Liberty & Equality in the American Founding with Carol Berkin | BRI’s #ConstitutionDayLive

0:00 so both in terms of external threats and in turn of in terms of internal rot i guess you could call it they thought that the creation of a national government to oversee this would in the long run protect the liberty uh and the the life

0:22 and the possession of property of the greatest number of american citizens hi this is tony williams a senior fellow with the bill of rights institute and this year we are celebrating constitution day by exploring the relationship of the principles of liberty and equality and how we continue

0:44 to balance these principles for this special episode of scholar talk i’m joined by professor carol burkin a distinguished historian author and expert on the american revolution and women’s history to explore how the founding generation interpreted liberty and equality as you watch this video please think of questions you’d like to ask dr birkin

1:05 we’ll be bringing her back on constitution day to answer your questions live follow the link below to submit questions and receive a variety of useful resources videos and e-lessons on the subject of the constitution as we lead up to the day itself carol i want to thank you very much for joining us to offer your expertise and provide some historical context on

1:26 liberty and equality delighted to be here great well my first question relates to the the earlier colonial period and the struggle against great britain and the american colonists spoke frequently of their traditional liberties uh but they also spoke of their their natural rights during their resistance against great britain

1:48 so what were some of those liberties and and what is the difference between what they called the rights of englishmen and natural rights i think people should think of natural rights in their perspective as the rights that preceded all creation of society and government

2:11 it’s very john lockian that is an idea that there is something called the state of nature in which people existed with no regulation and no limitation at all uh and must have decided somewhere back in the miss miss of history uh no one dared give a

2:34 date to it that maybe it would be better if they basically formed society and created a a governing body that could protect those natural rights so the natural rights come from god and from nature that is that’s their

2:56 understanding and they were jefferson describes them in the declaration of independence as life liberty and jefferson writes the pursuit of happiness because he is a flourish there but the men and we’re really talking not

3:16 about the revolutionary generation as a whole we’re talking about white men and white men of property they understood that what jefferson was saying in a kind of romanticized way was the protection of property not not just your plot of land but rather your possessions

3:36 that that you had a natural right to your life to liberty is the hard one because i think what they really meant and and scholars have disagreed about this your liberty meant that you were free

3:56 both in movement and free from domination by another individual they had to step rather gingerly about this because of course many of them were slave holders which certainly denied that right to african americans

4:17 but liberty i believe meant the the the opportunity to make one’s own way in the world both both physically and in terms of economic uh gain and in terms of what one thought and what one said

4:40 uh but the pursuit of happiness i think really was understood by them as the other piece of this which was the right to retain your possessions safely the right to to keep and make use of what you have

5:01 either earned by the sweat of your brow inherited from your family that is that that’s really what was being pursued happiness is unless you assume that that means happiness but i think jefferson i don’t want to say let us astray but

5:22 but he becomes very vague when he says the pursuit of happiness so those are your natural rights and and as jefferson writes in the declaration these are unalienable you you you cannot be forced to give them up but you also can’t voluntarily give them up apparently it’s like the leopard and his

5:44 spots the leopard can’t give those spots up and and this is um an optimistic view that people uh psychologists later on in sociologists who have written books about people’s desire to be dominated people’s desire to have someone make

6:05 decisions for them would argue with jefferson about this the traditional liberties that is the rights of englishmen that they talked about were came after the creation of government

6:26 and these were the laws the statutes the customs the precedents uh the policies that the government set so when they said we have the rights of englishmen they’re talking about the right to free speech they’re talking many of the things that ultimately

6:47 become uh written into the bill of rights uh the right to a a trial by your peers these are i don’t want to say artificial but they they come after the government is created and the general understanding by

7:07 the american colonists who supported the revolution was that in fact the the social contract the agreement between the governed and those who govern them which lock talked about as a social contract that when people back in the midst of time

7:29 got together and said we’re going to create a government it was a contract that we will recognize the legitimacy of that government as long as it protected our natural rights as long as it served the best interests of the people at the point at which it ceased to serve the best

7:50 interest of the people the contract was broken and i think it’s interesting students and teachers should ponder the the terms contract this is an era really when the idea of legal agreements about things

8:12 was beginning to really dominate another way of saying that is the rise of capitalism that these things were beginning to to develop and so locke speaks of it in the same way that if i signed a contract with the bill of rights institute we both had to do what we promised to do otherwise the contract

8:34 is null and void so what americans are saying and you can if you read the declaration of independence and you read past the preamble into the body of the declaration of independence excuse me which is the part they thought was important it’s really a kind of lawyer lawyerly

8:56 brief that says this is how the king broke the social contract and it’s interesting to look at it i i actually never hurts for a historian of the era to reread that some of the things they accuse the king of doing relate to natural rights

9:17 that is the first one is he’s refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good you haven’t done what you promised to do in terms of our natural rights but many of them are about the post-organization of society they’re about the way in which

9:39 his policies and his treatment of laws already on the book or books or precedents already established by the government have not been attended to have not been obeyed and so the declaration of independence shows you the way in which these two sets of rights

10:00 are combined to to fuel in fact a declaration of independence to fuel a war for independence excellent um so uh moving a little bit forward from the the time period of the declaration to the constitution itself

10:20 uh liberties were really threatened or in the 1780s uh and and that led to the constitutional convention and and men like madison and hamilton washington and others they wanted a stronger national government that they thought would ironically do a better job of protecting liberties than than a weak government so

10:41 uh and you dial into this in your in your book a brilliant solution which was fantastic uh and can you can you explain how they expected this new constitutional order to better protect liberty well for one thing the protection of your life and your liberty when there were foreign powers far more powerful that my students often

11:05 think i once had a student who wrote from the moment the pilgrims landed on plymouth rock which makes me think he was not a sailor uh landing on the rock is not a good idea america was the most powerful country in the world it’s very hard sometimes to shake students these are college students from

11:26 the belief that america’s position today is the position they always had but in fact in the 1780s people in paris did not open their newspaper to find out what the people in america fought and were doing because that was the most important thing in the world we were we were a third-rate

11:48 nation that they didn’t think really had a chance of lasting very long and in fact countries like holland and france and england were thinking well when that country falls apart and if we can give it a little nudge we can divvy it up we

12:09 and we know this is true because the french ambassador at the time the constitutional convention was meeting is writing home to his superiors well what part of the united states would the king like to take when it falls apart so clearly

12:30 men who were nationalists that is washington hamilton governor morris at the time madison madison thought that 13 separate sovereign countries which is how you really have to think about the states they weren’t administrative branches of a nation they

12:52 saw themselves as sovereign independent powers we’re not going to be able to protect the peoples of those states against invasion against indian attack against slave uprisings which southern states leaders white leaders worried about that

13:14 there were the danger to your liberty and the danger to your life were really quite quite real also madison for instance thought that the people who had taken power in virginia were corrupt

13:35 the 18th century political leaders worried enormously about power corrupting we need to do that more today they they really believed that the lust for power was open-ended and madison writes that the government of

13:57 virginia that they’re squabbling over who gets what what kind of power we need a government over the that government and other state governments that can take into account the needs of all the people but who also

14:17 could um diminish the power of these state governments and that’s really what they wanted to do they wanted to create a uber power that was made up of uh they hoped the very best of every state

14:38 you know the creme de la creme of wise political men who would in essence discourage this kind of state-level greed that that madison saw so both in terms of external threats and

15:01 in turn of in terms of internal rot i guess you could call it they thought that the creation of a national government to oversee this would in the long run protect the liberty uh and the the life and the possession

15:22 of property of the greatest number of american citizens and that’s why they were strong advocates i don’t think that it was because they themselves were power hungry if you will allow me hamilton for instance

15:44 wanted a strong national government that could take its seat in the at the table with the european powers not for him his own interest in his personal power was really not very he could have quit but he was a fabulous lawyer if he was

16:06 interested in his own wealth and his own social status and his own everything being in the national government was not where it was at he could have made a much better life for his family if he he wanted the country to to be powerful enough to protect itself

16:26 always and i think that that was the nationalist motivation when they went to this convention in philadelphia thank you right well well james madison uh then fights for a bill of rights in the first congress after the constitution is ratified and the state’s ratified those ten amendments you wrote about that in your your book the bill of rights yes uh and

16:49 so can you describe this struggle to create the bill of rights and and how did the bill of rights itself protect liberties yes even though the constitution was ratified a large number a great number of american voters that is american white men who

17:10 own property uh still had were wary about the national government they thought it was going to become as they saw the english government the government of great britain to it would become tyrannical inevitably

17:31 they believed it would become tyrannical and what they wanted was to call a second convention and basically uh take away all of the powers that the national government was given they were states rightists in the most extreme they believed that local government

17:52 protected people’s rights better than this national government would and that they they wanted to eviscerate the powers that had been given to the federal government well this and and the strongest advocates of this were in madison’s own home state and so he uh worried a lot about this and as

18:15 those who’ve studied madison know he was a big worrier generally and so he he said what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to and what these opponents by the way had claimed their biggest argument was this government is intended to be tyrannical because there’s no bill of

18:37 rights in it there’s no statement about the rights of the people that proves that that uh danger is afoot well the man who wrote the constitution said but most of the state governments already have a bill of rights in there and and our government has nothing to do

18:57 with most of those issues so why should we say we’re not going to do something that we have no power to do let’s all go home they really wanted to go home they’d been four months in philadelphia away from there their home so madison said that was a tactical mistake that a strategic mistake

19:19 what we’ve got to do is in the first congress we’ve got to issue a bill of rights and he was clever enough to say that bill of rights will not touch the powers of the federal government it will guarantee all kinds of powers that

19:41 american people are worried about even though really he knew that no enforcement uh uh mechanisms were available to the federal government he wrote this he wrote a long long i think there were

20:01 36 or 38 rights that he included all of which would have been recognizable to the average american white male most of which the colonies had in the british government had endorsed

20:22 and he submitted it and he thought of course federalists that is the nationalist dominated in the congress and in the presidency and so it’ll be easy going and he was amazed to discover that the congress said go away don’t bother us we’ve got

20:42 important things we have to do we have to set the import export duties we have to decide where the permanent capital was going to be leave we have to create the judiciary leave us alone with this we don’t need this madison was stunned but he persisted and he persisted and he persisted and over the months people

21:03 finally gave in and they said okay all right and ultimately they reduced madison also was not a great stylist he was not a good nemours or an alexander hamilton or thomas jefferson and he he made the argument that a it will win over a lot of the people who

21:25 are still not throwing this support to the government it’ll win over north carolina and rhode island who haven’t joined the union yet it will it will diminish the the push for a second convention and everybody said okay fine

21:45 and they reduced it to 12 amendments actually the senate reduced it to 12 amendments and and it passed and what is it madison had a very complicated mind a very complex mind and he said even if we can’t

22:08 provide an enforcement mechanism and we don’t until the 14th amendment after the civil war what we can do what he hoped we can do is we can establish in the minds of americans that this is a statement is the credo of what americans believe in

22:31 that they will internalize the bill of rights they will i mean he didn’t use that word but basically he hoped that people would internalize that this is what america stands for the bill of rights explain what america stands for to the world and to americans themselves

22:53 and so madison had both practical political reasons for proposing the bill of rights but he also had these really quite lofty uh hopes that it would become the american credo for which i i

23:14 deeply admire him for maintaining most people are either just practical or they’re pie in the sky but madison was able to do do both right and it did go through you know congress approved it because

23:35 the few anti-federalists who were in congress were horrified that it did not include certain things they wanted and the one big thing they wanted would have eviscerated the power of the constitution they wanted that the government can’t do the federal

23:56 government can’t do anything that is not expressly it’s a very important word express given to them in the constitution so there would be no uh uh implied powers there would be no and they lost on that and then they passed it and it was so

24:18 unimportant to the men at the time that when jefferson as secretary of state announced that it had been ratified by the states he announced it after more important things such as fishing rights had been approved and he no one thought it was really very important it was symbolic

24:39 and and it remained symbolic really until the 14th amendment and even after that it’s not until the 20th century that judges begin to cite it in their cases extensively and then precedents are set to rely on the bill of rights uh so

25:01 madison did a good deed for us yes he did [Laughter] so uh the revolutionary and founding aspirations of liberty that we’ve discussed these american creeds uh you know sometimes we’ve fallen short and and sometimes desperately short uh and and we’re not yet achieved for all

25:23 people um and so in what ways was liberty imperfectly achieved in america well it began falling very short when they talked about the american people the image conjured up was white men

25:43 who owned a property they essentialized fancy word that was the essential figure that they they envisioned certainly women did not i think one way to think about this is

26:03 groups of americans remained passive citizens uh they did not participate actively in governing or in choosing governors women indentured servants tenant farmers uh

26:24 younger sons who didn’t own property certainly by race and and uh gender african americans native americans all these people were left out they were not considered they were not considered qualified

26:47 to be active participants in this social contract and so from the very beginning that’s the case over time what’s interesting i often draw a timeline for my students and on that timeline i show them that one of the great engines of american

27:07 history is the struggle to turn these groups into active citizens and the first one is all white men regardless of whether they own property the second one temporarily was black men after the american civil war and i always

27:27 give a big x when students write black people got the vote because black women did not and then in the 20th century women got the vote and then in the civil rights movement black people male and female once again got the right to vote so this is one of i think the great engines of our history

27:50 and and it shows you a kind of um striving by these groups it didn’t just happen automatically oh gee we forgot you come on aboard oh come on aboard it it is one of the great struggles in american society and it

28:11 goes on to this day and i think that it stems from the fact that there stands the bill of rights and there stands the constitution that says you are not living up to what what you claim is your manifesto your credo

28:32 and and so that struggle goes on and hopefully we will reach a point where not only is it fully inclusive but there is no backtracking there is no you know here black men you can vote wait a minute no you can’t vote because

28:53 we’ve introduced jim crow laws so hopefully uh everyone will be active active citizens that’s what i think those of us who enshrine in our own minds the constitution and the bill of rights uh hope for

29:14 carol uh i want to thank you very much and we will end on that hopeful note uh and and i want to thank you very much for for joining us uh and we look forward to you joining us on constitution day as well i’ll be there right so what questions or comments occur to you throughout this video please use the link below to send them directly to dr

29:36 birkin and me and we’ll answer them on constitution day in the meantime please check out our other videos we have specifically designed for constitution day including an analysis of the constitution itself and why it is relevant to students with anastasia bowdoin constitutional expert and senior attorney at the pacific legal foundation

29:57 also a trip to mount vernon to explore what historic structures can teach us about the complexity of our country’s founding and more so we’ll be exploring these issues all year so stay involved with us on social media and look out for many more events and ways to get involved thank you

30:23 you