state. Two senators from California.
- [48:06]
B
Yeah. This is a nonpartisan issue. It should be a nonpartisan issue. Right now it is wrapped up in our partisanship. Texas and California have a whole lot in common. When we see in this current redistricting fight that the Supreme Court is having. Right. Those are the two states and there's one on each side. And those are the two states that can kind of swing things in one way or another. Right. It's a large state issue. The system we have is based on a compromise that was designed to solve a particular problem at a particular moment. It is possible that it is no longer the right solution to the current situation.
- [48:39]
A
We had a second founding after the Civil War with all those important amendments. You could say, I don't want to call it a founding, but the United States changed dramatically again after World War II. I do think our institutions, our Constitution, need a refresh. The problem is getting enough people to agree on what that should look like.
- [48:57]
B
Right?
- [48:57]
A
Well, you said 1929 capped at 435 members in the House. The country's population was 121 million. We've almost tripled it since then. The demographics are dramatically different as well. But thank you. Kate Carte, thank you.
- [49:12]
B
This is a great conversation. It's wonderful to talk with you. Always is.
- [49:17]
A
On the next episode of History As It Happens, have you seen the new film Nuremberg with Russell Crowe playing Herman Guring? And what about the 1961 classic judgment at Nuremberg? These movies are timely today as the rules, rules based order created after 1945, after the Nazis and the Holocaust is being shredded all over the world. We'll take a look at Nuremberg next with Alex Whiting, a former prosecutor at the icc. As we report History As It Happens, make sure to sign up for my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for History as it Happens.