The Declaration and Constitutional Legacy

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Back in seventeen seventy six If you would have wagered teen rebellious colonies would somehow grow into a continental power dominate world affairs The United States was always more than a risky bet It was an idea and experiment in self government attached Eastern edge very rich continent two hundred and fifty years on Empires have risen and forward human rights have made clawing progress around the globe. And still, the American experiment has endured and evolved Compassing so much of what makes this nation what it is He Dhn Weildman here and this is American History Head and today in the spirit of America's two hundred fiftieth anniversary, the semi quintcententennial poulled a few of our past guests, all esteemed voices, asking this Please tell us one of your most inspiring, uplifting, meaningful moments of America's founding era. our great good fortune, we were answered by none other than Professor Jill Lapur of Harvard University, staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, prolific author of so many important works. Most recently, we the people which just won the twenty twenty six Pulitzer Prize in history Professor Jill Lipapor, Jill, honored again. Thanks for taking our request Sure, Happy two fiftieth, man. Yeah, exactly. I'm feeling it. It's a month out right now Your response to our two hundred fifty query concerns an individual named Jane Franklin McCom lived. seventeen twelve to seventeen ninety four born in Boston, Massachusetts, or that area too the Franklin family, her big brother, Benjamin Franklin This good woman struck a chord for you. She had a front row seat to the whole Revolution and its aftermath, and you wrote a biography entitled The Book of Ages What is it about Jane Franklin McCom that drew you down this path Some years ago, God, it was a while ago. I was assigned. The New Yorker wanted me to write an essay about Benjamin Franklin for some reason. Maybe there was a new biography of him or anything. a I have a very immersive research style. So I went to the library Yale University Library for decades has been working on printing the complete edited papers of Benjamin Franklin. It's I don't know, it's maybe sixty volumes or something You know, most people would search it online, but I don't like to search for stuff online like that. I why would want to read the complete letters of this person who's a writer, you know. So I spent days just pulling volume after volume off to the shelf and sitting on the floor and reading through them. And I was like, who is this Jane Franklin that he keeps writing to And it turns out that Franklin wrote more letters to his sister Jane than he wrote to anyone And their correspondence is the fullest in terms of spanning the whole of his lifetime of any correspondence And I was fascinated by my utter lack of familiarity with her. Yeah. The great historian Carl Van Doren wrote a Pulitzer prize winning biography of Frlin I think it in nineteen thirty eight And he too had been so overwhelmed by Jane that he later wrote a little book about the pair of them and their relationship. He published an edited volume of just her version, her half of the correspondence I think he just felt like he had let Benjamin Franklin down by not being able to really include the star. So I decided to write a book about H. And In a way, you know, Franklin, one of his many aphorisms as poor Richard, this kind of fictional character in which he published proverbs was one half the world, doesn't know how the other half lives. And it really was kind of the philosophy of my biography of Jane, right And it really wasn't a way about her, right? Franklin's whole story and his autobiography is The story of America as kind of the rise from poverty to wealth and reputation, from ignorance to knowledge you know, from poverty to prosperity, from a kind of He was an apprentice who was indentured for that kind of unfreedom to freedom But Jane's story involved none of those transformations. Her life was a life of rags to rags Franklin was one of ten sons He had seven sisters. She was one of them. She's about six years younger than him, I believe He was born in seventeen oh six. She comes along in seventeen twelve. They were Benny and Jenny. I mean they were very close, weren't they? Yeah, so he was the youngest boy and she was the youngest girl. And they were often compared. There was something twin like, you know, in certain families, there's certainly with seventeen kids, you can imagine There's likenesses and differences. and they were kids who were really alike, spirited, lively, curious, And he, I think had a particular affection for her as the most vulnerable person in their family And when he himself We was himself Very poorly schooled Franklin really only had two years of formal schooling. Not that unusual. They came from a Fairly poor family, theirir father boiled soap for a living, they all helped boiled soap for a living. his brothers went into the trades and, you know, his sisters all got married and had many, many children, those of them who survived But Franklin was so bright that they sought a little bit of an education for him two years. and there was a theory that he might go to Harvard College, which, of course was just training ministers. And Josiah Franklin, their father said he thought he ought to pledge a tithe of his sons, one tenth of his sons to the church But Franklin it really had no interest in Right. in the church But what was unusual then is that taught Jenny how to read and write. And most girls, we forget how uncommon it was for girls to get any education, certainly poor girls to get any education at all It's just one of the things that's so striking about the course of her life that she's able to have this correspondence with her brother. And in a way for a historian, what a window that is on the experience of most women, which would have been entirely undocumented in the historical record in any meaningful way. So she provides this real You know, I often think of women's history as sort of like it it's a dark room and sometimes There's a candle And Benjamin Franklin was the candle that allows us to see the life of his sister She was evident throughout his whole life In all of his papers, he wrote more letters to her than anyone else as you've said She thought of him as her second self So they had very different lives It was really extraordinary. As a guy, I grew up with four sisters, so I kind of understand this By the way, my middle name is Franklin as well and I'm named for Benjamin Franklin. There's all kinds of these things. I gre up on Franklin Street. There you go. I a lot of Americans, yeah have that. Interesting. I was born on march twenty seventh, which is the day that her birthday. Jane is So I feel very close to this, thanks to you. Yeah.. She never learned a spell, which we're gonna to talk about in a moment The letter that we're about to talk through here It's just classic. I mean, it's just it's bad spelling everywhere. and yet her intelligence and her wit And I would say grace comes through this writing. Yeah. so remember spelling was not standardized in the eighteenth century. So it's only a real tiny minority of very learned people that spell in a standard way. and a lot of that standardization had to do with The printing trades, and of course, Benjamin Franklin famously worked as a printer for his working life before he retired from business to serve the public Actually, then one of the things I would just say I love about Benjamin Franklin is how funny is, and Jane can be quite funny too in a very different way When people try to read like even eighteenth century printing, it's very difficult because the S's are rendered They look more like Fs to us if they're in the middle of the word. If they're at the end of the world, they look like an S And there was a big movement to get rid of that because people even readers at the time found that hard. and Franklin said, that would be like cutting off a nose. How would you recognize the face anymore? He was really opposed to that change. But so Rush, she never learned to spell. Of course, he did. he would became a printer and printers did have a standardized form of spelling that they adhered to But she was an incredibly avid reader. And a big part of their relationship, she spent her life in Boston, of course, He spent his life either in Philadelphia or in London And a big part of the relationship was him sending her books to read. Interesting. She marries at fifteen years and four months twenty two year old older than her. Hence the name aam at the end of her, them her married name The rest of the family married around the average age of twenty four She would have twelve children nursed their parents in her old age. She was very present in this family I'm sure a huge amount of responsibility and every would turn to her But a lot of personality, which I'm sort of pushing towards this letter that I've mentioned But I want to say one thing that this is a good chance to tell anyone who's younger than me important to write letters. And this is a good example. I mean, we live in the age of emails. I have no idea how our story is going to be told when everything is going out on email, which is so not interesting and designed to be forgotten pretty much Ben and her are lifelong correspondents, as we said, and there's a telling letter that you found. You brought this up to us? So I'm going to throw it to you So it's from Jane McCom. It's an unpublished letter that you found in your research Dated july twenty first, seventeen eighty six. So we're long after the revolution here notot long after, but a few years I'm going to throw it to you to read what you think is important in these early paragraphs because it's further down that we've really got the body of the point here Take it away. Yeah. And let me just set this up a little bit. So they are near the end of their life at seventeen eighty six Franklin's going to die four years later. and Jane will die a few years after that She has raised twelve children and has buried eleven of them. She's raised her grandchildren and her great grandchildren because her daughters and granddaughters keep dying and childbirth She has been among the great sufferers of the Revolutionary War. She had to flee Boston during the siege of Boston Her brother went up to Boston to get her to bring her to Philadelphia. She spent most of the war living with him in the safety of his house in Philadelphia. She wanted to go home and he bought her house in the North End. and it was her great pride and joy. She was right lived in this little brick house. It still stands Right next to the old North church. Wow, really Especially in her very old age when she no longer had children in the house, which really, she didn't have that experience until into her seventies She became even more devoted to reading. And he would send her quite sophisticated books of political philosophy She had also, in the seventeen seventies, she ran a boarding house for the sons of Liberty and members of the Massachusetts Assembly She listened to every meaningful political conversation that took place during the resesistance movement and the Revolution She witnessed the war. her sons fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill. So now we are ten years after American indndependence. It's a anniversary, right? We're celebrating the two fiftieth. They were celebrating the tenth. And so she takes up her pen This old woman in this little brick house in the north E Living alone, Re really kind of in a Virginia Wolf Ray with a room of her own for the first time in her life. Right And writing to her brother in Philadelphia, her esteemed, aged, the most respected, most famous American in the world, Benjamin Franklin to report on the july fourth celebrations in Boston. and on her recent rating. So Iw'l I will just read a bit of this to give you a flavor of it. and then I want there's a single paragraph I'd like to talk about. Dear brother You've given me good pleasure in the short account you have wrote concerning my grandson for you not to perceive that he wants either advice or reproof is a good character. But I perceive you have some expectations of the loss of your advice and flatter myself, I am one So really just just family news I'm glad you have received the soap and like it. She she knew the recipe for the family soap.. And when Franklin was living in Paris, he asked her all the time to send her the soap because he liked He was swanning around Paris, but he liked be pretending to be the rube, the American rustic. and he would show the Franklin family soap, which was quite rough and priming Pimitive his bona fes that he was a real working class man. I perceive you have kept the fourth of July very honorably as well as joyfully. We also observed as usual But we had so lately celebrated the opening of the bridge on the Charles River being a new thing that the other was not so much noticed in our papers. In other words, they had a big july fourth celebration, but if you could picture the first new bridge across the Charles was really dramatic story in Boston. Anyway, so she's writing along. She reports on the Harvard graduation ceremony And now we get to the point where she's talking about a letter that she has received. Yeah. I believe Josiah is quite a proficient in your new mode of spelling. He has written me a letter that I believe perfectly right. I can read it very well, but dare not attempt to write it So this is a new spelling scheme that Franklin is trying to begin the process of standardizing spelling. And he sent Jane his new alphabet for simplified spelling, which was a scheme that never really took off. Benjamin Franklin's simplified spelling. And so she's saying, you know, Gay, this's really interesting, but I couldn't possibly write in this new simplified spelling. I have such a poor faculty at making letters And he had said a joke. Anyway, so she then then this is this paragraph where she she's talking about her reading. and she's referring to a book by Dr. Richard Price, who was an English radical and supporter of the American Revolution Price thinks thousands of Boyles, Clarks, and Newtons have probably been lost to the world and lived and died in ignorance and meanness merely for want of being placed in favorable situations and enjoying proper advantages Very few we know have been able to beat through all impediments and arrive to any great degree of superiority and understanding. Thousands of Boyles and Newtons likeich Robert Boyle, the chemist, right he comes up a Boyleles Law she'd read this treatise by price and she's really kind of essentially copying it out. where prices, you know ese are people who live in a world with, you know, there's been a king, right? There's a royal family there. If you're born as if you're born as a tradesman, you live your life as a tradesman. If you're born poor, you live your life poor. if you're born rich, you in havevered everything They've lived in a world of incredible hierarchy and almost no social mobility And Benjamin Franklin is extraordinary for the social mobility that he has achieved. and he He thinks that is the promise of the new nation that you could be born into poverty and you could rise. And She's read this tract and she's thinking about what this political philosopher has said, which is that There are geniuses out there who have been lost to the world and lived and died in ignorance and poverty merely for want of being placed in favorable situations. That is to say Yes, it's great that we live in a country where maybe you can actually crawl your way out of poverty, but so many more can't that the condition in which you are born can be such a trapic and be such a prison And there can be brilliant people who live in poverty who just never achieve anything And was this part of a regular dialogue of theirs over this sort of philosophy Yeah, they have this really amazing, I mean they require a lot of inspection and reconstruction, I spint. Ye. years making a list of every book that I knew Jane Franklin to have read. Wow. It's I publish as an appendix to this biography I wrote of her book of Aes. In I even found some of her copies of books that he had sent to her in this little town library in Massachusetts. blew my mind to hold in my hand these her copies and you could see where she had written in the margins, like how this woman born, you know, who had no education whatsoever had imbibed The revolutionary idea that we are all born equal talents compat like that we we we should have opportunities to pursue an education, to rise from ignorance and poverty, we are We should we all be born free. that this we they are endowed with equal rights. Th are these are ideas that she Historians often ask like Okay, was the revolution just really a revolution of elites? likeike a bunch of property owners and slave owners really just trying to They didn't like that they didn't want to pay taxes How did it really affect ordinary people? Did ordinary people really believe in those? They did. like her le heartfelt letters are about what it means. she didn't necessarily accrue the benefits of the ideals of the revolution But her children and grandchildren did, and she knew that they would I'll be back with more American history after this short break. that's called four Dsertations and I looked into it a little bit, written by Richard Price, as you say, a Welsh clergyman. So this guy's from over there Any political radical There are a series of these dissertations And the first one's called on Providence. an objection to the idea that everything in life is faded by provrovidence. which is so interesting. you know, we're dealing with the aristocracy over there. There's a sense that you are going to be who you are throughout your life This is really speaking to the idea of An American ideal that we can move upwards And that was very much in the air. Before the revolution, during and after, people were really coping with that idea of social mobility, right Yeah, and it's hard for us even to recover how radical an idea that was in the eighteenth century. You are born to what you are born to. You are to the manner born or you are not to the manner born And it was the American sensibility and that challenge that, but very much with the support of radical thinkers around the world. Franklin, Benjamin Franklin was quite good friends with Richard Price And another thing that happens in seventeen eighty seven, not long after this letter Now a lot of places I grew up on Franklin Street and a lot of places in the United States are named of course, Frlin or Washingon Columbus, wh U But Franklin was somewhat uncomfortable about this because it had a kind of the tinge of nobility about it. Right. And so the people of the town of Franklin wrote to him and they asked him, you know for a gift I think they wanted to, you know get some money for him, put up a statue him whatever. And he's like, you know what I will send you a list of books that you should put in a public library. I would like there to be a public library in this town. This is again, before there are public libraries, which are a huge part of opening up the doors of opportunity to people that don't have an education, right? Franklin had started the first private library that was open in Philadelphia in the seventeen thirties. Like he's so committed to education. So he writes to two people to ask what books should be on my list for this town. They're naming after me He writes to Richard Price and he writes to his sister Jane. And they send back suggestions like what are books that an American town, a new town should have Yeah whichich I just think is really it's so it's so refreshing. Beautiful. Yeah It's refreshing. It's uncynical It speaks exactly what you're saying. There's so many people that take one view of this I indndeed, Americans everywhere were really struggling with what was this revolution about? and what did they fought for How do we ground this experience that we've just gone through and the struggle that's continuing? Jane was drilling down into that ground You also speak about her in a later book that you wrote called These Trhs. twenty eighteen Less of a biography, more of an idea of her. places her in this new nation, These truths really treats her more emblematically, if I may No matter how much she's included in the revolution, she's still excluded from society. And this is really the crux of the issue as an idea In this country, we are constantly faced with the remarkable ideals that were set out right from the beginning in the most famous documents And yet the reality was always different that there was a gap between the two And that's a lot of what you've worked with in your career, am I right Yeah, and I think, you know, you see the consequences maybe of Really the costs of living within a myth of the country's history when We're living in an extraordinarily painful moment economically where Those of us with kids have real concern that our kids won't do as well as we were able to do. You know, I did a lot better than my parents did. you know, my grandparents were immigrants There had been, you know, my grandmother was an Italian peasant who never learned how to read. She never learned how to speak English. My father went to college on the GI bill and became a school teacher and I'm a professor. Like you can trace this, you know, my think of my husband His grandfather was a blacksmith. hisis father became a physicist and he's a computer scientist. Like there's a nice. you could see a sort of trajectory. There's nothing wrong with being a blacksmith Yeah notothing wrong being school. like but in terms of economic opportunity, right And that That doesn't seem to be continuing. we're looking at a real economic crisis. So it it's useful to be reminded of how hard how hard fought Economic opportunity has been, how hard fought the idea of social equality has been of racial equality or you know, of welcoming of immigrants of the things that that have characterized much of American history have been contentious throughout. So I write about Jane in this b these truths, which is a thousand page history of the country.. It's just people with many, many, many, many characters that you might not know about There's a lot in the book about Benjamin Franklin, but for my purposes, it's also useful to remind readers He was extra It was actually extremely unlikely that anyone really would rise from his kind of poverty to his kind of reputation. and you know, he's one of the world's most important thinkers in the eighteenth century. an extraordinary journey. There's also something to be learn learned from the ordinary journeys. Yeah If you turn this on its head, it's not the negative that you that so many imagine How could a D decclaration of Independence that claims all men are created equal be written by a slave owner. That's always the one that gets pulled out correctly so as the hypocrisy that's built in baked into that document That's true in many, many different arenas of American society at that time and throughout our entire history. This is a chance to say, Gee, isn't that interesting that that gap always exists and it closes and it opens and it closes and it opens throughout. It becomes kind of this engine, this tension that is built into the American system, into the American thinking, that's different from a lot of other places in the world. Is that am I saying this right I mean, I think N. Infrastructure that fuels the economy changes over time. There's nothing continuous about economic development. over the course of American history, right? So Unsurprisingly, the economic opportunities for generations change. They change with the conditions of you know, is it Are you a farmer In Vermont in the eighteen thirties Farming sheep and you're doing okay. well And then there's the Mexican American War and the United States acquires the northern half of Mexico and there's all this new cheap land for white settlers who are going to move into that land And everybody in Vermont leaves their sheep and leaves their far farms and Vermont becomes extremely poor. And there's a lot of great shepherding going on in the southwestern part of the country. The railroad changes everyone's economic opportunities, the factory, the telegraph system you know, mass industry with the Ford system in the beginning in the assembly line What unions do to provide economic opportunity is a story of much of the twentieth century. The GI bill has these extraordinary consequences Yeah, and theyre but they but as you say, they're not all stories of expansion And if anything, what one of the things that's really tough in trying to take a long view of American history at just this moment is that income inequality, which is quite measurable Certainly since nineteen thirteen is when the federal income tax is first assessed after the sixteenth Amendment makes it possible for Congress to tax incomes good about that. I mean From a historiian's point of view is then we have tax records, federal tax records. So you can look at incomes from nineteen thirteen forward and the disiscrepancy of income inequality where the measurement of income inequality is a really important tool for understanding economic opportunity and economic mobility across American history And income and inequality is extremely high at that point. That's, you know, the gilded age right where they're the great robber barons And they are just incredibly impoverished, especially immigrants, like when I think my Italian grandparents came and They were certainly better off in the United States than they were as peasants in Italy, but they lived grindingly poor lives And the real fuel that the Second World War and the GI bill is, you see income inequality just plummet. So there's just just really not a huge gap between the rich and the poor kind of you know, the late nineteen forties through the nineteen seventies Plenty of poverty, no doubt But the gap nationally is not that high, but since Since the early nineteen seventies, income inequality has been steadily rising in the United States. so we're back sort of where we were in the gilded age. Well, it's the economic determinist view, you that this is being driven by that. What I love about Jane Franklin and about your book is how it putushes the ideas of this country in the forefront. And someone like her and Benjamin Franklin were very well versed in talking about the identity of being American in a different way than it was. And was a really it's a really fascinating feeling So I'm clinging to this notion as we go along here. When you turn to slavery It is the ultimate hypocrisy. All men are created equal. they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights L, liberty, and the pursuit of happeniness. U, except if you're not White and male In seventeen seventy six, there were over half a million enslaved souls in the United States with a population, a total population of two point five million, twenty percent of the population The Declaration did not free anyone in seventeen seventy six like that Jefferson tried to remove the passage that condemned the British king for slave trade. But he was forced not to by slave holding interests in the south and the North Nonetheless As I say earlier It's there You know, it sits there as this glowing phrase, All men are created equal and It can't be defeated, you know, no matter how much hypocrisy is involved, it continues onward. and that seems uniquely America I'm sure there's equivalence in other countries, certainly in France but it's it's really baked into our system, isn't it? trying to cope with these ideas that seem to fall short in the reality of our lives and yet fighting for a better way So I think one thing we tend to forget about the Declaration of Independence is that It's not that it's a plagiarized document, but Jefferson always said it was really simply an expression of the American mind. It was meant to to still in quite Beautiful prose I no shade on Jefferson. Yeah. He said what he said better than anyone else had said it But the ideas that the Declaration of Independence expressed were ideas that Americans had been expressing for quite a long time. and more immediately earlier in seventeen seventy six in the first state Constitutions, which preceded the Declaration of Independence And includcluding, Virginia's Declaration of Rights, which was in June of seventeen seventy six Pennsylvan'sstitutional Convention in May. And so the idea that all men are born free and equal was one that Americans had been putting down on pieces of parchment all that year Yeah. And you know, in common sense from Thomas Payne's pample from january seventeen seventy six. And Those ideas are also found And arguably have real roots in petitions submitted by enslaved black men State. legislatures seeking their freedom You know, in seventeen seventy three, seventeen seventy four, you find these petitions in the Massachusetts arrchives that black men in Boston snd to the legislature, some other states as well saying All men are endowed with certain andalienable and natural rights and they are including the right to be free. And under those terms it's unconstitutional that you hold us in slavery. And therefore, we petition you to free us and thoseose ideas find expression in the Declaration of Independence But then the execution that would have ended slavery, which would have been so much easier in seventeen seventy six than it became later on Because although there are a large number of enslaved people, there are not that many compared to what they would be after the invention of the Cotton Gin in seventeen ninety three So I think it's important that we recognize how influential were the voices of enslaved people in articulating that these ideas are what the new nation is founded on what the new state constitutions are founded on So even your Massachusetts Constitution from seventeen eighty says it's written by Jhn Adams, All men are born free In seventeen eighty three, a woman in Massachusetts who' held as a slave File suits. says, accccording to the Constitution, we're born free, therefore I can't be held as a slave by this person who claims to own me. And she wins. and that's the end of slavery in Massachusetts.. So I think it's really important to know the struggle that you're talking about. precedes the Declaration of Independence, and it is immediately acted upon by people seeking their freedom under its terms Freder Douglas, he cherished the Delaration's principle of liberty and equality He also questioned the United States supporting independence movements abroad, but Reused to grant those same freedoms to African Americans. His famous speech in Rochester, New York, july fifth, eighteen fifty two What to the American sllave is your fourth of July I mean There are people like him just dealing with the complexity of and absurdity of the situation You can't escape the words and yet Actions speak louder That's the reality of America all the time Your work deals with the historical weight and responsibility of those truths carrying forth. And so We celebrate, while at the same time, understanding the tremendous cost of that argument, the price paid by so many that continue the work, trying to close that gap up One of the things that I think we sometimes overlook is the crucial contribution of the abolitionist movement and black abolitionists in particular, like Douglas, like Like the woman who sued Mas for her freedom in Massachusetts in seventeen eighty three, is that it is they cononstitutionalize the Declaration of Independence. Americans often think We hold these truths to be self evident is in the Constitution. It's not The Constitution was written in seventeen eighty seven. But the Declaration of Iependence in effect becomes part of the Constitution because of what abolitionists do, making it part of the Constitution You know, I work in schools these days. I'm part of National History Day. I'm on the board of that and is something I say often to kids is that it's one thing to celebrate the Declaration of Independence, but eleven years later is the two hundred fifteth of the U. S. Constitution. So we are in the midst of now entering into an incredibly important founding era, you know, a celebration of a founding era that lasts more than a decade. And every every year, another two hundred fiftieth anniversary of everything is going on But it all culminates in twenty thirty seven with the US. Constitution. I don't remember the two hundredth anniversary of the Constitution in nineteen, what was that? nineteen eighty seven It just went by me because I was in my twenties But but boy it's that's the one to really focus on, isn't it? Yeah, I write about the nineteen eighty seven moment a lot in my book Wee The People because it actually was a really important moment in the history of American constitutionalism. So Your listeners will have to go buy the book. There you go Great honor to talk to you Jill. Thank you so much. I hope we see you again Joill Lapur is the David Woods Kempert forty one professor of American History at Harvard University Longime staff writer at the New Yorker, best selling author of works We've discussed, These Truths and the Book of Ages Right up to this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history, We the people Run, donon't walk, get these books. Thank you so much, Jill, such a pleasure again Thanks so much and have a great fourth. Yeah, happy two hundred fifty Hey, thanks for listening to American History H