We are going to
record this session and welcome everybody. We're so excited to have
you join our Friday class, all about the principles of
the American Revolution. My name is Kerry Sautner. I will be here to help
and guide you with your questions through the
chat and please ask questions. We love questions and we love shares in the chat about
the conversation going on. Today is an extra
special Friday session because we are here with
of course Jeff Rosen, but also Professor Amar. Without further ado, because I know we have
such a short time and so many questions
for you professor, I'm going to turn it over
to Jeff. Kick us off. Thank you so much, Kerry, and welcome Professor
Akhil Amar. Friends, I'm so excited
to share with you the light and wisdom
of Akhil Amar. He was my great teacher in law school and it was Akhil
who inspired my love of the Constitution and
all the teaching and learning we're doing
together is a result of the sparks that Akhil's brilliant teaching
lit many years ago. Akhil, welcome back to the National Constitution
Center where you're such a frequent friend and we're here to discuss the principles of
the Revolution. There's no one who can
shed more light than you. I thought it would
be illuminating for me and our friends, for me to read the crucial second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence
and just go through those [NOISE] crucial sentences
clause by clause and have you elucidate the principles
of the American Revolution. Let's begin at the beginning. "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all
men are created equal." What principle is the
Declaration expressing there? That's such a big one. Obviously, the deepest is one of human equality, and by men, I think it's very
fair to understand that as human beings,
men and women. There's even now a hint of the Almighty in that
are created equal. You could have just
said, are born equal, but are created equal. That's such a big idea. We're still trying
to catch up with it. I'm not sure they
fully understood all the entailments
because how does slavery consist to be squared with the idea that
everyone is created equal? It doesn't mean that
we're all equally tall, or equally strong, or equally attractive, but this deep idea of
birth equality, which is going to eventually be the first sentence of
the 14th Amendment, and when born in America, is born a citizen,
born an equal citizen. That does have some, I think
today we would say, all sorts of powerful implications.
You're born equal. Whether you're born,
well, back in those days, the idea is no one is
really born a king or born a nobleman or born a serf. There's no Divine Right
of Kings as such. They would say, well,
Americans are the equal of Britons in England but today I think we'd
say you're born equal, whether you're born
Black or White. You're born equal, created equal whether you're
born Jew or Gentile, whether you're born
male or female, whether you're born in
wedlock or out of wedlock. Alexander Hamilton
very famously is a bastard and born
out of wedlock. You're born equal whether you're firstborn in your
family or fifth born, so no primogeniture and
entail laws that should privilege the firstborn in the family over the fifth born. I think today many
of us would say, I would say, you're born equal whether you're
born gay or straight. Wow, that's a deep, powerful principle that people
should be judged not by the circumstances of their birth because we're all born equal, but by what they do with the opportunities
that life gives them. Wonderful. Thank you so much for that. "That they are endowed
by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights." What's an unalienable right? Again, we have this
idea of the Creator and endowed by the Creator. To alienate means to part with, to give, or to sell. If my uncle gives me a
watch, it's mine now. It's a gift and I
can alienate that. I can give it to you, Jeff, as a memento of our many
years of friendship. I could sell it on eBay. There are things that are
mine that I can give away, that I can alienate, but there are some things
that I can't alienate, even if I wanted to. I couldn't give away or sell. I think that the most fundamental would be my
own freedom of thought. I've been endowed with a mind, with a brain and each of us
has his or her own brain. No two people share the
same mind or brain, even siblings, even twins. You and I are both fathers of twins, even identical twins. Your twins and my twins
are non-identical, but each of us has
our own mind and soul and that means we
can't give that up. We have to think for ourselves. Lots of things I could have
other people do for me. I can have them paint my house or fix my plumbing, or mow my lawn. They can alienate, give up their labor to
some extent and I can give up some of my money
and we can make a trade. You help me on this and
I'll give you that. But what I can't do is have
other people think for me. At the end of the day I have to decide for myself, for example, what I think is the
meaning of life, my relationship to the universe. I can't alienate my conscience. I can't really
ultimately say, Jeff, you do the thinking
for both of us. Even though I love
you and respect you, at a certain point, I have to
do the thinking for myself. That is an unalienable right. In some traditions, life itself isn't alienable. It's not
quite mine to give away. It's a gift from the Creator, and so I have a duty
to preserve it. Not just a right but
a duty to think for myself because conscience
is inalienable. My thoughts have to be my own. Who else's would they be? That's so crucial what
you just told us that if we have certain
duties from the Creator, we also have rights to perform the duties and both the right and the duty are unalienable because we have to perform it. So important that you
said that conscience was the quintessential
unalienable right. I want to read from Madison's
Memorial and Remonstrance. He says that "the religion then of every man
must be left to the conviction and
conscience of every man, and it is the right
of every man to exercise it as
these may dictate. This right is in its nature
an unalienable right. It is unalienable because
the opinions of men, depending only on the
evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow
the dictates of other men." Then he goes on to reaffirm
your point by saying, "It is unalienable also, because what is here
a right toward men, is a duty toward the Creator." Because this is so important. One more word about Madison's really interesting
suggestion that our opinions depend only on evidence contemplated
by our own mind. The evidence contemplated
by our reasoning minds. To what degree is the idea of a reasoning mind
itself unalienable? At some deep level you
believe what you believe. You might be able to force
me to do a certain thing, to move my arm in a certain
way because if I don't, an electric shock
will be administered or something like that. You might be able to coerce my actions but how
can you actually, in fact, compel me to
hold a certain opinion? You can't force people to
have the opinions they do, the thoughts they do, the conscience they do. You can try to persuade them. You can try to give them evidence of the world
as you understand it, but you can't really
force them to think something that they don't
think, to believe in some deep, deep way what
they don't believe. Fascinating. We know that to be true. That is why it is self-evident. Which is the crucial idea of this whole theory of natural
rights that we're exploring. Now you told us why
some traditions see life as unalienable right because we have a
duty to preserve it, because it's a gift
from the Creator. Why and in what ways is
liberty an unalienable right? Well, in some ways we
do trade things off. I give up my liberty to just lounge around
all day in exchange for maybe showing up at work and my employer pays me, but there might be again, certain liberties
that I can't give up, like liberty of thought, liberty of the mind,
liberty of conscience. Here's, Jeff, what
we're now agreeing on. Not all rights are unalienable, maybe even not all kinds of
liberty are unalienable, but certain things are, and then we have
to figure out what those core things are that
we actually can't give up. I can't sell my votes to you. Even if you were willing
to pay, even if I said, it doesn't matter
that much to me, you give me five dollars, Jeff, and you just tell
me how to vote. There are lots of things
where if you give me five dollars, I can
give you something. I can give you 10
minutes of my time or I can give you a book that I wrote
or something like that. There are lots of
things that I could sell to you for five dollars. But not in the end, my convictions, my beliefs, or for example, my vote. A vote isn't something that we have in a pure state of nature. Some of the rights that
we have are really rights that emerge after a
society takes shape. A right, for example, to serve on a jury. They're not juries before
government comes along, they're not elections,
they're not votes. Lots of the rights
that we have actually aren't pure natural rights, they're created by custom, by convention, by laws, by all sorts of systems. That's true of some liberties and many rights,
but not everything. Wonderful. It reinforces your first point that we know that
freedom of conscience, freedom of thought is
an unalienable liberty and there might be other
unalienable liberties, but there are some liberties that are alienable
that we can surrender partial control over in order
to get greater security and safety of the rights
that we've retained. We have one more unalienable
right on our list, and that's the
pursuit of happiness. You know, Akhil, I'm now writing a book inspired
by our work together about what Jefferson had in mind when he talked about
the pursuit of happiness. I've learned that he had in mind not feeling good but being good, the pursuit of virtue, of being our best selves, using our powers of
reason to master our unreasonable
passions and emotions so that we could achieve
human flourishing. I've learned that
that definition came from the classics,
from Aristotle, Cicero, great
enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Francis
Hutcheson picked it up. Do I have that basically right? How would you say that Jefferson understood the
pursuit of happiness? You've taught me something that sounds very persuasive
and plausible to me, but I couldn't have said
that five minutes ago. Our audience should know that, although you were very kind to say that I was your teacher, and technically you
were my student, truthfully, you
taught me more than the books that I had read about inalienable
rights and conscience. You wrote a very important
paper that you actually published in the
Yale Law Journal talking about some
of these things. I didn't quite
understand them before. Their first draft was
very wide ranging. They talked about Theophilus
Parsons and all sorts of documents beyond the
Declaration of Independence, George Mason, James
Madison, lots of stuff, and it sounded right to
me and you've taught me. What you say sounds
right to me but I actually had never
heard that before. I know some people have emphasized it's not a
guarantee of happiness, it's the ability to pursue happiness and happiness
can be elusive. I have said, he is modifying a
traditional formulation made famous by John
Locke and others, a trilogy that you'll
see in many places, life, liberty, and property. I think I had seen my way clear understanding that he is
modifying things a little bit. He's not giving us the
standard Lockean trilogy; life, liberty, and property. But what you say
makes sense to me, but I think you've researched
it more deeply than I. Well, I can't wait
to learn with you about this and to share with you the drafts of the project
as I complete it. But yes, Jefferson
was reading Locke, but not the Locke of
the Second Treatise which talks about life,
liberty, and property. But the Locke of the Essay
Concerning Human Understanding. [OVERLAPPING] Human Understanding,
yes. Locke is a great empiricist, a great enlightenment figure, a very interesting person
in all sorts of ways. One of his famous sentences was, "In the beginning all
the world was America." He's actually talking about
how in his kind of model, at the beginning there's
so much real estate for the taking and no one
really quite owns it all. You don't own all
that your eye can see anymore than you own the ocean just because you throw a fishing line in
there and you're trying to catch a fish, you don't own the entire ocean. Too, just because you're
hunting on a vast expanse, you don't own the
entire continent. Really interesting sentence and very famous one of Locke, "In the beginning, all
the world was America." That's already imagining a
certain America in which actually maybe there aren't people -- because they
were people living here, Native Americans and others -- but from a Lockean
point of view, did they really own
the land unless they mixed their
own labor with it, unless they were farmers of a certain sort who
plotted the land and bounded it and tilled it and improved it in various
ways and cultivated it. If they were merely
hunter-gatherers, for Locke, they weren't mixing their labor with the land in a way that generated a certain kind of property right from
his point of view. Lots of interesting
and important and controversial issues there. All of that is wonderful. The discussion of the part of Locke that talks about the social contracts that
you were just discussing, the Second Treatise, leads us to the next sentence that I
want to ask you about. "That to secure these rights, governments are instituted
among men deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed." Where does that come from
and what does it mean? It is very much something that comes out
of a Lockean tradition. Here's where government
doesn't derive its power from, for example, the
Divine Right of Kings, King James I of England, who was also James
VI of Scotland and the beginning of the 1700s. He said, I rule by
just divine right, God ordained me to be the ruler, I'm the sovereign of all. No, the Declaration
is saying that's actually not where -- There's this famous
scene in Monty Python where King Arthur is
engaging some folks who say, "Why? Why do you get
to tell us what to do?" He says, "Because the Lady of the Lake handed me
[LAUGHTER] Excaliber." This fellow says, "The right to rule derives from a
mandate from the masses, not because some watery tart
lobbed a scimitar at you." The consent of the government
is a very different idea. It's not that some
people are born destined to rule over others regardless of the interest
of the others, the idea is, we're all created equal and if we're all created
equal, at some level, we need to agree about what the fair rules of
government are. That's one thing. A second thing that was at the beginning
of that sentence, and one person on The Legal
Academy really highlighted this and done some interesting
work is Randy Barnett. He's a Libertarian. He's done things with the National
Constitution Center. He emphasizes very much
in much of his work, The Preamble of the
sentence you just read, that government exists
to secure rights. I'm not sure that's
the only purpose of government because I'm not
sure that, for example, just building roads and canals, which are very useful for
all sorts of purposes, so that we can do
things together, I'm not sure that's
merely to secure a right. Government may do things above and beyond rights securing. Just helping us to cooperate
as human beings but Randy Barnett is very much a Neo-Jeffersonian
and Neo-Lockean in his absolute insistence, and I think he's onto something
important, when he says the purpose of government or a main purpose of
government is to make sure that these rights are secured to implement them. That's so interesting. You mentioned the Essex Results that we talked about
many years ago and [OVERLAPPING] he gives a more thorough
definition about, what kind of rights we surrender
to government and why. I'm going to read it again to see if we think
it's relevant. He says "All men are
born equally free, the rights they possess
at their births are equal and of the same kind. Some of those rights
are alienable and maybe parted with
for an equivalent, others are unalienable and inherent and of that importance, that no equivalent can be
received for the exchange. Those rights that are
unalienable and of that importance are called
the right of conscience." That helped me understand why we surrender the
rights to government. We have to get something
back, the equivalent, and the equivalent is greater security and safety
of the rights we've retained. That helps me
understand what you just explained about
that sentence, that to secure these rights, governments are
instituted among men. Is that basically right? Yeah, and I did learn some of that from your
paper way back when. Our next sentence is that "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive
of those ends, it is the right of the
people to alter or to abolish it and to
institute new government, laying its foundation
on such principles and organizing its
powers in such form, as to them shall
seem most likely to effect their safety
and happiness." You have cast so much light on that central clause. What does it mean? That's very much an idea
that Locke elaborates in his set of writings, Two
Treatises of Government. When government
becomes tyrannical, it's the right of the people, Jefferson goes even
further and says, it's the duty of the
people to cast off this tyrannous yoke and to try to create a new government that will better serve the core
purposes of government, central of which is the
securing of rights. The rest of the
declaration is going to be an indictment of the King of England and his buddies
in Parliament saying, here's a list of all the
things that the King has done. Sometimes on his own, sometimes with people in Parliament, that are tyrannical, that are violations
of our rights as we understand them
and that's why it's permissible for us to renounce all
allegiance to him. Because the deal was, he was going to
protect our rights and in exchange for his
protection of our rights, we owed him allegiance and we were going to
be loyal subjects. But now, whenever the phrase that's used is
"a long train of abuses," which actually comes
directly from Locke. If we can show that again
and again, not just once, but repeatedly and
systematically he keeps disregarding
our rights, invading them, threatening them, it's our right, our duty to shed our allegiance and try to create
a better system, that will better
serve our rights. We're going to
want to consent to that new and better system. Well now I understand why the right to alter and
abolish government, understood as the right of revolution against a
tyrannical government, would be an unalienable right. Is it limited to a right
of revolution or does it include the right of say constitutional
amendments as well? Well Americans go beyond the Declaration over
the next 20 years. The Declaration is just
trying to justify revolting, actually in a military way. It's going to come down to fighting against a
tyrannical government. Later on, people
like James Wilson, who has strong connections to Philadelphia; he is one of the signers of the
Declaration of Independence. He would be one of
only six people to sign the Declaration
and the Constitution, along with the likes
of Ben Franklin, Roger Sherman, and others. James Wilson, whose statue is in the National Constitution
Center in Signers' Hall. James Wilson is going
to come along and say, "We've actually tamed, domesticated a right
of revolution. You don't need to appeal to arms anymore to effectuate it. We can just have
constitutional amendments." We can amend the Constitution, not merely because government's
acted tyrannically, but just because we think actually we've got
a better idea. Government right now is okay, but we have a better
idea and we should be able to implement
that idea through a constitutional
amendment which doesn't require an appeal to arms. Because it doesn't require
an appeal to arms, the trigger for it, the
threshold can be even gentler. We don't need to prove
that there's tyranny. or a long train of abuses.
We just need to say, hey, it's okay now, here's something that
would be even better. Let's put it to a vote in a constitutional
amendment process. That again, doesn't
require an appeal to arms, but just merely free
and fair elections and sound rules for
constitutional amendment. Democratic rules. Voting rules. Fascinating, so democratic
rules, voting rules, the rule of law themselves
would be implicit in this unalienable right to alter and abolish government. Is that right? We're moving beyond
violent revolution. The Declaration is early in this process and
what does it lead to? The Declaration is
negative in a way, it's casting off the King's
power and England's power, but it immediately leads to affirmative things
in each state. Each colony is now a new state, a free and independent state. Eleven of them are going to
adopt state constitutions. They're going to basically
create their own governments. Once they start to do that, they learn additional things and they practice self-government, and by the time of
1787, '88 where, there's another conclave
in Philadelphia not to sign a declaration
of independence, but to draft the Constitution, Americans have actually moved
beyond the Declaration, beyond Locke, in some ways. Beyond merely a right
of violent revolution, but rather just a
more full-blown idea that the people can modify
their constitutions, basically at any time and for any reason that they deem
good and sufficient. They think would be better than the regime that they have, but they're going to be able
to do it peacefully through elections rather
than by warfare. The Declaration is
basically getting Americans ready to
continue a war that, the fact has already started. Lexington and Concord were April 1775 and then
you have Bunker Hill in June of 1775, that
the fighting was already a year old by the time the Declaration of
Independence comes along. But later on, we're going
to have this idea, hey, to change a regime, we don't need to fight wars. We need to have good
fair votes with free speech and voting equality. Wow. Well, thank you so much
for helping us begin down the path from the Declaration to the Constitution and
identifying that basic idea of free and fair elections rooted
in popular sovereignty as a core principle that emerged from the Declaration and undergirded
the Constitution. Akhil, I want to ask you to do something
really important now, and I haven't shared you
with this in advance, so I'm going to give
you a moment to think by reading to you the three principles
that Kerry has put in the chat box that in the past with our
friends in this class, we've distilled from the
Declaration and said that these are the principles
of the Revolution that undergird the Declaration
and the Constitution. I'll read the three
principles we came up with, and then I want you to give your light and your reflection on which three principles
you would choose [NOISE]. Here are the ones that
we have in the chat box. Popular sovereignty,
which is the idea that the most legitimate
form of government is driven by the people. Natural rights, the idea that rights are given by God or nature and not from government, and they are inherent
in all human beings at birth, and the rule of law. The basic idea that we have
a government of law and not of man, or arbitrary rule. We identified
popular sovereignty, natural rights, and
the rule of law. Would you choose those
three principles, or would you have
a different list? I think that's a good
list and great list. I'd say these are not merely principles of the
Declaration of Independence. I'd want us to bring
the Constitution into the picture which is
11, 12 years later. I want to remind people, it's not just ideas and words, but actually deeds and
experiences and events. What's on the front of the
National Constitution Center? The Preamble. The Preamble isn't just a text, it's actually describing
something that's done. Let me pull out all the reasons; We the people... do ordain and establish. Here's the point. The Constitution
was actually put to a vote up and
down the continent. That's popular sovereignty. The Declaration wasn't
put to some special vote. Uniquely in the
history of the world, Americans, up and down an entire continent in 1787-88 put
the thing to a vote. That's popular sovereignty, that had never before
happened in world history. Massachusetts had put their
Constitution to a vote in 1780 and New Hampshire in 1784, but never had a
continent done it. By the way, the
ancient democracies, there weren't very many of them, but they never put
Constitutions to a vote. One man, a law giver, hands the law down from on high, like Moses on Sinai or Solon, the law giver in ancient Athens. Even the ancient
democracies didn't ever put their
constitutions to a vote. We did; that's
popular sovereignty. More people were
allowed to vote on the Constitution than
they had ever been allowed to vote for anything
else in human history, how they end up [inaudible] that's popular sovereignty. The Declaration moves in
that direction when it talks about consent of the governed, but it's throwing
off a government, it's not building a
new one affirmatively, the Declaration is
envisioning a war. Constitution is
utterly peaceful, not a shot fired, and the losers
acquiesced and they say, "Well, we were outvoted
fair and square." They don't storm the Capitol. Wow, that's not so
much the Declaration, which isn't put to a vote, which leads to a shooting war
but the Constitution says yes, popular sovereignty; yes, natural rights. But I'll see you natural
rights and raise you, because those aren't the
only rights we have. Voting rights aren't
the state of nature. Rights to be tried by a jury
or to participate in a jury. There are all sorts of other
rights above and beyond the ones that a small number that we can deduce from nature. Natural rights, yes,
and other rights. Yes, of course, the
Constitution describes itself as the supreme law
of the land, it's law, and so it has to be
animated by an idea, and most importantly
of the rule of law, which we haven't talked
about in great detail, but it's a very deep principle, as opposed to the rule of one person or set of persons. As opposed to whim or will. It's actually about
reason and consent. Its a very, very deep idea, that has gone through different iterations
over the centuries. But, I think those
are three great ones, I just want to remind
you for each one, we've got to go beyond the Declaration, to
the Constitution, which is the embodiment, the actual implementation
of popular sovereignty, which itself is
law in a way that the Declaration is not quite, and is affirming all
sorts of rights and not merely natural rights. But for example, rights
to a jury trial, which are very much rights
within a governmental system. That's so important to remind us that these are the principles
of not only the Revolution, but the Constitution, and they're perfected in the constitution with its
popular ratification, its recognition of rights
beyond natural rights, and its embodiment
of the supremacy of the rule of law
rather than whim. Just before we leave this question of trying to
distill the principles, are there any principles
of the Declaration and Constitution you would
add to our list of three, or would you encapsulate the whole American idea
in a different way, if I asked you to do it
in a paragraph or so? I just remind us that even
with the Constitution, the thing was deeply flawed because we weren't really living it out until much
later in the story. Slavery isn't going to be
eliminated until the 1860s. Women aren't going
to get the vote, and Blacks aren't
going to get the vote everywhere in America equally, Black men at least until
after the Civil War. Women aren't going to
get an equal suffrage until the 20th century with the 19th Amendment
across the board. Only in my lifetime do 18
year-olds, young adults, get to participate equally
in the political process, that was an amendment added in my lifetime, and abolition of
poll tax disfranchisement. We're still trying to catch
up to some of these ideas. Jeff, when you and I met, two men couldn't get
married to each other and pursue their happiness
and their virtue, even if they deeply loved
each other, or two women. When you and I met, that was not legal anywhere in America. Today it's legal everywhere
in America because we really are created equal, gay or
straight; I would say, and we really do have a
right to pursue happiness. We're still trying to
catch up to some of the implications of
some of these really, really deep, profound ideas
that are being articulated. That is so true and so crucially
important to remember. Kerry, I'm learning so
much from Akhil as always, and our friends in the chat box are chatting the Preamble. Do we have time to ask Akhil
to go through the Preamble? I would just love to take that clause by
clause if we could, but I understand that maybe that's too much
to ask of Akhil. Kerry, can I do that? Go through the Preamble? [OVERLAPPING] Sure. We
did the first sentence, or the first three words and
the last few words already, so why not keep breaking it up? I love color coding it
for the students too, so they can see which
part is in there. Akhil, if you're cool with that, I'm cool with that
[OVERLAPPING]. Let me do one thing, maybe the most important thing. It's very tacky. I apologize in advance. But we're talking
about big ideas. We don't have a lot of time, so I'm going to be
straight with you. If you really are serious
about these ideas, you can't learn it
all in half an hour. You actually have to read, and you have to read books. I've been seeing people in the
chats talking about books. I don't know some
of those books. I'm going to be straight with
you, I think in my books, you will find
elaborations of these, the two most of all, and they grow out of
my relationships with the National Constitution
Center, are a book called America's
Constitution, a Biography, that first chapter, which is just the Preamble. It's 50 pages on the
Preamble, [NOISE], and The Words That
Made Us actually tells you in a much
more detailed way the story of how we actually did up and
down the continent, state-by-state, ordain
and establish the thing. I can't really just
give you all of that. That's a whole
chapter of the book. That's Chapter Five of this book, excuse
me, Chapter Six; it's called People. But just in a
nutshell. Honestly, I know some people were talking about books in the
chat and all the rest, and if those books are so great, you should have
their authors here. But I actually learned from Jeff and what I
learned from Jeff, I put into these books what I learn from
my other students, I put in these
books, and I can't summarize everything
in just a few seconds. You have to buy the book,
you have to read it. It'll take you a
long time to read because there's a
lot of stuff there, these are deep,
deep ideas that are world-transforming
but in a nutshell. Wait, Akhil. Let me just stop and reinforce
what you just said. First, friends, I want to show Akhil's book,
which you can see, I literally have at my side, the same book that
he just showed you. I want you to do what he just suggested and
read this book. As Akhil said, it's long and you won't
be able to read it quickly and you may
have to really focus. But it's crucially important and the most
important thing that both Akhil and I can urge you to do is the
importance of deep reading. You'll see behind me
on my screen here, the most precious
possession I own, which is this legend
that my grandfather, who I never met, made
with his own hands. It says "The fountain of
wisdom flows through books." Those beautiful words
were inscribed in a Detroit Public Library and he, during the depression
in the 1920s, saw it and carved it with his own hands to
pass on to his son, my dad, who passed
those values onto me and they were just as Akhil's parents
passed them onto him. That's what we're
trying to do to you. It's a superpower if you will take the time to read
great books like Akhil's. The only way to
grow in wisdom is to tap into that
fountain of wisdom, which flows through books. Recognizing that and urging
you to read Akhil's book, which is your homework
for the class, let's go through the
Preamble and I know we did read the first words, but let's start again. We the People. They used to say back
when he was little more respectable that
when Rudy Giuliani, who was running for president, every sentence in this
campaign tour featured a noun, a verb, and 9/11. A noun and the verb
is 'we the people' is the subject noun, 'do,' that's the verb or, 'ordain and establish',
we're doing something. What's the object? A Constitution. Noun, verb, and actually direct object. We are ordaining a constitution. That's the most important
thing; the people are doing it. They're voting on it,
they're talking about it. They're deliberating on it. People are opposing it and
they're allowed to oppose it. There's freedom of speech and debate in this process. It's epic. It takes a whole year. Nothing like this ever had happened in the
history of the world. The world would
never be the same. I call that the Big
Bang in world history. A whole year, a whole continent, not just voting on
a constitution, but talking about it, deliberating about it in state
after state after state. We, the people do ordain and establish a constitution for
ourselves and our posterity. We understand this
is not just for us, but we're launching a whole
system of what we do. Later generations
can do themselves, they can amend and they have, they've made amends for
some of the mistakes that we've made like
slavery, for example. It's not just one
year, one person, one vote, one time, one year it's
beginning a project of inter-generational
constitutional governance that will change the
history of the world. They tell us six
reasons why they do it. Blessings of liberty is really important. That's this idea. We create government to
secure these rights. That hearkens back, but the other biggest thing, because I'm not gonna go
through every single one. But the other biggest
thing is general welfare. It's not just about rights, it's maybe about roads
and canals and safety. Not everything that
government does necessarily is perhaps just
about protecting rights. Sometimes it's just helping
us to do things better as a nation than we could
do it as individuals. Final thing, I wanted
to just tell you as common defense is
really important because the threats to
America at the time were from these foreign monarchs who actually didn't believe in
the consent of the governed. Yes, some of them had helped us in the Revolution like France. But George Washington and
Ben Franklin had fought against them in what we call
the French and Indian War, the Seven Years War in the
1750s and in the future, who knows whether France is going to keep
supporting us or not, or Spain, which is a monarchy, or Britain which is a monarchy, or Russia, or all sorts of autocrats in modern-day Germany;
back then it was Prussia. The Constitution
is fundamentally a common defense project
championed by George Washington who was the commanding
general who was able to preserve our liberty
by defeating King George. Then when he had all
power at his command, he had the only army
on the continent. He gives it up, surrenders
his commission, surrenders the sword to
go back to his plow, to live under laws that his
fellow citizens have made. That's why we can trust him
to be our first president. He's the presiding officer, the president of the
Philadelphia Convention. He towers over everyone in Signers' Hall at the National
Constitution Center. When you go there,
you'll just see literally he sort of head and shoulders above
almost everyone else. Maybe not Gouverneur Morris, but definitely little
Jimmy Madison. We the people do
ordain a constitution. We're doing this thing with
free speech and free votes for ourselves and our posterity up and down the continent. We're doing it to secure
the blessings of liberty, to secure liberty for
the general welfare. But those are all secured
in part by common defense. We have to hang together as a nation and we have
to do so today. You see, even though we're red and blue and
coastal and heartland, there are divisions in America, but if we don't hang together, God help the world actually, because we are an amazing model of an entire continent of people that actually is
trying to live out certain principles of the
Declaration, the Constitution, and work together
to show Jews and Catholics, and
Whites and Blacks, and Gentiles, and Protestants, and
Buddhists and Muslims, people of different
religions, different races. Some people whose family came
over yesterday on a boat, other people that descend
from the Mayflower. We actually are a people and we believe in certain things
together like the Declaration, the American Creed, we can
all be part of that project, and if we don't hold together, and common
defense is a big part of that, the world will lose
its last best hope, because there are other
democracies in the world, but none of them
are multicultural truly the way modern America is, and that wasn't fully
at the founding. It was a little bit
at the founding, but then it got better after the Civil War and into
the 20th century. That's what we have
to preserve today and it's what the Preamble says. That's so inspiring, Akhil. At the end of that completely dazzling
encapsulation of the Preamble, you told us about
the last three of the purposes or objects or means of establishing the
blessings of liberty, which was promoting
the general welfare and promoting the common defense all by creating this
common welfare pact. But I want to ask you
about the first three, which you signaled at the end. In order to form a
more perfect union, establish justice, and
ensure domestic tranquility. Why did they choose
those particular words and what did they have in mind? Well, a more perfect
union means it's going to be indivisible,
no secession, because the Declaration
of Independence is 13 free and independent states. They're independent,
even of each other, and you can have a Brexit. Eleven years later there's
a realization no, actually, we can't allow a
Brexit; one state to go off or another state, because suppose it goes off and one state allies
with Britain, and another one allies Spain, and another one
allies with France. Now we've got all the
European conflicts here on American soil. That will carve America up. It has to be a
more perfect union then the Articles
of Confederation, it has to be an
indivisible union. That's what a more perfect -- It's going to be a
union-like the union of Scotland and England to create a regime in which we don't need a big
army because we won't have internal land borders and
armies threaten liberty. We're going to actually not mess with the rest of the
world and we're not imagining getting involved in land wars in Europe or Asia. We're just going to try to
make this continent work. That's a perfect union. It's indivisible. Domestic tranquility,
we want to avoid convulsions and insurrections
like Shay's rebellion. We need to have a strong
inner system to avoid these domestic tumults, and yes, it is about justice and fairness and rights
and the rule of law. You see how the Preamble is a beautiful codification of many of the things that
we've been talking about. Popular sovereignty, the
rule of law, rights. It's all there. Wow, and I think the
only sentence that we have to parse one
last time is the first. It says, "We the people
of the United States." But as you taught me, and as we can see at the National Constitution
Center where we have James Wilson's
earliest drafts, and in even the earlier
drafts said "We the people of the states of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Providence
Plantation and so forth." Why did they change the language from "We the
people of the states of" to "We the people of
the United States" ? Well, we can't be entirely sure, but this idea of "united"
was really important. Ben Franklin originates the
world's first viral meme, the world's first cartoon, it's called Join or Die, it's very famous, we've
seen it everywhere. Before that there weren't
cartoons, political cartoons. But he's in a
democratic society. He's trying to make appeals
to his fellow citizens. He's so amazing;
the Franklin Stove, Bifocals, the Lightning Rod. A political cartoon make
a strong statement, join or die in other versions that's going to
become unite or die. The states have to be united and the United States
and the Declaration talks about the United Colonies. If you had named
each one by name, it's going to be
a little awkward because suppose all 13 don't ratify. The last sentence
of the Constitution, Article 7 says any nine will do. And if we had listed all 13 it might be a
little awkward because actually when George Washington takes his oath of office as first president of
the United States, Rhode Island hasn't
said yes yet. In fact, North Carolina
hasn't said yes either. We don't know all
the reasons why. I think it's soars more. I think it really captures
right at the very beginning this idea of unity;
E Pluribus Unum, we are one and indissoluble. But also if you
named all the 13, it would be a little awkward if Rhode Island basically
said "Thanks, but no thanks." And
did so enduringly. In fact, they rejoined very shortly after George
Washington's inauguration. Wonderful. Akhil, I cannot imagine a greater privilege than
walking through with you the precious words of the Declaration and the
Preamble to the Constitution. Thank you for that gift
to all of our students, and although I'm always reluctant to do this now
is the time for me to turn the Zoom back over to Kerry for a few questions from our
friends before we break. Really, I know we need to
wrap up because our students, need to jump, but that was unbelievably important
and interesting. One question that
goes along with that, this Big Bang moment, and our students were
asking about it. If you had a parse out
the Big Bang moment of the Revolution and wanted to look at that Big Bang moment, leading up to the Revolution, what kind of a mini
Big Bang is there? Would it be Boston Tea Party, would it be the Boston Massacre, there's was so many pieces,
that within 15 years we go from loving the king to fully, the biggest
break-up in world history. All these pieces matter, but would there be
one that you can really rally them
around studying? Thanks. For me, the
most important thing isn't even the Declaration because it's not put to a vote. The most important thing
is the Constitution. That's why it's the National
Constitution Center, not just National
Declaration Center, because we put the thing to a vote and really
talked about it, and it's not the fault of the folks in 1776 that
that didn't happen, they were already in the
middle of a shooting war. It's just going to be very
difficult to have that, so how amazing is
it that in 1787, '88 the wars have stopped. There isn't any army
overawing America, but there's going to be a
war sometime down the line, welcome to the world, and they took this little
moment of relative peace and prosperity and used it to
really talk amongst themselves, think among themselves
and come up with a system that would actually
work going forward. That's what's most
amazing is they put the thing to a vote
with epic free speech. The biggest thing is 1787, '88, the Constitution. What led up to it? Well, of course, you
can't get to that without the Declaration. What led to it? You're absolutely right, Kerry; none of my early books started
my story early enough. My book on America's
Constitution started with the Preamble, started with 1787,
and everything else, the ordainment, was backstory. Like the Declaration
of Independence. The new book, The Declaration isn't actually even Chapter 1. I start much earlier
because I start in 1760. Everyone seems to be happy. As Britons in America in
1760, it's all hunky-dory. They're toasting their
new king in Boston, raising their glasses of ale
in the inns and alehouses. In 15 years it's all
going to unravel. They're saying, "God
save the king." In 1761, James Otis
and John Adams, they're all cheering
their new young king. And 15 years later they're saying he's a tyrant and we have to overthrow
him by force of arms. So that's Chapters 1
and 2 of the new book, and I never told
that story before. They're an interesting
cast of characters. I think the biggest pivot
point is when the Bostonians stage a kind of political theater
called the Boston Tea Party. They are saying, "We
don't like this. You keep taxing us," and
the British react to what was ultimately peaceful -- It was a little provocative -- but it wasn't the
storming of the Capitol, no one died, no one
came close to dying. It was in a peaceful,
nonviolent political protest. Yes, a few 100 casks of
tea were thrown overboard. But in part because the Brits weren't listening and
Americans couldn't vote. They were trying to get the
Brit's attention instead of talking to Americans and
continue the conversation, the Brits react in 1774
with a set of laws. They call them the
Coercive Acts. They're proud. They say,
"we're coercing you." Americans called them,
the intolerable acts, that tried to shut down
the Port of Boston, that abrogate the charter
of Massachusetts, that basically deprive Americans going forward of jury trial. They tried to shut down
local town meetings, trying to basically shut
down political discourse and punish Americans for basically petitioning and speaking out. That's the turning point, Coercive Acts of 1774, and it's going to be a
very quick path from that to Lexington and
Concord and Bunker Hill, and George Washington, as
head of a continental army and the Declaration of
Independence and a shooting war. In a nutshell, Britain loses America because the
Brits aren't listening. They're not reading
American newspapers. Jeff, after he graduated, as my student, spent many years
as an amazing journalist. America's Constitution
grows up alongside American newspapers
and Americans are beginning to
talk to each other. Boston, New York, Philadelphia,
Charleston joining, uniting, and the Brits
aren't listening. They're trying to [NOISE]
shut down discourse. They tried to prohibit
petitions and all the rest, and that is going to lead -- we didn't talk about actually
one other sentence, Jeff, of the Declaration in
which the very end of this list he says," After
all of these things, we keep petitioning, and our petitions aren't
being listened to." If they're not listening to you, what else can you do? That actually was the last straw because Americans had been, they kept trying to basically appeal to the King,
to Parliament. "Here are our
grievances; talk to us. We can maybe come up with
a solution together," and George III never read
American newspapers. Here's an "ah ha" fact. This is all in the new book. I didn't know this stuff
before the new one because the other book
started too late. They started in 1787. Now I'm starting at 1760. Ben Franklin, I told you
what an amazing guy he is, he's in Signers' Hall too, one of six people to sign the Declaration and
the Constitution with James Wilson, actually, George Washington isn't one
of the six because he was off fighting for our liberty when the Declaration is signed. Ben Franklin in the
1760s and 1770s, late 1760s, early 1770s. He's in Britain for 10 years. He's one of the greatest
figures in the world. Today he'd be a Nobel Laureate. He's one of the most famous
scientists in the world. Probably the most
famous New Worlder. He said all these amazing
things. But he's low born. He's one of 17 children and
his father's a candle maker. He's not upper-class. He's in London for ten years, and George III can't ever be bothered to ask
him for a cup of tea. He's the greatest New
Worlder in existence, and George III isn't interested. He's not interested
in listening to his low-born American subjects. He's not reading newspapers. Who's Franklin? He is a
newspaperman. He's a printer. He's not conversing. They try to shut down
conversation with a course of [NOISE]
that's actually -- Oh, I will respond to
them in just a minute. But Jeff, you see that
our mutual friend Neal is apparently calling
me [LAUGHTER]. Akhil, we will let you
go; that was fantastic. That's actually one of my
favorite Ben Franklin stories, is how his energy
towards Britain turns as well and then being basically scolded by Parliament, and his like, "I'm
out, we're done, we're not going to make
this up" [OVERLAPPING] He is so loyal at the beginning
of my story, and he's, he's demeaned, he's mistreated, he is mocked, he's ridiculed. A British class structure
treats him as dirt and a British King can't be
bothered to even meet him. What an unbelievable life lesson to apply to all relationships. You need to start by listening, and that is a fantastic
for civil discourse. Constitution discourse
or in general, life. Thank you so much, Akhil. This has been such a
privilege and so much fun. I feel like it's
our revolutionary movie theater going on today. Thank you, Akhil. Thank you, Jeff, and students
have a wonderful day. Thank you so much, Akhil
that was so meaningful. Say hi to Neal and
we'll talk soon. Okay. Bye. Bye.
