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The Charlie Kirk Show
Great American Story: The Genius of the Constitution with Dr. Wilfred M. McClay (Part 2)
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Hey, everybody. Today on a special Saturday episode of the Charlie Kirk show, my continued conversation with Dr. Maclay from the wonderful Hillsdale College. Many of you have a love of history. I know it based on the emails you send us. Freedomarliekirk.com it's time to dive deep into that history. What is the American story today? We talk about the Constitution getting from a declaration to a regime who were the anti federalists, the genius of compromise, the the wound of slavery, and so much more. And if you want to teach your children proper history and if you want to take the classes for yourself, go to charlieforhillsdale.com I go to my Hillsdale Edu portal every single day when I'm working out for about an hour, hour and a half. I take a couple of these classes. You could download them as podcast and then you have short little quizzes after. And when you're done, you get a certificate and a long test to make sure that you are able to internalize all of the content that you go through. So there's free online courses. So I'm about to finish. I'm so close to finishing the Introduction to Western Philosophy. Introduction, western philosophy. I'm 75% done. All I have left is Kant, Nietzsche and C.S. lewis. So pray for me as I go through content. Nietzsche, not exactly uplifting thinkers. And I end with C.S. lewis, which is a nice way to end. I'm 17% of the way through the Genesis story, reading biblical narratives, a phenomenal class. I have finished Constitution 101, the meaning and History of the Constitution. I have finished Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, how to Lead a Good Life. And I finished Introduction to the Constitution. And I plan. This is a big statement to take every single Hillsdale online course eventually. I'm not putting a timetable on it. I want to take them all. A wise man loves to be corrected. And Aristotle says everyone loves to know. They have a desire to know. Do you want to know how to save the country? Dive deep into our history. Maybe you are interested in Mark Twain. Well, they have a course on that. Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn. Now these courses are videos. They're like a contemplation of really highly produced podcast, YouTube videos, all under their portal. Maybe you like theology. Let me maybe tease you at this one. Theology 101. They have the God of grace and Judaism in the Hebrew Bible, the God of grace and Christianity in the New Testament. God and grace and the Trinitarian controversy, the Life of grace and the Palaginian Controversy, Thomas Aquinas on nature, grace and life of God, Martin Luther on justification, the Council of Trent on justification, Christianity, enlightenment, and knowing God in the 20th century. All of that is in their Theology 101 class. Go learn right now from the Beacon of the north, the place that has all these courses. You can go into great detail. It's charlieforhillsdale.com and I ask people, they say, charlie, what can I do? And you know what my sprouts is? How many Hillsdale online courses are you taking now? If they've taken a couple, I'll dive deep into things they can do. But until you and your children spend the time to know, to understand, then what are we really doing here? How can you preserve and save a country that you don't know about? Charlieforhillsdale.com as you can tell, I'm super enthusiastic about this. I was so happy to be able to announce this partnership because I myself have benefited. People say, Charlie, how are you able to cover all of this information, these range of topics here on the Charlie Kirk Show? So because we take learning seriously here. We take learning seriously and that's what you guys can do. Charlieforhillsdale.com and you guys can get the curriculum there. Land of Hope, Best textbook, so make sure you check it out. Dr. Maclay is here. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
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Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kir. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie.
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He's an incredible guy.
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His spirit, his love of this country.
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He's done an amazing job building one
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of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point usa.
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We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives. And we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show. Back with us today, despite all the storms and all of Mother nature's best attempt to thwart us today is Dr. Maclay. Dr. Maclay, welcome back to our continued dialogue about the great American story, the Land of Hope.
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Thank you, Charlie. It's really great to be with you.
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So we got some wonderful response and lots of questions and people have been really looking forward to this particular topic about the Constitution and what you call the genius of the Constitution. You don't really hear that language as much anymore. Instead, we kind of hear about the flaws of the Constitution or the bigotry of the Constitution, as some academics would say. Talk to us about why the Constitution was truly a stroke of genius.
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Well, it was. It was very much conceived in a particular historical moment. And that part of it's really interesting, but it had a kind of larger vision that was part of that. You know, it's very rare that when people are involved in politics that they're both thinking about addressing the moment and thinking about something that's going to last permanently. Although some of the framers, even George Washington didn't really expect it to last that long. Were needing to be radically revised. I think all of them would be surprised at 234 years later. Bing. Still, there it is, with some amendments and alterations, but fundamentally the structure that they envision and the longest lasting Constitution in the world. So obviously there's something. You're doing something right if you last that long in a turbulent world. And I think that the genius of it is one of the ways that compromise sometimes produces a better result than what either side wanted. I think that's the case with the Constitution because it expanded the scope of the national government, but not too much, just the right amount, while enshrining protections against the abuse of power, some of which we've lost or we're in danger of losing. I mean, three and a half trillion dollars budget voted on yesterday or today. It's kind of horrifying. They would be horrified. I'm horrified. But we won't get into present events, current events. So the protections of the Constitution are not absolute. Nothing in life is foolproof because the world is full of fools. And the Constitution has failed. It failed in the Civil War, you could say. But did it fail us or did we fail it? That's really the question. I think what the Constitution does is it starts with a very realistic view of human nature. I mean, your view of human nature really is at the bottom of everything. And if you have the wrong kind of conception of human nature, the government that comes out of it is going to be ineffective and likely to be prone to tyranny simply because those who make it up will say we just need to turn the screws a little harder to get things the way we want. When you're going against the grain of human nature, they understood that we are motivated by interests, sometimes even by greed or cupidity, but by our self interest, the pursuit of our self interest. And instead of trying to outlaw that or badger us into an idea of virtue that would cause us to renounce our interest, it sets up a system in which interest is given its place but is held in check by the other people pursuing their interests. And so the system is like an equilibrium. When it's working properly and it's slow. That's something that frustrates a lot of people. Frustrated Woodrow Wilson. We were just talking about the slowness of government. But if your interest is in protecting liberty, you don't want to be hasty. You don't want to declare every bump in the road to be an emergency that requires you to suspend the laws and spend another trillion dollars. The Constitution I think is made for people who have that kind of patience, have that kind of realism. Are we still that people? That's again a current events question. But it was with the product of this extraordinary group of people, even people who don't especially like the Constitution, when they study the framers, they have to say, wow, these guys, an average of 45 years old, I believe, very young for the most part, who came up with such a profound document. But I don't know whether you want me to talk about this. I should a little bit about the circumstances because it really was a product of very special circumstances. You know, we had a revolution and we talked, you and I talked about that last time. That that was in large measure, I call it a revolution of self rule. It was a revolution to on the colonists part, to retain their rights as the Englishman, which oddly enough meant they had rebelled against England, which was they saw as taking those rights away.
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Yes.
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And during, you know, during the revolution, we fought the revolution under the Articles of Confederation. That was the charter of the national government. And just the name confederation suggests this is a loose alliance going back to the Declaration of Independence. You know, it concludes by declaring that the British colonies are free and independent states. Which is great, you know, but what does that mean in terms of the kind of government that are they independent? Does it mean the Rhode Island's going to be its own country? Or was there some sort of national structure envisioned? And if so, what? And it was very important to them to keep a degree of separateness and autonomy in the states. So that was the problem in the Articles were a good solution for their moment because they vested most power in the states. The president was very. President was really just a presiding figure. The states ran things. You had to have a unanimous vote to get through Congress. And obviously that was very difficult to do. You didn't have a real regulatory power to regulate interstate commerce or to conduct diplomacy, even to conduct warfare. So once the revolution was over and it was driven by a momentum of its own, it became clear that the Articles were not going to be adequate for the future. And there were several that the British refused to leave some of the western lands where they were encamped in forts. We didn't really have the power to do anything about it. And there were debt rebellions in all over, especially in Massachusetts. There was one famous one called Shays Rebellion, which debtors who were. Many of them were soldiers in the revolution who'd been paid in IOUs that had never been deemed. So they were broke, they couldn't pay their mortgages. And meanwhile, guys who had sat out the revolution running the banks in Boston and so on started to proceed to foreclose on them. And this produced a rebellion, shutting down the courthouse. And people like Washington, who were very concerned about the whole enterprise holding together, began to feel, we've got to do something. And Hamilton and others, Alexander Hamilton, star of Broadway musicals and also, you know, at Washington, save the camp, decided that they needed to convene a convention, which happened in Philadelphia, to revise the Articles of Confederation. And of course, what they ended up doing was much more extensive than that. They really drafted in secret, a whole different arrangement. And I think a lot of, you know that there was an element of compromise, a profound element of compromise, in that. The large states wanted for population to be dominant in representation and figuring out representation. And the small states wanted statehood. Pick on Rhode island again. Rhode island was so tiny little place, still is, hasn't gotten any bigger. And if voting was done by population, they'd be reduced to being nothing compared to Virginia, New York. On the other hand, if you had representation by states, it would be very unfair with regard to population. And there were other things disputed, but they came up with the compromise of the House and the Senate, in which each of the principles of representation is there. And this was a pretty brilliant solution. It borrowed some from the British parliamentary model, but it was in many ways uniquely American. Our whole idea of federalism is federalism, that the concept that power should be divided between the national government, the states, and within the national government, between the three branches. That's something new. That's something new in human history. You find precedents for it. Of course, it didn't just come out of nowhere, but that particular assemblage that the Constitution lays out is something new. And, yeah, genius. I would call it ingenious because it doesn't try to eliminate the sources of division which inevitably arise in society. We all have different interests. We come from different places. We enter the economy in different places. We can't. We're not one. Size does not Fit all. How do you deal with that? You can't reduce everybody to the same common denominator. Instead you build them in the system, a kind of mechanism for political action to fight things out and determine what is the best set of policies for the general good. So that's what we've done. It often looks very messy because it involves conflict. I remember I was in Turkey giving speeches in the country around the time when things got really messy with the Iraq war and George W. Bush, Bush's presidency, and he was fighting with the Congress, which was dominated by Democrats, and. And the Turkish journalists were all saying, well, is this the end? Is the Constitution going to fail? Is Bush going to be taken out of office? I said, no, this is how our system works. We have conflict. It's good. We are accustomed to it. We get tired of it sometimes. But we know that it's necessary, that that's what our constitutional system is about. It kind of internalizes and channels all these conflicts into something that in the end we believe is productive of the greater good. I think one thing that the Constitution may be faulted for is that it doesn't talk enough about civic virtue. Some people would fault it for that. I don't, because I think the state constitutions at that time were considered to be the real sort of seed beds of training citizens for virtue. So, you know, they were very. You know, people talk about how God isn't mentioned in the Constitution. Well, that is not a sign that the founders were all atheists. Hardly. It was a sign that they thought religion and things like establishment of religion, that was the responsibilities of state. That was not any of their business. And even the First Amendment, which was part of the original Constitution, the Bill of Rights is really about just about a national church. It forbids a national church. The states went right on having estate establishments. That was entirely constitutional. So. Oh, getting away from me, getting too excited here. So that notion that the Constitution ought to inculcate virtue, I think is maybe a little overblown, but there's something to it. It's not just the collision of force is just the same as in a courtroom. You expect the defense attorney to mount a vigorous. You expect the prosecutor to be vigorous. But that doesn't mean they get a right to lie or cheat or withhold evidence or, you know, they are officers of the court, which means they have a loyalty to the process. And we sometimes lose sight of that. That there's some. The way veneration of the Constitution is absolutely essential if the Constitution is going to work and I don't see. I don't think we have a whole lot of that. We're not bringing up young people to venerate the Constitution, that's for sure.
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Can you talk more about the story of the Constitutional Convention, how it came to be, the drama around it? I talked about the importance of story. This is one of the best, the greatest stories in American history that really hasn't been told. I would love to see some Martin Scorsese type do a real movie on this, talk about it. It's a really beautiful moment in American history.
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Well, it is. You have this assemblage of great, great people. You have all of the conflicting, or many of the conflicting interests in the country represented, including the Southern planters, who were not yet as addicted to slave labor as they would become, but even so, very resistant to the idea of abolishing slavery at the time of the founding of the adoption of the Constitution. That's one of the things we look back at and we just sort of say, why couldn't they have done that then? But, you know, one of the things that the framers had taken into account was if you didn't bring the whole wagon train with you, if some states dropped out, so we're not going to do this, the national enterprise would very likely have failed. It would have fallen apart. It would have submitted to a kind of mitosis, a sort of fracturing. And then we would have been praying for European powers to come back, England or others to come back in and pluck us up, as with the Civil War. So with the period after the Revolution, the critical period away had to be found to hold it all together. And many of the framers honestly believed that slavery was on its way out. It was an institution that couldn't last, of course. Then came the invention of the cotton gin. Yes.
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John C. Kelvin. Both those things didn't help.
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Yes. Yeah. But the convention, you're right, it's a wonderful story. And there are a couple of. There's some good books about it. Much of what we know about what actually happened because it was in secret. You know, in a hot Philadelphia summer. It can get pretty hot in Philadelphia, and especially when you have the windows closed so that nobody can overhear you. But Madison, James Madison, who is often thought of as the architect of the Constitution, took copious notes. And so we know a lot, and it's pretty accurate. I mean, as far as we can tell, what little we get from other sources corroborates Madison's testimony. And, yeah, there are all kinds of ideas out there and. And the drama. I would be wonderful to have a talented, patriotic Hollywood director if. I mean, that's a contradiction in terms.
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I know. That's why I'm laughing.
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But now, the Steven Spielberg movie about Lincoln is very good.
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I think I agree with you.
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The adoption of the 13th Amendment, that Lincoln. And this is something that. I think we turned Lincoln into this sort of plaster of Paris saint. He was a shrewd. Shrewd politician and a deal maker. And you could see all of that in that movie. So I recommend it. But there's nothing wrong with. We think of that as a dirty thing. And it's important that we not regard politics as intrinsically a low art. It's the art of getting people who are not on the same page to cooperate with one another. And politicians are the people who talk to one another in lieu of the people who can't talk to one another.
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Yes.
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And that's always been true In a representative democracy, it's especially true. So. Yeah, just the process. It's such an intricate story, but the process by which these different proposals coalesce. And the proponents of the respective plans, the New Jersey plan and the Virginia plan, come to champion their view of how representation should occur. And hovering above it all is this feeling. We don't want to make the same mistake that England made. We don't want to submit to a tyranny. We don't want centralized power. But we need more of that than we have. How can we get the right amount? And I'll tell you one thing that has to be part of the story. What would have happened if this shows history is about more than just ideas. What would have happened if George Washington hadn't been there?
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Well, that was gonna be my question. Yeah. And how he presided over it. I was actually. So you can answer my question. Would this have actually been approved if George Washington didn't preside over this?
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Well, it's more yet I think that's a great question. And I would put it slightly. I would expand it even. Would the office of the presidency have been conceived in the way that it was, Was much more powerful than the people who ended up opposing the Constitution. People like Patrick Henry, who was a great patriot, but feared the concentration of power in the national government that he saw if they hadn't had George Washington to look to as an example. George Washington, who had steered the country through. I mean, it's not often appreciated just how impossible a job he did is successfully in running the Continental army in the American Revolution. It's Incredible. And we all know sort of vaguely about Valley Forge, the difficult winters and the smallpox and other sort of obstacles that he dealt with. What people don't realize is that every step of the way his army was in, he was in danger of seeing his army melt away and of people who had served their time or mostly served their time just sort of disappearing. And it was not like a well organized, well oiled machine that you think of a great military. It was. So the kind of leadership he had to exercise was just extraordinary. And he came to be universally trusted. Very, very few people in those years that speak negatively about it.
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Well, and the anti Federalists, when they're critiquing the kind of idea, the Federalists, they never attack Washington. Right. They get very. They're very careful. They're like. Well, they almost admit in some of their own journals, like, yeah, this is going to be hard for us to win because they have Washington right now. Can you talk about, though, how Washington is sometimes portrayed by modern historians as being an egotistical person because he didn't want to over. He didn't want to preside over the Constitutional Convention. He was kind of waffling on that. Right. Some people would say, oh, that's because of his ego. I don't think that's right. I think it's because he didn't want to put his name behind something that could have been destructive. Can you talk about that, how Washington almost didn't actually agree to it?
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Yeah, well, no. He came out of retirement several times. He wanted nothing more at the conclusion of the revolution than to go back to his beautiful estate in Mount Vernon and hang out there and having earned that peace and quiet. But he felt strongly that the country, you know, that he owed. He had a duty of his country. He was very formed by sort of ideals of classical notions of virtue, Roman virtue, like Cincinnatus.
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Yeah.
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You know, the farmer who return, who does his duty and then returns to the plow or Cato the Younger and the Elder. Well, there was a wonderful play by Joseph Addison about Cato. I think it's actually called Cato. And that Washington apparently saw numerous times and had shown to his performances, put on for his troops numerous times at these critical points when morale was going through the floor. And so that was his notion. He. He could certainly have become king if he had wanted to. And he declined to do that. Is that the behavior of an egotist? I don't think so. It's a behavior of somebody who's saying that. But yeah, no, I know no, I'm not, I'm addressing this to the people you're talking about. I mean it's a, it's, he was. And he actually, I don't think he gets another credit for being eloquent. I think sometimes he's marvelously eloquent. And his speeches, which he largely wrote himself, I mean that's pretty much what was done. And his letters, he has a wonderful letter to the Hebrew congregation in Newport that is a crucial document in the history of religious liberty in America. And, and Washington saw all that. He saw the importance of religion. But he saw, if you look at his first inaugural, he sees the revolution as having been about self rule, about republican self governing a society which the people rule themselves. So that's what it was about. So it wasn't about, I mean it was antithetical to establishing kings. So he wasn't about to subvert the revolution in that way.
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So to keep on telling the story. Dr. So the constitution convention ends on September 17, 1787. But then the fun actually begins because the states then have to then start to ratify or accept. It starts with Delaware. And then all of a sudden you start to see these anonymous really well written publications in New York newspapers who we now know is written by probably Madison, Hamilton and John Jay almost certainly. I'd love to get your thoughts on that. But then these kind of debates are happening anti Federalists and Federalists. So I have a couple of questions. Why write them anonymously? I have my own personal theory. I'd love to have your theory and then talk about the process of convincing state by state, because that was also a real, that was a, that was an endeavor in itself.
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Yeah, no, that's an interesting point. They published under the name Publius and most of the, on both sides. This was a sort of convention at the time that you elevated your argument by separating it from your personal identity and instead associating it with some universally revered figure from generally the Roman, sometimes Greek, but usually Roman past. And so, you know, there's something to be said for, takes attention away from the personality of the author you think of today. I mean you read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal and you probably know some of the people who write for that editorial page. I know a couple. But it's sort of pointless to try to figure out who actually wrote this. It's a statement, it's a, it's a corporate statement of the entire editorial board. So it's, it's a way of giving what you're saying, what you're Arguing for a more, a more, more of a weight. Now about the debates and the ratification process, that was by no means a sure thing. You know, there's a lot of these things in early American history. We sort of forget how close run they were. The revolution itself. And I hope I pointed out last time, I think I did, how crucial the intervention of the French was to us winning, you know, and that was not a sure thing. The New York ended up being not a crucial state, as it turned out, because when it was built into the Constitution that after nine states had ratified, the Constitution would become effective. But New York, love it or hate it, New York is a pretty big enchilada in the American makeup. So yeah, what you were referring to is that Madison, Hamilton and Jay. I think we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was those three. And we know which numbers they wrote. They wrote 100. How many was it? You know, I can't remember right now how many, but it's over 100. A number of articles in New York newspapers and these are. Yeah, there's Kessler's edition.
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Yeah, no, it's the best one.
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It's very good. It's very good. And it's gotten better over the years as he's added things. Imagine newspapers having things. Well, you'd have to read them to see what I'm talking about. These are masterful discourses in political science and political theory. Some of them quite innovative. Yes, battalist number 10 is maybe the most famous for being innovative because you know, there'd been an argument going back to Aristotle and as recently as Montesquieu in that time that a republic had to be small, that if you got larger than a certain amount, you couldn't have a sort of self governing entity. It would inevitably become some kind of an empire or take on the lineaments or have to be governed by a monarch. And Madison said no, you know, there's a way this can work that precisely by as he called it, extending the sphere, making it larger rather than smaller. You can mitigate the effects of faction of conflict of of interest clashing with interests because there's so many more interests encompassed that no one can get the upper hand and dominate over all the others. It was ingenious argument. Federalist 51, also by Madison, one of the best expositions of the logic behind the separation of powers. Yes, and federalism that anyone's ever written. And if men were angels, government would not be necessary. That's the most famous line. Said that we have to deal with Human nature as we find it. And ambition must be made to counteract ambition. That's again that notion that you're not going to stop ambitious people from being ambitious. What you have to do is make sure they don't have a clean path by everyone else who's not ambitious just rolling over and say, oh well, take it, it's yours. No, you have to have other ambitious people standing in the way. And that clash of the ambitious, which is sort of what life is in Washington D.C. the clash of the ambitious on a good day is more productive of the general good than if one group, one faction, one person triumphs. It's more consonant with human nature to recognize this.
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Yes.
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And all through the Federalist Papers they're really arguing, you know, these are very learned guys and they've, they haven't just learned things in a kind of book learning way. They scour the past looking for examples that can have some relevance for their situation, for our situation at the birth of the nation. So they're really looking for. Their essays are tremendously learned. Well now, what about the other side? The side, the anti Federalists? First of all, they didn't have a good name, you know, that doesn't. But there's a very good book I recommend anyone who wants to read about this. It's a small book too, extremely clearly written by a man named Herbert Storing, called what the Antifederalists Were for. Because they were for a lot of things. They were worried that there was no way that the Constitution could hold within bounds this power that was being unleashed in it. Patrick Henry saw it as a document that he said, squints toward monarchy. You start out with a republic, but you're going to end up with an empire and thus defeat the American hope, which is to establish a polity based on liberty and virtue and the entwining of those two things. Yes, they were, they were not, not interested in America becoming a great power in the world. They were interested in America being a virtuous, agrarian, you know, nation of people who minded their own business and had the joy of living in peace and harmony, governing themselves, themselves. It's not a bad vision, you know, it's. Hamilton was very interested in growth, in prosperity, in, you know, cutting a fine figure in the world, being an important industrial power, commercial power, highly diversified economy. His arch opponent, Thomas Jefferson was more. And he wasn't around for the Constitution, by the way. He was so off in Europe, so he didn't take part in any of this. And he didn't really think much of it, even though Madison was a good friend of his political ally. And Jefferson thought there ought to be a revolution every so often to kind of cleanse the air a bit. And I did some appeal at the present moment.
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And Madison calmed them down on that, Though if there was a dialogue, and he was like, well, maybe that wouldn't be a great idea, because what's going to be? Jefferson wrote back, yeah, you're probably right.
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Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, Jefferson's an interesting character that way, but he and Hamilton did represent kind of opposing visions of the country that first become evident, I think plainly evident in the antifedalist Federalist debates over ratification. One thing that the guys, I mean, the guys who pushed the Constitution, they were a shrewd bunch. They covered all the answers. They were better at PR and more sophisticated at it, and they understood that something really important that in each of the states, if you put this before the state legislature, question of whether to ratify, as we all know, legislative bodies are generally not keen on giving up any of their power and voting themselves a cut in the salary or anything like that. So what they did was they specified there were to be constitutional conventions that would be completely independently chosen. I mean, legislators could serve, of course, but it wouldn't be the identical body. So those people would be operating in different conclaves with different, different people. And that was a shrewd thing that eliminated or mitigated one barrier to acceptance of the Constitution. And so they, they zoomed through and they got a whole bunch of states. New York looked as if it was going to be very, very tough. And by the way, if you look at the margins of the votes in many, many places, it was pretty, pretty, pretty close. So it's, again, we take it as a foregone conclusion. Well, of course, the founders won the Revolution and they established the Constitution. Well, yeah, but there were a lot of steps and a lot of people had to be kind of dragged along, and some, like Patrick Henry, were not. I mean, he continued to be involved in politics. Yes, but he was not happy with the outcome of the constitutional installation. And look, let me say this for the Antifederalists, one of the big things they did for us for the Constitution is insist on the Bill of Rights.
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Yes, George Mason, especially George Mason.
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All hail George Mason and his law school, the Scalia Law School School of Law. George Mason Madison himself thought that it might be a mistake to have a Bill of Rights, because I think I mentioned this last time that if you. His fear was, if you started enumerating rights. What about the ones you don't bother enumerating, like the right to breathe or the right. All sorts of things. The right to marry. These are things that he feared might be endangered if you went down the road of enumerating certain rights and not mentioning others. Well, I think that worry proved to be ill founded. The worry that those rights might be violated if they weren't by national government, they weren't incorporated in the Constitution was I think, much more, much more of a present danger. And I think we're all grateful for the existence of, especially the first couple of amendments. And those would not have come about without the.
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And the Virginia Declaration of Rights was the precursor to a lot of that in 76. So, Dr. McClay, my last question, and we only have a couple minutes, but this is a big one and I just, I can't forget this because it was actually on the top of my list. Was the Constitution a slavery or anti slavery document? Talk about the moratorium on new import of slaves into the United States prefix clause. We might have to actually continue this to the next episode.
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Yeah, and I'd be glad to do
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A
that because it's such a, it's such a heavy topic. So.
- [44:08]
B
Yes, well, you know, no less a figure than Frederick Douglass, the great, great black abolitionist who was born into slavery and became one of the great orators of the times. And in a speech, the famous speech he gave called but to the slave is fourth of July.
- [44:30]
A
That's right.
- [44:31]
B
But he ends up, he goes back and forth in a dialectical way in the speech, but he ends up praising the Constitution as a glorious document that enshrines liberty, enshrines freedom as principles, and that it's that underlying character of the Constitution rather than the particular things that were inserted to mollify the slaveholders that make up its real character. So I think, I don't think there's any doubt that the country was founded on principles other than the principle of slavery. The slavery was a great aberration. It was never part of a sort of organized plan. It was something that sort of came in for economic reasons in areas where labor intensive agriculture, tobacco first and then cotton and indigo, sugar, so on, where it was profitable to use forced labor, including indentured servants.
- [45:42]
A
Yes.
- [45:43]
B
But I think the crucial thing. And professor from Princeton, Sean Willin, who is no right winger, he organized a petition of historians to impeach Donald Trump twice. Both times he's a man on the left, but he wrote a wonderful book called no Property in Man, which is a Very nuanced, but ultimately resoundingly affirmative view of the Constitution on this subject. And one of the things he points out, and he's not the first to do this, is that the Constitution resolutely avoids using the word slavery. And one of the things he's ferreted out is Madison saying explicitly, I wanted to do it this way because I did not want to give any credence, any kind of crevice to be kind of crawled up through arguing that there is such a thing, a legitimate thing as property in man, that is to own another human being. So there is every place that slavery comes up, there's a kind of euphemism, conditions of servitude, you know, and not never the word slavery itself. And I think that's important. Willinz thought it was important. Pretty decisive that. And as I mentioned before, there are awful lot of them who felt that slavery was certainly not going to last and they couldn't have envisioned the way it grew by kudzu in. As the southern agricultural economy developed. So yeah, I think that now there are these things. There's a fugitive slave laws, there's the three fifths rule, which actually, if it's the northerners, the anti slavery people that wanted the three fifths, Southerners would like to have had slaves represented fully because it would have increased their power.
- [48:07]
A
That's exactly right. In a perverse way. Right. Like, yes, I can increase my head count by caring about it, but actually it's going to keep it. It's a totally. Yes, it's very paradoxical, actually. Yeah, it's totally so But I think,
- [48:25]
B
you know, I think the way people. Yeah, I don't want to defend it, but at the same time, the way people understand it, it wasn't sort of saying a slave is 3/5 of a man or something like that. Often you'll hear that said emotionally that way. So at every turn. And you mentioned the provision that the importation of slaves that Thomas Jefferson signed
- [48:57]
A
in 1807, one of his first acts as president in March of 1807.
- [49:00]
B
Yeah, Jefferson. And Jefferson fought against slavery when he was governor of Virginia too, earlier. Jefferson. Jefferson is a paradoxical figure because he owns slaves and, and he knew the institution was wrong. And he said, you know, I tremble when I reflect that God is just and his mercy will not last forever. I'm not quoting him exactly there, but that's the essence of it. I think in other instances it's a more even more tragic thing that as the 19th century develops and as Slavery becomes more and more entrenched and people like John C. Calhoun start arguing that it's a positive good and not that's exactly evil things that would throw their whole way of life and the economic means that they depend on into disarray. They, you know, there are some things that they simply won't allow themselves to think. And I think that's. That can be said in this instance. That said, it's very hard when you have an entrenched economy in a certain way to change it because you're dealing with lots and lots of people's lives. And it had to be done. And thankfully it was. But the Constitution survived through it all. And if I may say a thing about Lincoln here, just that one of the interesting things about Lincoln is Lincoln was a lawyer. He was a corporate lawyer, he was a lawyer for the railroads.
- [50:45]
A
I mean, that's, you know, non college
- [50:47]
B
educated, just Shakespeare, Euclid in the Bible, non school. He was, you could say he was homeschooled, but it was really. He was schooled by reading books, Shakespeare,
- [50:59]
A
the Bible and doing Euclid's proofs.
- [51:01]
B
Yes, exactly. Those three are often, you know, touted and he did read a few other things, but he clearly had taken in the language of the King James Bible and Shakespeare in his speech. Vine. But Lincoln always moved in a way that was designed to bolster the Constitution. So that, for example. I'll just give one example because I know we're running out of time here. The Emancipation Proclamation, people look at that. One historian, famous historian Richard Hofstadter, said it had all the emotional power of a bill of lading, an invoice. And it really isn't an inspiring document at all. It's just because what it does is it frees slaves in those areas that were in a state of rebellion. So even in states where at that point, Confederate states, where Union armies occupied part of the states, like Tennessee, slaves there were not free. Slaves in Kentucky were not free because Kentucky had never joined the Confederacy and so on. But why did he do it that way? He did it that way because he was. It would have been great to say. I mean, a contemporary politician would say, I declare that all slaves are free. But Lincoln wasn't going to do that because it would be way beyond his constitutional powers. What he could do in his reading of the Constitution, and not everyone agrees with this, but he could do as a commander in chief, was to free slaves as a military, as a tactical measure, so he could free those slaves in those areas in a state of rebellion and would in no way endanger the Constitution. He was looking ahead always and saying, I want to come out of this war with the same Constitution. We went into it, have. I don't want to trash the Constitution in order to win the war and then turn around and have no structure of authority to appeal to. And we're going to get rid of slavery. Let's do it the right way. We passed an amendment to the Constitution.
- [53:25]
A
Yeah. And we're going to talk about Lincoln in our next conversation. And just to kind of tease, I have some questions about Lincoln because some of his detractors say that there's two schools of thought on Lincoln today, that he didn't act decisively enough soon enough in his Cooper Union speech, or he just what he was trying too much focus on process. And I think those people are full of it. And the other ones, you gotta get elected. Yeah. I mean, that's a minor deed. You have to have political power to use political power. Right. And then the other school of thought is that he was a tyrant, suspended habeas corpus and all that. But we are going to talk about that on the next episode. Charlieforhillsdale.com Everybody pick up a copy of the book itself, A Land of Hope. Go buy it and teach your children the property story of America. And so it really is a great, great textbook. Dr. Maclay, I'm loving this series and I wish we had.
- [54:19]
B
Well, this is much fun. This is too much fun. As somebody used to say, more fun than a human being ought to be allowed.
- [54:29]
A
Well, Dr. McCloy, thank you so much.
- [54:31]
B
Leave it there.
- [54:32]
A
There you go. Talk to you soon. Thanks so much.
- [54:34]
B
All right, bye bye.
- [54:38]
A
Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us your thoughts Freedom at charliekirk. Com and please consider supporting our program Charliekirk. Com support. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. God bless. Speak to you soon. For more on many of these stories
- [54:53]
B
and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.
- [54:55]
A
Com.