Lecture delivered at the Lifelong Learning Seminar, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan

 

In order to conduct politics according to a written constitution, it’s probably best to have a citizenry that can read. And if they can read a logical syllogism like the Declaration of Independence with understanding, so much the better. The American citizens of the founding generation, male and female, found themselves in the midst of the Second Great Awakening, the movement that gave us, among other things, the Sunday school. Many Americans of that generation learned to read in Sunday school. By 1790, almost every male American citizens in New England could read and write, and the vast majority of women could, as well. In fact, New Englanders were the most literate population in the world at that time. The literacy rates declined as one headed further south, but estimates are that even in the states with the lowest literacy rates, 70 to 75 percent of male citizens could read and write.

This doesn’t mean that the American Founders were satisfied with our schools. The great political revolution or regime change which they had undertaken required a new kind of education. One of the most famous founding-generation Americans, Noah Webster—of dictionary fame—complained that American schools lacked what he called “proper books.” There was no shortage of books as such. In fact, schoolboys memorized Demosthenes and Cicero and even debates from the British Parliament, which Webster judged to be “excellent specimens of good sense, polished style and perfect oratory.” But there were two problems with them: coming from “foreign and ancient nations,” these speeches were “not very interesting to children.” What is more, “they cannot be very useful” to American children, who are neither Greeks nor Romans nor even Brits, any more. “Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country”; know “the history of his own country”; “lisp the praise of liberty”; and learn about “those illustrious heroes and statesmen, who have wrought a revolution in [America’s] favor.”

The principal American textbook, Webster argued, should consist of a collection of essays “respecting the settlement and geography of America; the history of the late revolution [he was writing in 1788] and the most remarkable characters and events that distinguished it, and a compendium of the principles of the federal and provincial governments.” “These are interesting object to every man; they call home the minds of youth and fix them upon the interests of their own country, and they assist in forming attachments to it, as well as in enlarging the understanding.”

Far from rejecting the wisdom of foreigners—wisdom, after all, is wisdom wherever it comes from—Webster cites “the great Montesquieu,” who teaches “that the laws of education ought to be relative to the principles of the government. In despotic governments, the people should have little or no education, except what tends to inspire them with a servile fear,” because “information is fatal to despotism.” In monarchies (what we would call constitutional or limited monarchies) education should differ depending on which class of citizens the student comes from. In such monarchic and aristocratic communities, where one’s station at birth largely determines one’s lifelong standing, each citizen should not only ‘know his place’ but know the way of life and purposes appropriate to that place. There is no point in teaching rhetoric to a shoemaker if he lives in a monarchic regime, and so will have no place to exercise his oratorical skills beyond the local tavern. Which could only lead to trouble.

However, Webster continues, now quoting Montesquieu, “in a republican government the whole power of education is required.” “Here,” Webster observes, “every class of people should know and love the laws. This knowledge should be diffused by means of schools and newspapers; and an attachment to the laws may be formed by early impressions upon the mind.” Some fifty years later, a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln would say almost exactly the same thing in his now-famous address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield.

Webster even insists that “a system of education as gives every citizen an opportunity of acquiring knowledge and fitting himself for places of trust” is one of the two “fundamental articles” of republican regimes. The other is equal economic opportunity to “acquir[e] what his industry merits”—an opportunity granted when the aristocratic systems of primogeniture and land monopoly are abolished, as indeed they are in the Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance, written as they were to establish the United States regime as a commercial republic. Education and economic liberty together “are the fundamental articles; the sine qua non of the existence of the American republics.” It would be, he writes, an act of “absurdity” to copy “the manners and adopt the institutions of Monarchies”—their way of life and their ruling forms.

Although several states had provided for colleges and academies “where people of property may educate their sons,” they have made “no provision… for instructing the poorer ranks of people, even in reading and writing.” While their “constitutions are republican,” their “laws of education are monarchical.” Webster therefore advocates the establishment of public schools.

What is more, “When I speak of a diffusion of knowledge, I do not mean merely a knowledge of spelling books, and the New Testament. An acquaintance with ethics, and with the general principles of law, commerce, money and government, is necessary for the yeomanry of a republican state.” Indeed, “the more generally knowledge is diffused among the substantial yeomanry, the more perfect will be the laws of a republican state” because the citizens will be better able to choose good representatives an themselves take on governing responsibilities, in turn.

Montesquieu taught that while the principle of monarchy is fear, the principle of republicanism is virtue. Accordingly, Webster argues, “The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.” He concludes: “Until such a system shall be adopted and pursued; until the Statesman and Divine shall unite their efforts in forming the human mind, rather than lopping [off] its excrescences, after it has been neglected; until Legislators discover that the only way to make good citizens and subjects, is to nourish them from infancy; and until parents shall be convinced that the worst of men are not the proper teachers to make the best; mankind cannot know to what a degree of perfection society and government can be carried. America affords the fairest opportunities for making the experiment, and opens the most encouraging prospect of success.” Webster knew that the founding generation of Americans would soon disappear. Simply maintaining the regime they established would prove difficult, but there remained much more for new generations to learn and accomplish. Education beckoned as an open field for them.

Along with the other prominent members of the founding generation who wrote on education, Webster saw a very tight connection between political self-government, republicanism, and the need for moral self-government and certain kinds of learning. Obviously, this learning would include such intellectual fundamentals as spelling and arithmetic and the moral fundamentals seen in the New Testament. But as we see, it would also include the economic and political fundamentals, “the general principles of law, commerce, money, and government,” and a student’s grammar school were not too soon to learn them. Learning these economic and political principles of self-government remains a task for today.

More politically prominent Americans than Webster thought carefully about education in America. I will discuss three of them: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. But behind all of them we see the educational advice of the English philosopher, John Locke, who had such a strong influence on the argument they had made in the Declaration of Independence. So, I’ll begin with a brief look at Locke’s seminal book, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, published in numerous editions beginning in 1693.

The first thing to notice about Locke’s book is its intended audience. Locke does not address the upper aristocracy; indeed, he ridicules the aristocrat as a rather frivolous and useless fellow—”always with his cup at his nose,” a cup that too often contains substances stronger than chocolate, coffee, or tea. Locke instead addresses the father of “the young gentleman,” meaning the gentry class or lower portion of the landed aristocracy. It is in them that Locke sees the kingdom’s continued and future greatness because they show the traits of rationality and industry which the pampered and idle lords and ladies will never exhibit. Indeed, one of the key features of Great Britain’s rise to dominance of the seas and of commerce would be transition the gentry class made from the mores of feudal, warrior-aristocrats to those of what one nineteenth-century writer would call “captains of industry.”

Locke was a home-schooler; his gentry could afford to be. But he also dislikes the boys’ schools: “Children who live together strive for Mastery.” The constant supervision by and contact with adults is far better. The two principal teachers of the Young Gentleman will be his father and the tutor his father hires. Although Locke doesn’t yield an inch to even the most Calvinist divines in taking a jaundiced view of the nature of children, saying that they love liberty but love “Power and Dominion” even more, he denies the tutor any power to punish them corporally. Even the father should strictly bridle his own anger while punishing the boy, interspersing calm admonitions between the spanks. Locke recommends this course because he regards the authority of example as more powerful than either coercion—which is both resented and, eventually, emulated, inculcating habits of tyrannizing—or mere precept. “Ill patterns are sure to be followed more than good rules.” And even such firmness as this ought to be relaxed as soon as possible, as the father asks his son’s advice on appropriate subjects, especially those concerning the management of the estate. Listen to the boy’s ideas, and when he comes up with a good one, pretend it’s his very own, and follow it. Such a mild form of freedom actually increases the father’s authority by adding to his son’s esteem for him. The habit of ruling and being ruled, government by consent, begins here. And it quickens the child’s maturation, substituting serious concerns for childish ones: “The sooner you treat him as a Man, the sooner he will be one.”

Locke decries the old, “scholastic” education—the Christian Aristotelianism fashionable in most of the schools of his time—but also the abstract and indeed mathematical education favored by that firm anti-Scholastic, Descartes. He wants, above all, a useful education, intended to bring the Young Gentleman to the point where he can “judge right of Men, and manage his Affairs with them.” He wants to inculcate “the knowledge of a Man of Business, a Carriage suitable to his Rank, and to be Eminent and Useful to his Country according to his Station.” Not so much warlike or battlefield courage but courage in the sense of “the quiet Possession of a Man’s self, and an undisturb’d doing his Duty, whatever Evil besets, or Danger lies in his way” is the Lockean way.

Accordingly, Locke firmly discourages influences that appeal to the imagination—whether imagined fears, which will effeminate the mind—or imagined glories—which will harden its against reason—must be repelled. Poetry, painting—anything that engages the passions by making them seem noble—are to be discouraged. If a child has what Locke calls “a Poetick Vein, ’tis to me the strangest thing in the World, that the Father should desire, or suffer it to be cherished, or improved. Methinks the parents should labor to have it stifled, and suppressed, as much as may be…. There are very few instances of those, who have added to their Patrimony by any thing that they have reaped” from the Mounts of Parnassus.

In the commercial-republican regime of America, Locke’s emphasis on education for one’s social “station”—what Montesquieu would call a “monarchic” bias—hardly got much play, except in some parts of the South, where a gentry class had established itself during colonial times. As did Webster, they wanted schools for large numbers of citizens, not only ‘the few.’ But Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson all share Locke’s esteem for usefulness, for the practical virtues of commerce and citizenship.

In proposing a college for Pennsylvani in 1749, Benjamin Franklin cited “the great Mr. Locke” and his “much-esteemed” treatise on education. Nor is this idle praise; in his extensive footnotes to the proposal, Franklin quotes Locke more copiously than any other writer. Following the philosopher’s lead, Franklin emphasized the need for a “more useful Culture of young Minds” than afforded, for example, by the aristocratic habit of gardening. Along with the obvious choices—mathematics, the English language, geography, morality—Franklin insists on the study of history broadly understood. Not only will reading histories teach political oratory, but it will also teach “the necessity of a Publick Religion”—specifically, Christianity—and the “advantages” of constitutions—a topic Franklin wanted to prepare American students for, some quarter-century before he would sign the Declaration of Independence and nearly forty years before he would sign the U. S. Constitution. The study of history can also lead to discussions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, which in turn lead to debate and therewith to reasoning. Finally, “natural history” and the “history of commerce” can complement one another, if the study of nature leads to improved techniques of agriculture. Tellingly, Franklin includes no separate study of theology, contenting himself with saying in a footnote, “To have in View the Glory and Service of God, as some express themselves, is only the same Thing in other Words” for “Doing Good to Men,” thereby “imitat[ing] His Beneficence.”

Franklin does not follow Locke in insisting on private tutoring. He is proposing a college. “Youth will come out of this School fitted for learning any Business, Calling or Profession, except such wherein Languages are required; and tho’ unacquainted with any ancient or foreign tongue, they will be Masters of their own, which is of more immediate and general Use.” Time Europeans spend learning foreign languages will accrue to “such a Foundation of Knowledge and Ability, as, properly improved, may qualify them to pass thro’ and execute the several offices of civil Life, with Advantage and Reputation to themselves and Country.”

After independence and the founding of the republican regime change Franklin had long prepared had been realized, he took a particular interest in the schooling of freed slaves. As early as 1763, on a visit to a Sunday school for black children, he concluded that “their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal to that of white Children. You will wonder perhaps that I should ever doubt it, and I will not undertake to justify all my Prejudices, nor to account for them.” In a public address in 1789, Franklin called for a “national policy” of slave emancipation. “Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care may sometimes open a source of serious evils.” The “galling chains, that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his heart” because he who is treated like “a mere machine” finds his reason “suspended” and his conscience stifled, having been “chiefly governed by the passion of fear”—the monarchic principle. You will recall that this is precisely the kind of thing Locke wanted to avoid by limiting the use of corporal punishment—the very punishment that a slave finds himself subjected to, not only in childhood but throughout his life. “Under such circumstances, freedom may often prove a misfortune to himself, and prejudicial to society.”

Therefore, “Attention to emancipated black people, it is… to be hoped, will become a branch of our national policy,” a “serious duty incumbent upon us.” To instruct, to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty, to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them with employments suited to their age, sex, talents, and other circumstances, and to procure their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the… plan which we have adopted, and which we conceive will essentially promote the public good, and the happiness of these our hitherto too much neglected fellow creatures.” As with whites, the education of black students will be preeminently useful, with an insistence on “a deep impression of the most important and generally acknowledged moral and religious principles.” Franklin further recommends the establishment of a “Committee of Guardians,” which would place the students in apprenticeships. He knows that some students, and especially the children of former slaves, will lack the family ‘connections’ that help young men ‘get ahead’; the Committee of Guardians will act as the guardian of an orphan would, at least when it comes to finding work for his ‘ward.’ Like Locke, Franklin wants useful citizens, but unlike Locke he wants them on American terms, without the rigid class distinctions that Locke need to work within (and to some extent against) in England.

John Adams shared Franklin’s well-known appreciation for modern science: “Man,” he wrote, “by the Exercise of his Reason can invent Engines and Instruments, to take advantage of the Powers of Nature, and accomplish the most astonishing Designs.” He also saw that this conquest of nature promised both great good and evil. Education for boys and girls alike must therefore include education in philanthropy, patriotism, and “the art of self-government, without which they can never act a wise part in the government of societies, great or small”; “the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system… will happily tend to subdue the turbulent passions of men.” The impressive and ever-increasing technological mastery over nature comes power, a virtuosity surely to be abused if virtue does not go with it.

Although necessary, such study and practice will not alone suffice. “There is no simple connection between knowledge and virtue,” Adams observed, and that goes for the knowledge of Christian virtue as well as the knowledge of modern science. This is true partly because social elites often devise means to “keep the people in ignorance, and… to conceal truth and propagate falsehood,” sometimes in the name of high moral principles. Educators may deceive, even as they claim to educate.

These reservations notwithstanding, Adams thought that much more might be done toward improving the character of the American people through education. Education is “more indispensable, and must be more general, under a free government than any other,” inasmuch as the governing element in any regime must be educated, and in the American regime the people are sovereign. Education must therefore be redefined in terms of self-government: “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of he whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it.” School districts no larger than one square mile should be maintained at public expense. In each school, the children must not be taught to “adore their generals, admirals, bishops, and statesmen.” Don’t adore Washington but “the nation which educated him. Why? Recalling a lesson of ancient Greek history, Adams remarks, “If Thebes owes its liberty and glory to Epaminondas, she will lose both when he dies. But if the knowledge, the principles, the virtues, and the capacities of the Theban nation produced an Epaminondas, her liberties will remain when he is no more.” Adams here combines Locke’s desire to avoid glory-mongering with American republicanism.

Adams’s educational system would have been locally governed. It would also include a national institution. Republics cultivate eloquence; inasmuch as “it is not to be disputed that the form of government has an influence upon language, and language in its turn influences not only the form of government, but the temper, the sentiments, and manners of the people,” Congress should frame an national academy, modeled on those of France, Spain, and Italy, for “correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English language.” In this century, Adams observed, French has succeeded Latin as the lingua franca of Europe, but it hasn’t been universally established and “it is not probable that it will” be. “English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French in the present age,” thanks to “the increasing population of America” and “the influence of England in the world.” An American Academy could help to ensure that the coming empire of English—what we might call a cultural empire—would speak well, in order to govern itself well. Speaking well, with precision and vigor, itself exemplifies self-government.

Finally, no consideration of the educational ideas of the American Founders would be complete without considering the Sage of Monticello. Thomas Jefferson endorsed the Enlightenment project of “diffusion of knowledge among the people” as the “sure foundation” of liberty and happiness. He considered prerevolutionary France an object lesson of how a benevolent and amiable people “surrounded by so many blessings from nature, are yet loaded with misery by kings, nobles, and priests,” who have kept them in subjection by keeping them in ignorance.

Civic education serves as both gateway and guardian for all other kinds. Both ordinary citizens and those best endowed by nature to govern ordinary citizens should partake of it. Political history will show the people, “possessed… of the experience of other ages and countries,” to “know ambition under all its shapes,” and so be “prompt[ed] to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.” Beyond civil education, a liberal education will render the best-endowed citizens “worthy to receive, and also to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.”

Specifically, in Virginia Jefferson advocated the establishment of public school districts, “wherein the great mass of the people will receive their instruction” in Greek, Roman, modern European, and American history and in “the first elements of morality”—which consists of instruction in “how to work out their own greatest happiness, by showing them that it does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed them, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.” Jefferson silently rejects the claim that God in His Providence has placed everyone in his station. On the contrary, education will be a means of enabling students to go on to find their place, even to make one, as they reach the limits of their natural abilities.

There is a conceptual link between these two tracks of instruction, between history and morality. The link is experience. Historical study provides students with a far wider range of experience than they could ever attain if they were “confined to real life.” The better students, and also the wealthier ones, will go on to instruction in Greek and Latin; “I do not pretend that language is science,” but it is “the instrument for the attainment of science.” Modern science, too, is a form of experience or experiment. From this system, “twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually,” statewide, and “half of these will be sent to William and Mary College to be liberally educated.” A liberal education as the culmination of an education for self-government should not be confused with dilettantism, the product of “self-learning and self-sufficiency,” whereby men “possessing Latin and sometimes Greek, a knowledge of the gloves, and the first six books of Euclid, imagine and communicate this as the sum of science,” sending graduates into the world “with just taste enough of learning to be alienated from industrious pursuits, and not enough to do service in the ranks of science.” If education as Jefferson conceives it ranges more broadly through the arts and literature than Locke and Franklin prefer, nor more than they does he intend education to disable citizens from usefulness.

Like presidents Washington and Adams, as president Jefferson advocated the use of public revenues for a national university. Although the “ordinary branches” of education are not to be removed from “the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal,” the most advanced sciences need public support. While this project never won favor in Congress, Jefferson’s final act of founding, the establishment of the University of Virginia, was designed to accomplish the same end on the state level. Although public, the university of Jefferson envisioned it was to be very compactly organized. There were to be no divisions among the students—no ‘freshmen’ or ‘seniors’—and the courses of study were to be entirely elective. That is, Jefferson’s university was to maximize both equality and liberty. Self-government at the University of Virginia could have needed no administrators, only teachers and students learning together. Architecturally, Jefferson designed the campus to be like a village—very much the liberal-arts equivalent of the Jeffersonian ‘ward republic.’ To Jefferson’s mortification, the University soon fell into exactly the sort of disorder that Locke would have predicted when the young get together without adequate adult supervision. There was a riot on campus, with hapless professors dodging brickbats. After order returned, the board of governors (including Jefferson himself and James Madison) had the ringleaders jailed, others expelled, and offered the student petitioners who had backed the rioters the chance to recant publicly. By the end of his life, less than a year later, Jefferson was satisfied that the University of Virginia was back on track, where it has usually stayed in subsequent generations, at least in matters pertaining to civic order.

In educational matters and in much else, the American founders took much of their orientation from Locke. The emphasis on practicality, on utility, was central to their thought—from a morality aimed at forming commercial-republican citizens to experimental science aimed at forming inventors, architects, and engineers.

 

Further reading:

Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle: The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders. Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1993.

John Locke: Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Edited by James L. Axtell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

Noah Webster: A Collection of Essays and Fugitive Writings: On Moral, Historical, Political and Literary Subjects. Boston: I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1790. Reprinted in 2014.

For the educational writings of Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, see the well-edited one-volume collections of their works published by the Library of America.

This lecture was delivered at the Lifelong Learning Seminar at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan.

 

With respect to geopolitics, the first several generations of Americans concerned themselves with achieving ‘strategic depth’—sufficient land and population to defend themselves against European navies along the Atlantic coast and American Indian nations, nations sometimes in alliance with European powers, along their western border. With respect to their new state, these generations were preoccupied with the maintenance of the Union in an effort to avoid the condition of perpetual warfare which prevailed among Europeans and the North American Indians. With respect to the regime of democratic and commercial republicanism they established for that state, they pursued an “empire of liberty” in the western lands and an improved navy to defend worldwide commerce. They also undertook a policy of regime change among some of the neighboring Indian nations.

By the time George Washington published his Farewell Address in September 1796, the United States had added three new states: Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The substantial Northwest Territory was waiting to be populated. Out of it would come the states of Indiana (1800), Ohio (1803), Illinois (1818) and, a generation later, Michigan (1837). Washington knew some of this land quite well, having surveyed and purchased Ohio property before the Revolutionary War. A major domestic and foreign-policy objective takes up the first half of his Address, namely, the political union of the United States, which he calls “the main pillar in the edifice of your real independence,” providing tranquility at home and peace abroad—the foundations of American safety, prosperity, and liberty. The Union provides safety by making the United States more formidable to would-be invaders; it provides prosperity by establishing a large free-trade zone; and it provides liberty because it obviates the need of “those overgrown military establishments” which “are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican liberty.” A broken-up North America would feature a collection of small and medium-sized states suspicious of one another, armed against one another, and (to the extent armed) prey to military coups d’état. No mere alliance among such a collection of states could substitute for their constitutional Union, Washington argues. Indeed, disunion or faction is by itself “a frightful Despotism,” quite apart from the threat of military oligarchies.

In terms of the first two considerations I mentioned in the previous lecture, Washington addresses the need for a unified, modern, federal state as the means to a stable republican regime—both at the service of securing Americans’ natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The second half of the Address, which is now the most celebrated portion, addresses geopolitics. Unlike self-describe foreign-policy ‘realists,’ Washington regards geopolitics as no less a realm to be governed by moral standards as domestic politics. In fact, he regards so-called ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’ as indispensably linked, not contradictory.

Americans should observe good faith and justice to all nations while cultivating peace and harmony with all. As we’ve seen, this policy had governed his dealings with the Chickasaw and Cherokee nations, and it had also governed his insistence that the United States remain neutral regarding the wars attendant upon the French Revolution, during which the French ambassador to the United States, Edmond Genêt, had attempted to whip up sentiment for U. S. intervention on behalf of his country. Washington says that we should adhere to neutrality because “religion and morality enjoin” it and prudence does, too. In sharp contrast to the advice of Machiavelli, who contended that a prince must learn “how not to be good,” Washington’s anti-monarchic, non-‘princely’ republican foreign policy rests on the claim that it’s smarter to be honorable.

But how to bring this general set of rules into action?

The centerpiece of Washington’s advice to his countrymen is to avoid “permanent, inveterate antipathies” or “passionate attachments” to any particular nation. In the 1790s, with memories of the Revolutionary War still vivid, Americans understandably inclined toward antipathy regarding Great Britain—our “unnatural Mother,” as one patriot described her—and attachment to our ally, France, without whose naval intervention the war would have dragged on for years longer. But a policy—which, as we’ve seen, must derive rationally from the politics of the political community (its regime, its state, its geography)—must avoid such impassioned, unreasoning sentiments. Passions are slavish, not self-governing. Specifically, permanent antipathies and passionate attachments—hostility or alliance unrelated to changing circumstances—most likely will have bad economic and political consequences.

Economically, such sentiments put our trade at a disadvantage. If we favor one nation for reasons of sentiment alone over another, we will lose the vale of the free market, given the westward march of Americans that had already begun. Politically, our passions open us to foreign influences—Genêt had exemplified this—which exacerbate our own internal factions and thus threaten the Union.

Therefore, Washington urges, “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations but to have with them as little political connection as possible.” He is thinking particularly of Europe, which “has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence therefore it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships, or enmities.” Fortunately, we are “detached and distant” from Europe; our geographical position across the Atlantic Ocean affords us the capacity to “choose peace or war, as our interest guided by justice shall counsel.” That is, under ordinary circumstances we will stay out, although there may be extraordinary circumstances—presumably, a situation directly affecting our safety and happiness—where we might intervene. Washington isn’t opposed to alliances, much less war (he was, after all, the Commander in Chief of U. S. armed forces and the hero of the Revolutionary War). He is against alliances that commit us to war in advance and thus, as he puts it, “entangle our peace and prosperity” with European ambitions and interests. Two decades later, Washington’s former protégé James Monroe and Monroe’s Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, would formulate the Monroe Doctrine, intending to limit the expansion of Old-World empires of monarchy and aristocracy in the New World, where the Empire of Liberty was beginning to see republican regimes—friendly regimes—replacing Spanish imperial rule to the south of us.

Beyond Europe, and respecting the foreign world generally, we should also “steer clear of permanent alliances” and “safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.” A good example of this policy was the war against the three Barbary States—Morocco, Algiers, and Tripoli—which sponsored piracy against our Mediterranean shipping. The Jefferson and Madison administrations fought those states in the early 1800s, and rightly so, by Washington’s standards. The Barbary States were attacking the commercial dimension of the American commercial republic by defying the principle of free transport on the oceans, which Jefferson called “the great highway of the nations.” Similarly, the War of 1812—our first of five declared wars under the 1787 Constitution—was fought in defense of the principle, “Free ships, free goods, free men.”

Washington concluded his address by explaining, “With me, a predominant motive has been to endeavor to gain time to our country to settle and mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress without interruption, to that degree of strength and consistency”—the foreign-policy equivalent of moral character—”which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.” Unlike Machiavelli, who claims that the prince can determine his own fortunes and those of his principality, Washington understands that the laws of nature and of nature’s God have a moral content, that foreign policy can issue in peaceful friendships and not a perpetual war of all against all.

Washington’s policy of gaining time, extending the republican “empire of liberty” westward while avoiding major wars with major powers, governed American foreign policy for the next century. It is of course not at all clear how far west Washington himself would have wanted to go—for example, the Whig Party tended to prefer not to go farther than the Mississippi River. The Democrats—more favorable to the extension of slavery and also amenable to very substantial self-governance by the states even at the expense of the coherence of the Union—optimistically pressed the nation ahead, through Texas and on to the Pacific Ocean. This conflict over policy regarding the western territories nearly split the Union, but by 1890, when we’d consolidated Pacific claims and the frontier was judged to be ‘closed,’ we had some very substantial choices to make.

As far back as 1787, in The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton had argued that oceans are as much highways as they are barriers. As a Caribbean-born immigrant to the port of New York, he knew that very well. By 1890, technology had made this much more so, with steam-powered vessels having replaced the old sailing ships and telegraphs making ‘messaging’ nearly instantaneous. These improved means of transportation and of communications had strengthened European empires. By Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, Britannia not only ruled the waves but about one-fourth of the land on earth and about one-fifth of its population, while France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and even Belgium had substantial holdings as well.

Also as a result of these technological advances, rulers were beginning to reconceive the world as one ‘system’; our term ‘geopolitics’ was invented at this time. The leading naval strategist of geopolitics was the American, Alfred Thayer Mahan, among whose readers and correspondents numbered an ambitious and vigorous young American politician, Theodore Roosevelt. In the English-speaking world, the leading geopolitical writer who concentrated his attention on land masses was Halford Mackinder. Whereas Mahan focused on the importance of control of key oceanic chokepoints as indispensable to world commerce, Mackinder pointed to what he called the “World Island”—the giant land mass comprised by three interconnected continents: Asia, Europe, and Africa. Mackinder understood that if you laid a political map over a map of the World Island in 1900, you would see that the tinderbox for conflict in the twentieth century would be the large, flat European plain running from the Atlantic to the Urals; along this plain, the central region (the flashpoint in the tinderbox) was the space between Germany and Russia. World Wars One and Two would in large measure be ‘about’ control of that Heartland of the World Island, and the Cold War would ‘freeze’ rival forces in that place, too, as NATO confronted the Warsaw Pact.

Such a radically changed circumstance presented American strategists with a set of problems noticeably different from those seen by Washington and his successors. Would the strengthening empires block American trade? Would they once again threaten American shores, as they had not done since 1812? Further, having fought a devastating civil war, a war on our own territory, we were less likely than ever to want to fight a war on our own territory—especially given the increasingly devastating power of modern weapons and of well-organized and trained mass armies, one result of modern statism. In other words, we needed to re-think the question of strategic depth, which we thought we’d settled in turning the middle part of North American into an empire of liberty. And we also needed to re-think our policies regarding international commerce.

Several choices were formulated. The first, advocated by a German immigrant and old Republican Party ally of Abraham Lincoln, Carl Schurz, was simply to continue the Washington policy: to eschew not only empire beyond our own continent (“overseas empire,” as he called it) but even to eschew any major strengthening of the military—this, on the traditional grounds that big army establishments threaten republican regimes and that a big navy would be “a dangerous plaything.” By far the most distinguished American statesman to carry this policy forward was Herbert Hoover, whose “magnum opus,” Freedom Betrayed, was published for the first time a few years ago, after decades of suppression by the Hoover Estate.

The second, and opposite, policy was advocated by the young Indiana Republican Senator Albert J. Beveridge, who called for a vast, renewed imperial project—this time based upon the alleged superiority of the white race as claimed by the ‘race science’ then predominant in the universities. The most famous of Beveridge’s speeches remains “The March of the Flag,” delivered in 1900 at a Republican Party convention in Indiana and reprinted widely for years thereafter. Beveridge called for American conquest of the rest of the Americas and their incorporation into the United States—not, to be sure, as equal states, but as colonial territories. At the time, ‘scientific’ theories of racial superiority were very much a part of the Progressive movement, and Beveridge became the most vocal representative of the militarist wing of Progressivism. Although this is now usually forgotten, Progressivism was a very broad movement when it came to military and foreign policy, ranging from the militarism of Beveridge to the pacificism of Jane Addams, the prominent Chicago social worker.

Two in-between policies also emerged, and from them flow the American versions of foreign-policy ‘realism’ and foreign-policy ‘idealism,’ respectively. Heading would evolve into the realist camp was TR, who advocated the use of a greatly-expanded navy, which he eventually got, and peacetime military conscription for the army, which he hinted at but never formally proposed. These forces, but especially the navy, would be used not so much for imperial expansion but for obtaining naval bases throughout the world, usually but not always with the consent of foreign governments. U. S. naval bases would counterbalance the much more expensive (and, as it turned out, untenable) imperialism of the Europeans. To reinforce America’s opposition to European imperialism in the New World, Roosevelt also propounded his well-known “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine—stipulating an American right to intervene in Latin American countries if they fell down on their debt payments to European nations. Such a refusal to repay loans, if “chronic,” invited European military intervention into the Western Hemisphere, which of course the Monroe Doctrine was intended to discourage. If looked at from this perspective, TR’s foreign policy becomes quite coherent if controversial: drive the weakened Spanish imperialists out of the Caribbean and their redoubt in the Pacific, avoiding the acquisition of those countries by any other empire (especially the British or the Germans) while eventually standing them up to govern themselves, thus using the old ‘Washington’ technique of regime change to obviate any need to (quite implausibly) make them into U. S. states while also avoiding their (un-American) use as permanent colonies of our own. Add the Panama Canal, linking the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans for both trading and military purposes, and you see that TR aimed at recovering America’s strategic depth under new circumstances. TR himself, it should be added in fairness, was himself no simple-minded devotee of Realpolitik. He understood his policies as advancing America’s rightful interests in the world. Subsequent American geopoliticians were less principled.

The other policy, advanced most conspicuously by TR’s great rival, Woodrow Wilson, has now come to be called ‘liberal internationalism.’ Wilson’s phrase, “The League of Nations,” comes from the well-known essay “Perpetual Peace” published in 1795 by the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Kant argues as follows. Someday, he predicts, the European system of sovereign states, solemnized by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, will break down into a cataclysmic war. All the major powers will exhaust themselves. Seeing the error of their ways, statesmen will form a League of Nations to prevent future wars. Wilson evidently saw in the Great War (as it was then called) exactly this Kantian apocalypse. As the war dragged on, he proposed what he initially called a “League to Enforce Peace,” which was actually more descriptive than “League of Nations,” inasmuch as the League did in fact commit its members to intervention—diplomatic at first, but military if necessary—to stop cross-border wars and to punish “aggressors.” What Wilson called “the organized major force of mankind” would be rapidly mobilized to prevent another world war, making this one (he hoped) a “war to end war.” Although the United States Senate refused to ratify the treaty that would have brought us into the League, FDR’s subsequent plan for the United Nations amounts to essentially the same thing. That is, instead of avoiding “entangling alliances” in order to avoid unnecessary wars, the United States involves itself in a sort of comprehensive entanglement in the hope of preventing small wars from becoming world wars.

Why did Wilson suppose that this would be feasible rather than exhausting? He does not say. And, again in fairness, Wilson did not lack ‘realism’ altogether; after all, he chose the winning side in a worldwide war. But given his confidence in historical progress, my guess is that he believed that human nature was getting the aggression bred out of it, that ‘History’ was ‘moving on’—progressing—beyond war-consciousness and towards peace-consciousness. That is, liberal internationalism in its more buoyant forms may depend upon the belief that peace can be permanent because human nature isn’t. For a League of Nations really to enforce peace around the world, wars will need to become not only small but rare.

With these innovations—some of them consistent with American principles, some not—we see the elements of American foreign policy today. The undermining of European imperialism continued to be discouraged by the United States and, indeed the Austro-Hungarians and the Turks went down in the First World War along with the Germans, with the Germans then reconstituting a new empire before losing that one in the Second World War. That war put the British and French empires on the path to extinction, too. The Russians expanded after the both the First and Second World Wars, then lost their empire at the end of the Cold War, in large measure due to the containment strategy enacted by the United States in conjunction with all of the above-mentioned ex-imperialists.

Without the British Empire to patrol the seas and protect commerce, this left the American navy as the ‘last man standing’ in that role, which we continue to play. (In the decades to come, the main challenger is likely to be China, at first regionally, and eventually worldwide). Although the other piece of TR’s policy—routine intervention in Latin American affairs—has been bridled, the centerpiece of his policy—the network of overseas naval bases—remains. I am not sure that Alexander Hamilton would have disapproved and, given the Jeffersonian/Madisonian defense of U. S. shipping in the Mediterranean, even the old Democratic Party might have hesitated to condemn us.

On the other hand, liberal internationalism would have been viewed by the Founders with much more suspicion, even with the substantially changed circumstances of the 20th and 21st centuries. Such a strong and continuous obligation to intervene may well strike one—as indeed it did strike the majority in the U. S. Senate during the League of Nations treaty debate—as a weakening of American sovereignty. It is safe to say that the Founders tended to frown upon any weakening of American sovereignty. Since the end of the Cold War, every president and Congress have been forced to choose which places we intervene, although the principles of liberal internationalism open the possibility of such intervention in any instance of cross-border aggression. What liberal internationalist principle do is to bias the debate on behalf of economic, military, and diplomatic intervention, arguably distracting the government from its more fundamental task of defending the self-government of the United States.

In terms of our self-government, the U. S. Constitution has also seen a subtle but profound alteration, at least in the way it is interpreted or perhaps misinterpreted by the Supreme Court. The pivotal case here was U. S. v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation. In this case, decided in 1936, the Court handed down an opinion holding that, first, foreign policy is preeminently the domain of the executive branch and, second, that the necessary and proper clause applies only to domestic matters and not to foreign policy. This gave President Roosevelt and subsequent presidents very great discretionary powers indeed, powers they have at times not hesitated to exercise. Now, once again, it should be noticed that in the case of war a president has always had the right and indeed the duty, as Commander in Chief, to take immediate military action against enemy attack without a declaration of war by Congress. Of the some 200 wars the United States has fought since the ratification, only five were formally declared. But the decision in Curtiss-Wright had nothing to do with U. S. military action; rather, it authorized the president to embargo two Latin American countries that were at war. While Congress continues to exercise the power of the purse, and thus can shut down presidential ventures into foreign policy in due course, ‘due course’ may take a lot of time.

In both foreign and domestic policy, the new constitutional dispensation under the aegis of Progressivism and its several variants (New Deal-ism, Great Society-ism, and so on), a dispensation makes full use of what President Wilson called “the Elastic Constitution,” has inclined toward the practice of rather generous transfers of authority to the executive branch—whether the executive branch proper, that is, the White House, or the administrative agencies, which have become a sort of fourth branch unto themselves. This was recognized by President Eisenhower in his own ‘farewell address’ on the ‘military-industrial complex.’ That is, we have moved some distance from a regime of democratic republicanism, and from a federal state, toward a centralized state governed by a mixed regime featuring an executive who enjoys somewhat monarchic powers in foreign policy and an administrative elite or ‘meritocracy’ which reminds one a bit of Old-World aristocracy, absent the blue blood. The Founders would have their reservations about that.

Lecture delivered at the Hillsdale College Lifelong Learning Seminar.
Hillsdale, Michigan.

 

Let’s start by defining some of the terms I’ll be using to describe our foreign policy.

The word ‘policy’ comes from the same word as ‘politics.’ Politics means ruling and being ruled. The way we rule and are ruled depends upon the political regime under which we live. So, for example, if we live under a tyranny we won’t be doing much ruling, but we will be ‘doing’ a lot of being ruled. Aristotle explains that political regimes have four dimensions:

1. The persons who rule. One, few, or many? Good or bad? In the United States, “We the People” rule, albeit through our elected representatives. Thus we have a republic or representative government, but a democratic republic in the sense that almost all adult citizens can vote and hold office. Although contemporary critics of the 1787 Constitution point to the lack of suffrage for women and slaves, they seldom mention the fact that the United States had by far the widest franchise anywhere in the world at the time—far greater than the British House of Commons, for example.
2. The institutions, structures, or forms by which the rulers rule. The Constitution establishes three separated and balanced branches of government, establishes procedures for election to office, and generally provides the ‘power grid’ for the energies of the governing bodies.
3. The way of life, the habits of mind and heart, of the people who rule and are ruled. You’ll recall that in the Bible God often speaks of His “way,” sharply distinguishing the way he has prescribed for His people from the ways of other peoples. The American “way” includes freedom of worship and of speech, and freedom of commerce. America is a commercial republic, as distinguished from the soon-to-be established French republic, a military republic soon overthrown by the most gifted and ambitious military officer it would valorize.
4. The purpose or purposes of the political community. What are its founders trying to accomplish? For example, the purpose of the Islamic Republic of Iran is to advance the practice of Shi’a Islam. The purposes of the Soviet Union included the advance of socialism, the formation of the new ‘Soviet man,’ and the eventual establishment of worldwide communism. The purpose of the American regime, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, is to secure our natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are the foundational principles of our regime.

Policy or the planned actions of a political community aiming at achieving the purposes of the regime does or should follow from the character of its regime. This goes for foreign policy as well as domestic policy. When a given policy—slavery, for example—contradicts the principles of our regime, debate will ensue. If sufficiently serious, the dispute might even culminate in civil war or, in foreign policy, international war.

When considering foreign policy, there are two more considerations to keep in mind in addition to regimes. The phrase ‘foreign policy’ implies that there is an ‘us’ and there is a ‘them’—insiders and outsiders, citizens and non-citizens. This in turn implies that the world’s human population finds itself divided among discrete populations, each in some significant degree independent of the others—self-governing or sovereign. To maintain their sovereignty, a people will need to achieve a certain size and also a certain degree of governmental centralization—enough in both instances to defend itself against the many ‘thems’ out there. So, we need to classify political communities not only in terms of their regimes but in terms of size and centralization. Let’s call that political form ‘the state.’ There are several kinds of ‘state’:

1. The ancient polis or ‘city-state,’ small but highly centralized.
2. The ancient empire, huge and decentralized. Typically, an emperor would extract tribute in the form of soldiers, slaves, and goods from the vassal-states he ruled, but otherwise would allow the local ruler or rulers to govern themselves under their own laws.
3. The feudal state, large and decentralized. If the feudal state were a liquid, we would call it a colloid: globs of more or less independently funded and defended in a condition of equilibrium.
4. The modern state, large and centralized. This is the state envisioned by Machiavelli, actualized by the Tudors in England and the Bourbons in France. Aristocrats and churches have been brought to heel under the rule of a central government, often with a system of bureaucratic overseers.

It turned out that State #4 defeated #3, just about every time. Europe quickly turned into a collection of modern states. The problem for those who wanted to preserve genuinely political rule—reciprocal rule, ruling and being-ruled in turn (in a word, political liberty)—sought a modern state that had the capacity to defend its sovereignty without succumbing to over-centralization. This led to

5.  The modern federal state—large, partly centralized (especially for foreign-policy purposes but also for commerce) and partly decentralized (retaining a substantial degree of local self-government).

The American Founders designed their state as a federal state. And the questions that arose from it were, first, can such a federal state avoid or at least survive civil war? and second, can it conduct a successful foreign policy against rival states that will attempt to split it up? If the answer to either of these questions had turned out to be “No,” America would have become what we now call a ‘failed state.’

The third and final element in considering the sources of foreign policy is what we’ve come to call ‘geopolitics.’ ‘Geo’ means ‘earth,’ as in ‘geography.’ Geopolitics means the territory of the country (its topography, its soils, its water resources and so on) as overlain by a given regime in state, in relation to all other such regimes and states with which it has relations. For much of human life geopolitics has been regional. For centuries, many American Indian tribes and nations had no idea that Europeans existed, and the ignorance was mutual; for a long time after that the Indians had no idea how many Europeans there were. But now geopolitics is truly worldwide, even if (as Mr. Putin has reminded us) one’s nearest neighbors often remain the most relevant ones.

Geopolitics takes note of a fact we sometimes forget in the age of the Internet, namely, the world is not flat. We do not really live in cyberspace, although at times we seem to. We live in a world where all territories are not created equal. When it comes to controlling key resources and strategic lines of communication, including military transport, the Straits of Gibraltar and of Hormuz, the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal are simply more important than, say, Hillsdale County. Such geopolitical ‘choke points’ will always be fought over in a way that Hillsdale County will never be.

When we think about the foreign policy of the American Founders, we need to think about all of these sources of policy: regimes, states, geopolitics. Let’s start with geography and look at the map. The United States that saw the inauguration of George Washington as its first president consisted of thirteen states strung along the Atlantic coastline in the middle of the North American continent. It was surrounded by regime enemies on all sides:

1. Many if not all of the American Indian tribes and nations. The regimes were warrior-oligarchies, but without modern centralized states. Some were settled in one location and were termed by the Americans the ‘civilized’ tribes, and some were hunting-and-gathering societies with no fixed territory—called by the Americans the ‘savage’ tribes.  When the Declaration of Independence refers to “merciless Indian savages” it does not mean Indians as such, but rather these latter groups. Today we usually don’t recognize that early Americans understood how the Indians, allied with European imperial powers, posed a considerable danger to the new republic.
2. The British Empire, consisting of Canada and the Caribbean colonies in this hemisphere, but perhaps above all with the great British Navy, which ‘ruled the waves’ in the Atlantic Ocean, making our extensive coastline vulnerable to attack. Great Britain was what Aristotle called a ‘mixed’ regime, with a monarch, an aristocratic legislative branch, and a ‘house of commons’ which enfranchised only about fifteen percent of the population of the country.
3. The Spanish Empire controlled Florida, Caribbean colonies, and Mexico. The regime was an absolutist monarchy.
4. The French Empire, which was about to re-acquire “Louisiana.” France during the American founding era was first an unstable absolutist monarchy, then an unstable military republic, and then a military despotism.

As for the key geopolitical points in early America, we had

1. Port cities such as Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Charleston. Today we are inclined to overlook the importance of Charleston, but at the time it was a major commercial site dealing in slaves and the agricultural products slaves produced; this accounted for what we sometimes think of as the curiously large influence wielded by South Carolina in the first 85 years of our independent existence.
2. The Appalachian and Allegheny mountains. In the days before railroads and good roads, these were substantial barriers to the expansion of the Americans into the west.
3. The Mississippi River flowing to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The North American continent uniquely features the largest expanse of rich soil in the world, which we now know as our Midwest, overlain by a network of rivers flowing into one giant river, the Mississippi. Any people that could control this territory would becomes a major world power, but, as Thomas Jefferson said, any foreign power which controlled New Orleans was merely by reason of such control the enemy of the United States. Such a power would control the flow of commercial goods coming down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. As late as 1848, the Mexican government hoped to seize New Orleans as a prize in the ongoing war with the United States.

Given this geography, and given the nearby hostile regimes, American statesman saw that one of their most pressing needs was to acquire what we now call strategic depth. We needed to move west in order to become less exclusively dependent upon our vulnerable coastal cities and to control the Mississippi Valley and New Orleans.

The policies they settled on included Indian removal and regime change, along with the establishment of a standing army and a standing navy, obviating dependence upon state militias.

In terms of the American federal state, the principal need was union. How far could the extended republic extend? Would it be a republican empire? How could it be kept together, so that North American would not become another Europe, or even what it was under the Indians: a cockpit of war, prey for the European empires playing divide-and-rule with the aid of the Amerindian allies, eager to contain the ever-advancing Americans?

And in terms of the American regime of democratic, commercial republicanism aimed at securing our natural rights, on this point the philosopher Montesquieu had made a crucial observation, known to all the Founders. Commercial republics, Montesquieu argued, don’t fight wars with one another. To this day, it is simply a fact that commercial republics—republics defined in the American sense of representative governments elected by a very large portion of the adult population—have not fought wars with one another, although of course they have fought many wars against regimes organized around opposing moral and political principles: monarchies, tyrannies, oligarchies both military and religious. This means that Americans are likely to include regime change among their several instruments of foreign policy, on the grounds that the more commercial republics there are, the fewer enemies we will have and, consequently, the more peace and prosperity.

These aims of strategic depth, political union, and commercial republicanism can be seen in the two most important foreign-policy documents of the founding period: the Declaration of Independence and George Washington’s Farewell Address. And of course in between these documents we find the United States Constitution, which sets down the structures whereby our foreign policy shall be conducted.

I. The Declaration of Independence

The Declaration was of course the first act of truly foreign policy by the United States. The previous Continental Congresses had been congresses of colonies under the British Empire. There had been declarations of Americans’ rights as British citizens within that empire. But the Declaration of Independence makes a different kind of argument.

No document before 1776, anywhere in the world, had been called a “declaration of independence.” Since then, there have been more than 100 such declarations, as new states have emerged from old empires. But few of these have invoked natural rights as the moral foundation or justification of independence. Most such declarations assert national rights.

The great English jurist William Blackstone defined “declaration” as a legal complaint made by a plaintiff in court. In diplomacy, a declaration is a formal international announcement made by an official body and delivered by an ambassador. Taken together, the American Declaration is an appeal or complaint under the law of nations, that body of international customs and treaties governing the conduct of states with one another and with foreign peoples. The most recent and authoritative treatise on the law of nations at the time of the founding was written by the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. Titled The Law of Nations, its subtitle was On the principles of the laws of nature, applied to the conduct of nations and sovereigns. That is, the law of nations as understood by Vattel and his students, including the American Founders, had a standard, namely, the laws of nature and of nature’s God.

The United States Congress had already issued a declaration of war against the British Empire on July 6, 1775: “A Declaration Setting Forth the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.” But this was a declaration of civil war—as it had to be, absent independence. The 1775 Declaration was distributed in London, Canada, and Jamaica—that is, within the British Empire. Not so the 1776 Declaration, which was distributed in many foreign capitals.

This leads to the second unique feature of the 1776 Declaration. It isn’t merely a series of assertions or claims. It is a logical syllogism. That is, it is an argument governed by the principle of non-contradiction. Socrates gives the first definition of the principle of non-contradiction in Plato’s Republic: the same thing won’t be willing to do or to suffer opposites at the same time, with respect to the same part, and in relation to the same thing. He gives the example of a child’s top, which can be said to move and stand still at the same time because its circumference rotates while its axis remains in one place. Another example would be the opposite shades of black and white, which can be combined in many ways but never to produce something ‘blackwhite.’ Nor is there anything that can rightly be described as a ’round square.’

Accordingly the Declaration follows the formula of a syllogism, beginning with the major premises of the argument—all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, along with other basic principles—going on to the minor premises of the syllogism—the charges against King and Parliament, stating actions they had taken which contradict the major premises, that is, violations of the laws of nature and of nature’s God—and then reaching a conclusion: that these states are, and of right ought to be free and independent states.

The principle of non-contradiction is the principle of human reason. Human reason or the ability to think logically is the distinctive characteristic of human nature as such. Not only do we need the capacity to reason in order to perceive and understand the laws of nature and of nature’s God, we need it to state our case to other human beings insofar as they are human—that is, insofar as they, too, reason, insofar as they, too, recognize those natural laws. The regime founded upon the rights of human beings as such will have justified the independence of the people who founded it by a declaration to its fellow human beings as such.

The Founders were not so naïve as to suppose that all human beings would recognize their claim. That’s why they say “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” They don’t expect King George III to hold them self-evident, and he didn’t. They submit their logical proof to “a candid world”—meaning, the world insofar as it is free from prejudice, from passion, ready to deliberate and to consider claims based on right, ready to follow a logical syllogism and to concur with it. This is why the Declaration can say that Americans hold all nations “Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.” To make war on this regime is to make war against a regime that aims at securing the natural rights of all human beings within its territory. To maintain peace with this regime is to recognize those rights and to endorse those rights—rights which, when secured, establish in practice the friendship among all human beings, which are by nature rational and civil beings.

Once the British Empire recognized American independence in 1783, European authorities on public law incorporated the Declaration into the law of nations. Previous discussions of international ‘recognition’ of states had concerned individual rulers’ rights of dynastic succession. For example, Henry III of France had been assassinated in 1589; as the last of the Valois line, he was replaced by Henry IV, the first king of the Bourbon line. Henry IV was duly recognized as the sovereign of France by the other European states, themselves monarchies. Now, in 1983, the law of nations needed to include recognition of a sovereign people.

A second consequence of American independence was our promotion of similar regimes of popular sovereignty in the Americas and in changing the way of life of some of the Indian nations. In 1786, the Articles of Confederation Congress signed a treaty with the Chickasaw nation in upstate New York, making them a protectorate of the United States. The Chickasaws also agreed to certain legal reforms, such as foregoing the practice of “punishing the innocent under the idea of retaliation”—the lex talionis—and the regulation of their trade by the United States. Several years later, President Washington’s Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, began pushing for the breakup of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the New World. In 1786 he met secretly with a Brazilian medical student named José Maio de Barballo, who carried a copy of the Declaration to Brazil.

More importantly, Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox determined that “a system of coercion and oppression” regarding the Indians would “stain the character of the nation” and would also be far too expensive of blood and treasure. Washington wanted Army veterans to be granted some of the unsettled lands in the west, partly as payment to them for their services during the war and also, as Washington said, to have a population there “always ready and willing (in cases of hostility) to combat the Savages, and check their incursions.” The Indians, he said, should be given a fair price for the land “to induce them to relinquish our Territories, and to remove into the illimitable regions of the West.”

Meanwhile, the British took their time in turning over the western lands to the U. S. and in evacuating their extensive system of forts. They also encouraged the Indians to harass American settlers, practicing a ‘containment’ strategy in North America after the war was over.

Washington and Knox saw that they needed to form alliances with some of those tribes, but to do so they needed them to moved toward civilization and away from a way of life consisting of hunting, gathering, and raiding. They formulated a policy of regime change for those Indian tribes which did not want to move out. Knox wrote: “How different would be the sensation of a philosophic mind to reflect that instead of exterminating a part of the human race by our modes of population that we had persevered through all difficulties and at last imparted our Knowledge of cultivating and the arts, to the Aboriginals of the country by which the source of future life and happiness had been preserved and extended. But it has been conceive to be impracticable to civilize the Indians of North America. This opinion is probably more convenient than just.”

In his third annual message to Congress, Washington wrote: “Commerce with [the Indians] should be promoted under regulations tending to secure an equitable deportment towards them, and… such rational experiments should be made, for imparting to them the blessings of civilization as may, from time to time, suit their condition.” Therefore, Article XIV of the 1791 treaty with the Cherokee stated: “That the Cherokee nation may be led to a greater degree of civilization, and to become herdsmen and cultivators, instead of remaining in a state of hunters, the United States will from time to time furnish gratuitously the said nation with useful implements of husbandry, and further to assist the said nation in so desirable a pursuit, and at the same time to establish a certain mode of communication, the United States will send such, and so many persons to reside in said nation as they may judge proper, not exceeding four in number, who shall qualify themselves to act as interpreters.”

Notice that this policy of regime change aimed at altering the Chickasaw and Cherokee regimes and states in significant ways, but only so far as the current condition of those nations would make feasible. Policy as distinct from principle is contingent, a matter of prudential reasoning and not of theoretical reasoning, which is the kind of reasoning which discovers natural right. Regime change has remained one important instrument of U. S. foreign policy since independence, but as with all instruments, its use must be governed by both natural right and prudence, reasoning drawn from principle and reasoning drawn from practical experience and judgment.

II. The United States Constitution

With independence, American sovereignty—including the power to provide for the common defense and all other foreign-policy powers—went ‘from’ the King of England—the “defender of the realm”—to the American people. But how would the newly-sovereign American people allocate those powers in order to exercise their natural right to self-government, including self-defense, under the laws of nature and of nature’s God?

Our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, proved inadequate to the task. Under it, all national powers—legislative, executive, and judicial—were lodged in one branch of government, the Congress. Most of the legislative powers remained in the states. One or more of the states might embroil the others in a war without their consent. Congress was charged with foreign-policy decision making, but lacked the legislative powers to carry out such decisions. In other words, the sovereign American people had failed to delegate enough foreign-policy power to Congress to make the United States especially united, and therefore credible, in international politics—giving it no power to regulate or tax foreign commerce. Further, Congress had no power to protect American rights under the law of nations; Congress could only recommend that the states pass laws on that. There was no way to frame and implement a coherent foreign policy. Hence the need for what the Preamble to the 1787 Constitution calls “a more perfect Union” to (among other things) “provide for the common defense.”

In addition to provision for the common defense, under the new Constitution Congress received the powers to legislate regarding foreign policy: to collect duties and imposts, regulate commerce with foreign nations and the “Indian Tribes,” to “define and punish piracies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the Law of Nations.” Also under the legislative powers were the power to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal—that is, to authorize the use of privateers—and of course to raise and support armies and a navy and to regulate those services. States were not allowed to do most of those things, although they retained the right to raise militias.

The executive branch received the power to command the army, navy, and militia of the United States; the president also has the power to negotiate treaties and to appoint ambassadors  who negotiate them. Ratification of treaties and approval of ambassadorial appointments provides a check on these executive powers. The treaty power comes out of Locke; it is what he calls the “foederative” power: foedus in Latin means “treaty.”

For its part, the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction in all cases concerning ambassadors and consuls; cases involving treaties, maritime disputes, cases involving alleged treason, and the like go to the federal judiciary, with the Supreme Court enjoying appellate jurisdiction. Treason itself is defined narrowly: levying war against the United States, or adhering to our enemies, “giving them aid and comfort”—serving as a guide to an invading force, for example.

One of the most important features of the new Constitution—oddly overlooked by many commentators, but indispensable in understanding American foreign and domestic policies as they have intersected—may be seen in Article IV, sections 3 and 4, which govern the admission of new states into the Union. “New states may be admitted into this Union,” but only if they have “a Republican Form of Government.” We admit them as equals—two senators, the number of representatives apportioned according to population, and so on—but only as equal republics. James Madison and Gouvereur Morris both pointed out that insofar as a state was controlled by slave-owners it was an aristocracy, not a republic—a point that would turn out to make a difference that eventuated in civil war. But this also has implications for America as an empire. Jefferson called America an empire, but “empire of liberty.” Previous empires had founded colonies (such as the British colonies in North America) which were subordinate to the central, imperial power. But American territories were from the beginning acquired in order to be made into equal  states—consistent with a regime and an empire founded upon the principle, “All men are created equal.”

John Locke had justified imperialism under certain conditions. Locke argued that God gave the world to men in common for “the Support and Comfort of their Being.” The right to property derives from this common gift: In order to survive in nature, each person takes what he needs; this act of taking, this labor, makes wheat we take our property, and no one needs the consent of another in order to appropriate needed natural objects. Having “mixed his labor” with nature, man adds to nature; the common possession of nature is of no real use to human beings if they as individuals do not undertake this appropriation. You can eat my lunch, but not on my behalf. Thus the Indian who kills a deer owns that deer. By nature, such appropriation is limited to one’s own use; no waste or destruction can be rightful, inasmuch as it depletes the common natural storehouse without producing any benefit to human beings.

This goes for the appropriation of land as well. You own it if you mix your labor with it, thereby “inclos[ing] it from the Common.” No one else has just title to that land. Civilization occurs because the natural plenty that supported such free acquisition prevailed in “the first Ages of the World,” but subsequent population increase required civil laws governing and protecting the property so acquired. Such laws allow the increase in the value of the property. Man as such is “the great foundation of property”; it is better to have a large population than al large territory because human labor is more valuable than the land it works; “of the Products of the Earth useful to the Life of man 9/10 are the effects of Labor.” (Locke subsequent revises this estimate upwards to 99/100). He that “incloses Land” has “a greater plenty from the conveniences of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to Nature, [and] may truly be said, to give ninety acres to Mankind.”

This is why “The great art of government” is to employ “established laws of liberty to secure protection and encouragement to the honest industry of mankind.” That is to say, natural right can be enhanced by conventional or positive right. What is more, thanks to the invention of money—a thing that exists by civilizing convention or human law, not nature—human beings can engage in extensive commerce without the risk of spoilage, inasmuch as money, for which perishable goods can be exchanged, cannot spoil. By establishing civil property rights for English settlers and guarding them by absolute monarchic rule over Indian tribes and nations which had a sense of territory but not of property, the British Empire advanced human prosperity and liberty. The British settlers objected most when the king started to treat them like Indians.

Locke concludes that land rightly belongs to the industrious and rational, not the idle. This is the basis of the right to conquer nomadic and hunting peoples. American Indians, he writes, “are rich in Land, and poor in all the Comforts of Life” because they unknowingly leave vast tracts of land in a condition of relative waste, thus depriving mankind of the best use of that land. They are rather like the aristocratic idlers of Europe—a point Tocqueville would note, more than a century later. Notice that this is a regime conflict, a clash of opposing opinions about the best way of life and the right purpose of life for human beings.

Thus Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” had two foundations: one was the political and Constitutional/legal foundation of conquering territories in order to elevate them to equal status as states of the Union; the other was the civilizational/economic foundation of the cultivation of land for human use. Both of these foundations in turn had a moral foundation, namely, the industrious and rational securing of natural rights.

American foreign policy from 1776 to today has been anti-imperialist in the sense that it denies the right of any person or people to subordinate another people perpetually. The foundation of this right to self-government is natural, not ‘nationalist,’ although of course by nature human beings group together into social and political communities, sharing a language. This gives nations a right to self-government not because they are nations but because they are human, regardless of their nation. None of this precludes conquest, if such conquest occurs as the result of a just war and aims at either incorporating the conquered territory into the United States as an equal state or raising it to the status of an independent but friendly state. A friendly state is likely to be a fellow commercial republic, although not necessarily. This depends upon the condition of the people conquered and the disposition of the regime in place toward the United States. The exact limits of the American empire itself would prove controversial, as would the policy of regime change as the result of victory in war. These are matters of prudence, not principle.

 

Suggested readings

The best general account of early American foreign policy is Patrick J. Garrity: In Search of Monsters to Destroy? American Foreign Policy, Revolution, and Regime Change, 1776-1900 (Fairfax: National Institute Press, 2012).

There are several informative recent studies of the Declaration of Independence: David Armitage: The Declaration of Independence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Allen Jayne: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy, and Theology (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1998); and Danielle Allen: Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014).

On the United States Constitution, see Michael D. Ramsey: The Constitution’s Text in Foreign Affairs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).