Thomas Jefferson and the American Declaration of Independence: The Power and Natural Rights of a Free People

by Ross Lence

Ross Lence

It is not accidental that the Greek word for history (historia) is a derivative of the verb meaning to narrate what one has learnt, for all history is, in some manner or other, the relating of tales about a people. Now as we all know some stories are more dramatic than others; some are more accurate; and some, dare we say it, are more important. The most important tales for any people are those told about the beginnings of their political society and the forming of the body politic, beginnings which are often blurred with the society's conception of virtue, piety, and the gods. Thus, Plato begins The Laws, his political treatise par excellence, with the old Athenian stranger asking his two interlocutors: "Tell me, gentlemen, to whom do you give the credit for establishing your codes of law? Is it a god, or a man?" Cleinias' response is very determined: "A god, sir, a god—and that's the honest truth."[1]

This apotheosis of the beginnings of political society is universal: all societies shroud their founders and their nascent mores in their respective myths and symbols. America is no exception. Franklin stood in the rain flying a kite. Betsy Ross was at home knitting a flag. George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and would not tell a lie—even about throwing a dollar across the Potomac. And make no mistake about it: How these myths are told and to whom, when, and where are all critical questions, for it is through these myths and symbols that a society transmits its values and beliefs, or in the language of Eric Voegelin, comes to know itself as a people. Propriety dictates, therefore, that we not tell our children that Benjamin Franklin would not recognize lightning if it struck him in the head; that Betsy Ross was really a very simple lady, doing her very best to reproduce the Union Jack; or that George Washington was an unsavory, unstable character at best, having never psychologically adjusted to either his red hair or his wooden teeth. To tell our children these things would be to destroy their creed, to tread on their dreams. In the final analysis failure to transmit the proper myths and symbols will weaken—if not destroy— the moral fibre of any nation.

James Madison and the Dynamics of the Constitutional Convention

by Lance Banning

Studies of the Constitutional Convention, both "empirical" and more "impressionistic," almost always emphasize its multiplex divisions: small states vs. large, "pure" federalists against proponents of a large republic, planting states against commercial interests, south against north. There is no denying the necessity of close attention to these conflicts. The Convention was a battleground for disagreeing politicians and competing state and sectional concerns. It succeeded, as the textbooks say, because the clashing delegates discovered ways to compromise their sharpest disagreements. Analyses of its divisions have taught us much of what we know about the way in which the document emerged.[1]

For all its benefits, however, there are also ways in which a fascination with conflicting coalitions may have interfered with insight and imparted partial and misleading images of how the meeting worked. I do not merely mean that a repeated emphasis on conflicts and divisions can encourage a neglect of the cooperative dimensions of the meeting (though this, of course, has sometimes been the case).[2] I mean to call attention also to another sense in which we have repeatedly applied a static method of analysis to a dynamic situation and thereby missed a major aspect of the story.

The Real Founding: Long Gone

by Bradley J. Birzer, TIC co-editor

George Mason

Last week, I had the privilege of lecturing on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Passed unanimously by Congress in New York on July 13, 1787, this law never ceases to inspire me. As our own venerable John Willson has argued many times, it is, quite possibly, the most impressive republican law ever passed. Protecting religious freedom and common law rights, it also called for good relations with the American Indian, for a prohibition of slavery north and west of the Ohio River, and for the prevention of empire as the republic expanded West. My favorite provision is the untempered defense of property rights in the second article:

And, in the just preservation of rights and property, it is understood and declared, that no law ought ever to be made, or have force in the said territory, that shall, in any manner whatever, interfere with or affect private contracts or engagements, bona fide, and without fraud, previously formed.

Contrast this for a moment with what the French Revolutionaries passed only two years later in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, article III:

The source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body, no individual can exercise authority that does not explicitly proceed from it.

At first reading, the second article of the Northwest Ordinance appears to be a statement about mere possession. I own this; it’s mine; leave it alone; I obtained it through good faith; back off.

The Spirit of American Constitutionalism: John Dickinson's Fabius Letters

by Gregory S. Ahern

Though virtually ignored by scholars in recent decades, John Dickinson was one of the most influential of the American Founders. When he entered the Pennsylvania State House in May 1787, as Delaware’s delegate to the Constitutional Convention, he was one of the most knowledgeable and experienced statesmen to attend the Grand Convention. Colonial legislator, "Penman of the Revolution," colonel in the state militia during the War of Independence, drafter of the Articles of Confederation, member of the Stamp Act, Continental, and Confederation Congresses, and chief executive of two states—few other men could boast of similar achievements. In his character sketches of the delegates, William Pierce observed that Dickinson "will ever be considered one of the most important characters in the United States."[1]

After the Revolution

by Patrick J. Buchanan

“Democracy … arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects,” said Aristotle.

But if the Philosopher disliked the form of government that arose out of the fallacy of human equality, the Founding Fathers detested it.

“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule,” said Thomas Jefferson, “where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49.” James Madison agreed, “Democracy is the most vile form of government.” Their Federalist rivals concurred.

“Democracy,” said John Adams, “never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”

The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson

by James W. Ely, Jr.

The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson by David N. Mayer,  University Press of Virginia, 1994    

Thomas Jefferson continues to fascinate scholars. A voluminous literature examines his long public career and extensive comments on political issues. Historians have shown particular interest in exploring the elusive philosophical underpinnings of Jefferson’s political persuasions. David N. Mayer makes a valuable contribution to this debate with his comprehensive study of Jefferson’s constitutional principles as they matured from the 1760s to the 1820s.

Mayer identifies three sources that shaped Jefferson’s thinking about constitutional questions. From the English Whig tradition, Jefferson derived the notion of a constitution as a check on the power of government in order to protect individual rights. The federal aspect of his thought emphasized the division of governmental authority into state and national spheres, each of which was further divided into distinct executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Jefferson also gave special weight to the republican character of government, in which governmental authority rested on popular sovereignty and majority rule. Mayer points out that Jefferson’s constitutionalism developed over time and was often influenced by the course of political events. Rejecting criticism that Jefferson as president did not always act in conformity with his previously articulated views, the author maintains that Jefferson’s use of power was remarkably consistent with his constitutional theory.

It is Our Duty to Leave Liberty to Our Posterity

Honor, justice and humanity call upon us to hold and to transmit to our posterity, that liberty, which we received from our ancestors. It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children; but it is our duty to leave liberty to them. No infamy, iniquity, or cruelty can exceed our own if we, born and educated in a country of freedom, entitled to its blessings and knowing their value, pusillanimously deserting the post assigned us by Divine Providence, surrender succeeding generations to a condition of wretchedness from which no human efforts, in all probability, will be sufficient to extricate them; the experience of all states mournfully demonstrating to us that when arbitrary power has been established over them, even the wisest and bravest nations that ever flourished have, in a few years, degenerated into abject and wretched vassals.

--John Dickinson, A New Essay by the Pennsylvania Farmer, 1774

Always a Friend to Peace

"Always a friend to peace, and believing it to promote eminently the happiness and prosperity of nations, I am ever unwilling that it should be disturbed, until greater and more important interests call for an appeal to force. Whenever that shall take place, I feel a perfect confidence that the energy and enterprise displayed by my fellow citizens in the pursuits of peace will be equally eminent in those of war." --Thomas Jefferson to John Shee, 1807. ME 11:140

M.E. Bradford' s Constitutional Theory: A Southern Conservative's Affirmation of The Rule of Law

by Marshall DeRosa

M.E. Bradford

A Better Guide Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution. (La Salle, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Company Publishers, 1979). Cited in the text as Guide.

Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative. (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1985). Cited in the text as Remembering.

A Worthy Company: The Dramatic Story of the Men Who Founded Our Country. (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1988).

The Reactionary Imperative: Essays Literary & Political. (Peru, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Company Publishers, 1990). Cited in the text as Reactionary.

Against The Barbarians and Other Reflections on Familiar Themes. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1992). Cited in the text as Barbarians.

Original Intentions On The Making Of The United States Constitution. (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1993). Cited in the text as Intentions.

M.E. Bradford's constitutional theory is firmly grounded in the original intent of the Framers. His scholarly links to original intent are twofold; original intent is the only way to legitimately apply the U.S. Constitution to contemporary politics and it is better than any alternative at procuring good government.

A Little Rebellion

by Clyde N. Wilson

John Taylor of Caroline

Scandalously, Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote another friend, “God forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.” A lack of rebelliousness among the people would demonstrate “a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. . . And what country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?”

The “rebellion” in Massachusetts had alarmed many, especially the masters of that commonwealth, who were imbued with a Puritan longing for regulated behavior and saw the tax revolt of Capt. Daniel Shays and his farmers as a threat to their control. In Jefferson’s perspective, the “rebels” were merely adhering to good American practice. What, indeed, had the recent War of Independence amounted to but resistance to heavy-handed government? And such rebellions against unsatisfactory government officials and policies had been a regular occurrence during the long colonial history of the Americans, especially in the Southern colonies.

Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic

by Kevin R. C. Gutzman

Virginia’s revolutionary May Convention adopted its three resolutions of May 15, 1776. In doing so, it decided to craft a declaration of rights, a republican constitution, federal relations with other former British colonies in the New World, and foreign alliances for the fledgling Virginia republic. It did more than that, however:  it also touched off a decades-long dispute about the meaning of republican self-government, about the shape the Virginians’ new republic would take. On the mid-May day that it ran up a continental union flag atop the old colonial capitol at Williamsburg, James Madison said, Virginia staked its claim to self-government.  What proved more difficult was deciding what self-government would mean.

The American Revolution proceeded simultaneously on two levels:  the state and the federal. The federal Constitution ratified in 1788 provided an international context in which the sparsely populated, weak new states could conduct the experiment in republicanism the Revolution was meant to inaugurate,[1] and the founding of the federal republic has naturally drawn the bulk of historians’ attention. While federal reform was essential, and while Virginians took the lead in achieving it, the state-level activity of those years struck contemporaries as more important. As Thomas Jefferson noted in 1776, independence would have been for naught without success in state-level reforms of government and society.[2]

An Excerpt from: James Madison and the Making of America

by Kevin R. C. Gutzman

James Madison, Jr. entered the world at midnight of the night of March 16-17, 1751.[1] By chance, he was an American prince.

James Madison, Sr., the master of Montpellier in Piedmont Virginia’s semi-frontier Orange County, was the wealthiest man in the county. His lands were extensive, his slaveholdings were notable, and his family connections were impressive. In a society that privileged the wealthy to a notable degree, James, Jr.’s world was his oyster.

Piedmont Virginia lay west of the Tidewater region that had been dominated by Virginia planters for well over a century. Life was cruder there, and tradition less powerful. Social status figured very strongly in a young man’s life, but not to the degree that it did in the coastal counties. If James Madison, Jr. ever experienced having a common Virginian doff his hat as young Madison passed, then, he was not quite so snobbish as a Byrd, Carter, or Harrison. Still, like them, Madison knew his place.

James Madison and the Making of America

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Kevin Gutzman’s James Madison and the Making of America takes what we thought was a familiar story and gives it a fresh and important interpretation that challenges old orthodoxies and helps us better understand important episodes in American history.

For instance, proper credit for the world-historic Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom is at last granted not to its draftsman, Thomas Jefferson – who had his gravestone list the statute along with the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia as his proudest achievements – but to James Madison, who actually managed to get the statute enacted (and who would have nothing inscribed on his gravestone).

Charles Carroll, the Catholic Founder: An Interview with Dr. Bradley J. Birzer

by Carl Olson

Dr. Bradley J. Birzer is the author of Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson and J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth. In this interview he talks with Carl E. Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight, about his most recent book, American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll.

Ignatius Insight: Why a book about Charles Carroll? How did it come about?

Dr. Birzer: Thank you very much, Carl, for wanting to talk about American Cicero. I'm especially happy to talk about Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a man I have come to admire deeply in my study of him, the American Roman Catholic Church, and the American founding.

George Washington and the Gift of Silence

by Stephen M. Klugewicz

In December 2009, a letter written by George Washington in November of 1787 to his nephew Bushrod Washington was auctioned for $3.2 million, the highest price ever paid for a letter written by our first president. In the letter, Washington urges Bushrod to support the newly-written Constitution, then under consideration for ratification by the states. To most historians, this is probably the more interesting part of the letter. But the personal advice that Washington gives his nephew, who had just been elected to Virginia’s House of Delegates, at the letter’s conclusion provides a window on a key aspect of George Washington’s character. Washington tells Bushrod:

“Rise but seldom—let this be on important matters—and then make yourself thoroughly acquainted with the subject. Never be agitated by more than a decent warmth, & offer your sentiments with modest diffidence—opinions thus given, are listened to with more attention than when delivered in a dictatorial stile. The latter, if attended to at all, although they may force conviction, is sure to convey disgust also.”[1]

Oh James Otis, Where are you now? Or, Lamentations for the Republic That Was

by Bradley J. Birzer

With the Senate passing the National Defense Authorization Act on a vote of 87 to 13 yesterday, something fundamental seems to have changed in the very existence of our republic, if we can even employ this noble term any longer. 

For a year and a half, under Winston’s excellent editorship, TIC has been examining in various ways the history, the nature, the meaning, the purpose, and the frailties of republics, this once great one and a number of others. At times, this analysis has been direct. At other times, very indirect.

Regardless, every writer at TIC is concerned with the existence, defense, and perpetuation of the American republic.

But, yesterday. . . . that was a day.

On the 220th anniversary of the ratification of that most excellent common law document, the Bill of Rights, Congress (as the House had already passed it earlier in the week) agreed to hand over some of the broadest powers to the Executive branch it’s ever given away.

President Obama will sign this into law very quickly, if he hasn’t already done so by the same this is posted. Once he signs it into law, the dreams of every progressive president since Teddy Roosevelt will have been fulfilled. The executive will now be authorized by Congress—against a number of vital constitutional provisions—to detain American citizens accused of terrorism indefinitely and without trial.

There’s been very little public debate about this, and the news reports from the major news outlets yesterday mentioned these wide-sweeping powers only in passing. There’s more than a little hypocrisy in all of this, given the way the press responded to the rather heinous Patriot Act (remember how we were promised that would be a temporary measure) under Bush and the Republicans a decade ago. But, the NDAA is even worse than the Patriot Act, and it’s now clear that the Patriot Act was merely one step in the advance of this move toward extreme centralization.

As I wrote at CatholicVote yesterday, I believe it’s very possible that yesterday or the day (probably today) President Obama signs this into law will be remembered by future historians of western civilization as the “official” day the American republic became an empire, in the way historians now regard the murder of Cicero as the last day of the Roman Republic and the first day of the Roman Empire. I know many readers of TIC already believe we drifted fully into an empire, but we’ll all admit, I think, that we’ve been drifting for a very, very long time. As with Rome, we’ve kept the forms of the republic by destroying the essence of it.

Where is republican virtue? Where is republican liberty? 

Inspired by Liberty & Virtue: The Education of the Founders of the American Republic

by E. Christian Kopff

The education of the American Founders was “Inspired by Liberty and Virtue.” Winston Elliott suggested the title for this essay and it is a good one. The curriculum that educated so many of the Founding generation was not primarily training for a profession. It aimed at preparing future citizens for a life of ordered liberty through the practice of virtue. Certainly his suggestion is a more inspiring title than my first thought: “Dead Languages and Corporal Punishment.” Both titles are equally accurate as descriptions of the colonial curriculum. One describes its goals; the second describes its means. I want to talk about those means this morning, but the reason why it is worthwhile discussing them is their success in achieving the curriculum’s goals.

Today American education swings wildly back and forth between crises in reading and writing and crises in STEM subjects. (STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.) These crises appeared in the twentieth century in tandem with the slow but steady marginalization of traditional classical education and achieved critical mass after World War II. In 1955 Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read voiced a concern with language arts that continues to this day.[i] It was sidetracked, however, by the hue and cry that went up after the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957. A few days later Elmer Hutchinson, director of the American Institute of Physics told the New York Times (October 8, 1957) that unless the US revamped its educational system to emphasize science, “our way of life is, I am certain, doomed to rapid extinction.”

Naturally, threatened with rapid extinction, the national government poured money into science programs at the expense of humanities and foreign languages, the budgetary aspect of the educational environment in which enrollments in high school Latin went from 728,637 in 1962 to barely 150,000 by the late 1970’s.[ii] This significant change in the nation’s priorities in curriculum and funding was accomplished with remarkably little public debate. Earlier generations had rejected calls to repudiate traditional classical Christian education, and America had enjoyed 200 years of prosperity, creativity, and freedom.[iii] The success of the American space program in the 1960’s could not have been due to the money directed at what are now called STEM subjects in schools. The scientific and military leaders associated with the space program were all educated in the previous generation, a number of them in Europe.

The cycle of crises has continued into the twenty-first century. A few years ago educators warmed against a crisis in writing. As a result writing programs and even departments were founded at universities that had long refused academic credit for such a basic skill. This crisis has now taken second place to concerns with what they call “the drying up of the STEM pipeline,” which can be solved only by federal intervention. Meanwhile educators discovered another crisis—it is always a crisis—in critical thinking. Teachers in writing programs are asked to address it, but, as they often admit privately, they spend so much time correcting grammatical errors they have little time for in-depth instruction in critical thinking and persuasive discourse. In Real Education (2008), Charles Murray explained convincingly that “The tools of verbal expression... are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level.”[iv] Writing and speaking ungrammatically is an insuperable obstacle to thinking clearly and logically. 

“The world is like the drunken peasant trying to ride a horse,” Martin Luther noted. “If you prop him up on one side, he falls off the other.”[v] Luther could have been describing the educational establishment in the United States. Instead of careening from one crisis to another, our nation needs a curriculum that is balanced between language and math. It should not be a recent fad, but have been practiced for a long time, preferably for centuries. Its success should be demonstrated by wide acceptance in many countries. Its best graduates should be distinguished in a wide variety of areas, like literature, art, philosophy and political thought, politics and science, people like Shakespeare and Michelangelo, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Jefferson and Adams, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Galileo and Newton, Linnaeus and Darwin. Where can we find such a curriculum?

Redeeming America's Political Culture: The Kirkean Tradition in the Study of American Public Life

by Bruce Frohnen

By and large, the American Revolution was not an innovating upheaval, but a conservative restoration of colonial prerogatives. Accustomed from their beginnings to self-government, the colonials felt that by inheritance they possessed the rights of Englishmen and by prescription certain rights peculiar to themselves. When a designing king and a distant parliament presumed to extend over America powers of taxation and administration never before exercised, the colonies rose to vindicate their prescriptive freedom; and after the hour for compromise had slipped away, it was with reluctance and trepidation they declared their independence. Thus men essentially conservative found themselves triumphant rebels, and were compelled to reconcile their traditional ideas with the necessities of an independence hardly anticipated.1 --Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind

Is the United States a revolutionary nation? Was it founded in 1776 out of whole cloth by men determined to construct a government and a people committed to radically new ideas of political equality and individual liberty? Or is American public life best understood as the outgrowth of a political culture—governmental structures and an unwritten constitution consisting of people's habits, attitudes toward government and general ways of life—rooted in British and earlier traditions in the west? Were the founders politically innovating liberals or culturally and historically grounded conservatives?

Much hinges on the answer to this question because it indicates the nature and tendency of our founding documents and our nation's intended path. If America is at its core a set of ideological beliefs we all must accept and serve, then we must constantly reshape ourselves and our way of life to fit these ideas. But if our nation was founded to preserve a pre-existing way of life that the founders valued deeply, then it is this concrete way of life—the institutions, beliefs, and practices central to the local communities in which we live—that we must work to conserve, rather than any abstract notion of the best political regime.

Russell Kirk left no doubt on which side of this debate he stood. At a time when the liberal interpretation of America's past and destiny reigned all but unchallenged he forged, from dispirited and isolated pockets of resistance, a tradition of cultural valuation and analysis. And this tradition connected "modern" America to its cultural roots in Great Britain, medieval Europe and the classical world. From The Conservative Mind through The Roots of American Order and America's British Culture Kirk insisted that American constitutional government—our system of ordered liberty—rests on customs, beliefs, and habits developed during 150 years of relative self-government in the colonies and by centuries of formation within Western civilization.

Kirk argued that our "new order of the ages" was not intended to be a political utopia founded on abstract theories. Rather, it was to be an experiment in republican self-government firmly grounded in traditions of common law, local control, and adherence to Christian and western standards of virtue. Thus the American founders drafted a Constitution that balanced and limited the powers of the central government, thereby protecting rather than threatening the cultural habits or unwritten constitution onto which it was grafted. Conservatives at the time—John Adams chief among them—sought to maintain the historical continuity of Americans' traditions and ways of life within their new nation. Of course, Jefferson and his followers took a different path; they sought to reform society on the basis of abstract principles borrowed from the French revolutionary Jacobins.2 And so was born the fundamental tension in America between defenders of tradition and ideologues committed to the notion of progress and its corollary values of equality and material wealth.

Today most academics and journalists side with Jefferson. Even a number of public intellectuals calling themselves conservatives have sought to portray America as a truly "new nation" founded on an ideological commitment to equality, progress and an abstract freedom divorced from prescriptive institutions, beliefs and practices.3 These intellectuals further portray Kirk and the tradition of social and political analysis his Conservative Mind did so much to reinvigorate as marginal and even "un- American" because of their focus on the roots of America's ordered liberty in European and Christian sources.4 Indeed, some deny the very existence of traditional conservatism outside a few "fever swamps" of extreme isolationism and pseudo-European pretensions.5

Yet Kirk's cultural understanding of the nature and proper ends of politics is hardly eccentric. It belongs to a tradition of sociological understandings of public life represented by prominent figures such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Otto von Gierke and Robert Nisbet.6 As a method of political analysis it is alive and well and shared by a worthy group of successors. Traditional conservative scholars continue to expand our knowledge of the social institutions and customs at the heart of the American way of life. And it is to our way of life rather than to any set of abstract political precepts that conservatives would have us look in judging the worth of political or any other institutions.

Traditional conservative scholars see politics as merely a part of any good society. And the proper goal of political institutions is to protect and nurture more fundamental, local associations such as churches and families. Traditional conservatives reject the liberal emphasis on political ideology as the shaper of public life, seeing this view as the source of destructive innovation and an increasingly centralized, powerful, and intrusive state. For conservatives, political systems are good or bad according to their tendency to promote or undermine a decent way of life. In Kirk's words, conservatives work for the "preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity."7 These traditions embody and pass on the habits that make it possible for human beings to fulfill their duties to family, friends and neighbors, as well as strangers and God. American ordered liberty is the flower of these longstanding traditions as modified by changing historical circumstances. But the flower dies unless the roots are nurtured. And it is the chosen task of traditional conservatives, following Kirk, to extend our knowledge of the nature and requirements of these roots. Within the study of politics this means examining the cultural bases and ultimate purposes of governmental institutions and processes. Thus, in seeking Kirk's legacy in this realm, we must look to scholars concerned to show the limits of politics as the pursuit of ideological utopias. We must look to scholars integrating the study of politics with historical understanding and appreciation of the higher ends of human beings taken both individually and, more naturally, in their communities.

The Untold Story of the Constitutional Convention (video) - Gleaves Whitney

by Gleaves Whitney

Benjamin Franklin - Leader Extraordinaire (video lecture)

By Gleaves Whitney