Transcripts For CSPAN2 Discussion--Founders 20140101

We are very a journalist at a time when poland had no money at all and cnn are arrived by helicopter heat came by bus. We want to be coming by and stay until the end. That has always been our view of the story and we do it immediately and it is worth always doing the last interview and going the last kilometer. Nick myron magnet recounts the personal lives of americas founders in an examination of their homes. This is about an hour. Are we all adjusted . Well adjusted . Myron magnet, you have written a sumptuous physically and very rich in terms of its content and surprising. Let me start with the devils question. We have had the founders revival going for 20 years, big books on all the big guys, we are getting books on lesser known figures, why do we need another one . First of all it is beautiful as you say. You will see this 32 pages of very expensive color plates in it. It seemed to me that one of the things people hadnt really looked act as carefully as possible with the founders is their ideas. They were brilliant, very thoughtful guys, some of them had read very widely and some had a very wide experience and the founding came out of a world view. That is why i wanted to tell the story as biography. I wanted to ask the question not just what did these guys do but who where they, what did they think . What was driving them . On was impressed that there were three large themes that they were concerned about. One was they had a first for liberty, the way that people who no concrete lee what its opposite is like, the way that eastern europeans who had finally escaped from communism understood what liberty was and that is because so many of them were descended from descending protestants, pilgrims were just the first of them but for 150 years there were presbyterians, baptists, quakers and others coming from europe, protestants in europe who were cascading the persecution of the Catholic Church and this was very much a living memory for them. So they knew they had come here seeking they werent going to let go of it. They just werent going to let go of it. Then there is the tragic paradox we all know is at the center of american history. They lived amid slavery. That was everywhere. The 13 colonies. Even john jay had a couple slaves as he was president of the manumission society. How many people are doing something bad but they are not doing anything to end . I just had to respond to that, the ripple of laughter. But even the slave owners, as you well know, all obscenely and just it was, the smart ones, Thomas Jefferson said that an avenging god would take action and show that the world is not governed by blind chance. In a passage that you are writing, another great book about lincoln right now, just told me you were writing about the second inaugural, just as lincoln read the 5 jefferson in the gettysburg address talking about all men were created equal, so he revivified him. Host jefferson didnt often speak about avenging god or god at all. Guest that issue, if there were a god this is something he would be concerned about. That is for sure. Now comes to be george iii comes to the throne, this 22yearold more net who has succeeded his grandfather george ii for 30 yard years and starts messing with the colonies, nobody had messed with america and George Washington and many other colonists looked out and fought we know what is happening here. George washington said he wants to make us as came and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway and George Washington said this and it took George Washington a lifetime to understand the full implications of what he was saying and free his own slaves on his deathbed. They made a revolution for liberty and i wanted to make clear from the very, very beginning, in 1735 here in new york where so much of the great events of our history happened. From there on out the colonists were concerned about liberty. They had taken the country out of wilderness and they were going to run it themselves. Host tell us exactly who you are focusing on in this book. You have six figures and a family. The reason for that is my wife barbara and i took a trip to virginia just kind of on a whim to see the founderss houses. You would think we would have done this many times. But we never had. It just knocked my socks off to go down there. You walk into those houses and it is like you are walking into the presence of these guys, like they are haunted. And you feel that a place like monticello you feel you know the man. And do i deal with . My gimmick is it had to be somebody who had a house that was open to the public that you can visit because i wanted people to have some sense that these were not mythical figures. They were living human beings who as the review in the wall street journal said who have mortgages which they couldnt always pay off as you wrote so eloquently about hamilton. So that was kind of where i made the cut. I left out john adams who has two houses you can visit because he has been written about so many times Nobody Needed to write it. I wrote about william livingston, who was a signer of the constitution and important because he ran a magazine in new york in the 1750s. John adams who i left out of my book said that the American Revolution, the real American Revolution happened 15 or 20 years before the shots rang out in lexington. Host williamss remark. Guest and intellectuals. He said it happened in the hearts and minds of the americans and if you want to see how they changed their affections and their ideas just look at the literature, the pamphlets or the sermons even of the last 15 years or so. But he didnt go far enough back because the place where it really started was with william livingstons magazine, the independent reflector. He wanted to model it on the fuel spectator. Is this weekly monthly . Guest it is weekly which he knows the road with a couple friends. He started with a fuss about establishing columbia college. It turned into a lesson where he talked to america the ideas of government by consent, the right of the people to resist or as jefferson some doubt many years later, the servant, not the proprietors of the people. Columbia was kings college. Host there was going to be a tax on everybody at the table. Guest everybody had to pay. Most of us in new york arent anglicans. Why should everybody be taxed for the purposes at and furthermore, led him to the idea of free thought and there mustnt be any orthodoxy in. Like john stuart mill, like James Madison in a way in be leading James Madison, when he was a student at princeton. I start with him and he is the first great intellectual influence on the founding. This magazine, everybody read it. Everybody all over america subscribe to it. Madison and his fellow students at princeton were still reading it 20 some years later. Then i moved to stratford hall, the house, i saw this gonna book cover and thought oh my god, and i know you think that but is the only one you havent been to. It is so beautiful and in fact, the dean of the british art historians says this house is still architecturally sophisticated that you would think it had been designed by a British Royal architect but it wasnt. It was designed by. Kenya born william nobody knows anything about him. Host my judgment of the house is affected by the oddity of the inhabitants. Guest isnt it extraordinary . You have these Four Brothers who grew up there, Richard Henry lee, Francis Lightfoot lee, arthur b. And some sisters and then the next owner of the house was light horse harry lee, the dashing commander of lees legion in the revolutionary war who won the famous battle of paulas hook, now jersey city. An extraordinary character in his own right. Great realestate speculator who ended up in debtor apps prison. And board in that house was light horse harrys son robert e. Lee. Imagine that. The man who tears apart the union that his ancestors made was born there. If you go third you will see one of those cast iron fire back, what used to be his nursery with a couple very crude cherubs cast into the back of it and when they were leaving the house when robert e. Lee was 3 years old they couldnt find him and they went looking for him and he was in his nursery kneeling in front of the fireplace saying goodbye to the cherubs who had been his companions in his youth. Just as the civil war was ending, the letters of law robert e. Lee wrote to his wife saying i wish we could buy stratford. Is the only place in fused with local law for me. Where we could go. I wonder if it is for sale. So the leaves of stratford hall. Host tell the story of how Richard Henry turned a disaster into great accounts, his terrible accident. Guest that was a terrible year for him. He was out shooting swans. If you go to stratford, go to washingtons birthplace four miles up the road, hopes creek. The house is gone but it is so beautiful it is like going back, like going back to the americas that when you work through the woods you see the deer scampering away the way pigeons get out of your way, the potomac at that point is about seven miles wide so it is spectacularly beautiful. The potomac forms into these little beige when we went there, there were thousands of geese and hundreds of swans and overhead if you can believe that a bald eagle. It was like it had been set up by hollywood. When i set out to describe this i like to use adjectives so i wrote an overhead, a fastball eagle, that doesnt sound he was out shooting swans which i guess they ate just as Queen Elizabeth i used to eat them. And his gun blew up. The barrel of his gun blew up and blew the four fingers off of his left hand. This was the same year that his young wife died leaving him with two baby sons. So he had a black silk glove made to cover his disfigurement and he had a lot of stage fright, but he learned to become a great orator. He was tall, aristocratic virginian, looked like so he learned to gesture with his black silk glove as he got off his latin and greek quotations when serving at the Continental Congress of which he was finally the president. He got to be one of the great orators of all time. On the topic of his stage fright he gave his maiden speech in the Virginia House of burgesses in 1759 so we are talking 100 years, 100 years and more before the civil war. He gets up, and what does he say to his fellow slave owners . He says abolish slavery. He says on prudential grounds it is not good for us to have other people do the work while we sit around and furthermore it is going to greet all kinds of strife in future and furthermore if we are christians how can we think that our fellow creatures are not created in the image of god as ourselves and entitled to liberty and freedom . We have a complicated history here. 100 years and more before the civil war, here is one of the representatives of one of the great slave phoning plantations in virginia making this statement. Amazing. Then i have three paragraphs on the great George Washington. Three chapters. It will feel like three paragraphs it reads so beautifully. I fell in love with him. I couldnt stop. You sit there reading his letters and speeches, 1200 pages. Host anything surprise you about him . Guest yes. I had thought that he was kind of like a high toned dental liquid the me. That he was a very handsome man who looked great in a uniform and all these much smarter guys like madison and hamilton were pouring the ideas into his head and he did get up there in his uniform and say his lines. And it is true, they did break his speeches. But the fact of the matter is in he was serving in the french and indian war and in effect the government of this lawless territory with this savaging the enemy as he said and having to having to requisition supplies at fordpoint from the very people whose interests he was trying to protect, already was starting to think a strong central government, decades before the articles of confederation, decades before the Constitutional Convention over which he presided. He was having good ideas and what i came to see about him is that he was you wrote a book about this too, wonderful book about out George Washington like a ceo, he had the capacity to make a large strategy and then had the self confidence to pick out brilliant young men to flesh it out and get the details done. So he wanted a strong central government, needs a constitution. Let madison do it. He will sit there quietly but he knew that was what he wanted and he knew that is what madison intended to do. He knew very well that the might of a nation depends on its wealth. Host armies have to be paid. Guest and england is so powerful because it is a fiscal military state that had a bank and a great system of finance. He knew he wanted a diversified economy. And he didnt gent just one farming, wanted to be a modern country. With every kind of industrial activity there could be. Let madison do it. Let hamilton do it when madison objected, of course, he fought long and hard about was this really the right way to go. In the end he said yes, lets absolutely do it. That surprised me. He was not just handsome guy who looked good in a uniform. He was a visionary in chief. I came to find out that. After him. Host in the case of choosing hamilton over madison he is going to against what you would think where his proclivities, his virginian advisers, the people who were most like him were saying a strong, bad guy but he goes to new york or the immigrant. Guest he was an entrepreneur himself. He saw mount vernon as his business. He had everything was useful for him, the potomac was beautiful but it is full of fish. He built a fishing fleet and he is exporting barrels of salted fish to the west indies. He built the distillery. It soon turned into the biggest one of the United States. I cant remember how many gallons of raw and bourbon a year, you are allowed to make bourbon in virginia. As the Virginia Soil became exhausted, he experimented with i think it was 60 different kinds of crops until he realized that wheat was the thing to grow. He was no lazy aristocratic planter nissan that hamilton, the illegitimate west indian on the make, real genuine new yorker, hamilton in certain ways, the fatherless child really was the true soul son of this childless founding father. And he saw that. Host then washington and hamilton. Guest we have john j. He is an interesting one. We had copies of the federalist papers of which he writes only five. There he is forever with hamilton and madison so we know the name but he himself is a little pale and i have to say of all your portraits, his was the most interesting to me because partly because of what he was willing to do during the revolution. He had a lot of tough assignments, really tough stuff. Tough stuff morleyally. Guest he ran aspiring during the revolutionary war and he came to believe you couldnt be neutral in this revolution. You couldnt just sit back and say okay, i will just wait and see what happens and if england wins i will be english and if america wins i will be american. You had to choose. So he said look, if you are not going to choose to be an american then you have to be disarmed and put out of the protection of the United States or you have to be exiled. Exiled drove some of his best friends into exile. It was a civil war. Host new york state. Guest and in virginia as well. There were partisan gain, the patriot skinners and the loyalist cowboys. Just games of thugs is what they were. They were using the war as an excuse, but they were out there to steel as much as they could steal. These people are rebels. Of course we are coming to confiscate for the kings loan loyal subjects or vice versa but they would kill people into doing this and they did it to john j. s own father and brother and did not, thank god, kill them, but took everything. Took everything except for the clothes on their back and there is john j. Serving as the first chief justice of new york and he is up there in albany and he says now i am doing the worst part of my job. He said trying loyalist traders. He had a game of cowboys in front of him as he writes in his letter, and they had broken into this patriot farm when his son, a continental soldier was home on leave visiting, killed both of them and then got caught by continental troops. John j. Sentenced the whole group to hank. This is very disagreeable work but it has to be done. The reason you know least about john jay is there has not been satisfactory biography of him. There is one by his son which is very good but it is very powerful. There are matters, all kinds of documents and all kinds of official correspondence. Host you love his wife. Guest i love his wife. She is like a jane austen heroin. As i say in the book with sense and sensibility to spare. She has such when they get shipwrecked on their way to europe and end up in the west indies. Host as a diplomat. Guest they are on their way to spain. They are a cast away on Santa Domingo and she comments on how beautiful it is and what she likes is what human activity has done to is and how up to the very mountaintops they have planted coffee and sugar cane and she writes her father, william livingston, the writer of the wonderful magazine in the 1750s. She writes her father to precise paragraphs about how a sugar mill works. She loved she was fantastic. When john jay was off making the john jay treaty she write a letter to him saying dont be mad at me, but we have been investing our money by lending it out. So now everybody who knows us money has paid us back and nobody wants to borrow money just now. So all this bank stocks going, it seems to me like a really good investment and she gives a little kind of investment report, an Analyst Report on why this stock would be good to buy. I took the money and i bought it. And she said it has already gone up x . The thing about john jay that is most striking is although we remember him as our first chief justice in fact he is most important for having made the treaty that ended the revolutionary war. What is so interesting about it is the congress under the leadership of madisons party had given him instructions to share everything with our french allies. This treaty, negotiations took place in paris, france. John jay realizes that the french have their own ambitions in the new world and they are helping us but not because they love us but because they have their own plan. Host nomination of lafayettes. Guest it is not. He proceeds to deal quite separately with the english negotiators and he says to them and what we have to do is negotiate a lasting peace. We have to negotiate a lasting peace and kiss the daylights out of the english out of the english negotiator. Lasting peace . Is that a code word for how the americans want to be the arbiter of the balance of power in europe . And he goes to franklin who is officially but not really taking any part in these negotiations, what are the lasting peace mean . Franklin tells him a story from roman history, which one i dont know, but spins it out. Lasting peace is peace that is fair and just to both parties so they dont go to work again. And hence, it is lasting. Oh, says oswald, the negotiator, fine. Then i can do what you want done which is recognized american independence, something the french did not want and all so host they wanted a small america. Guest they wanted to be small and hemmed in by a hostile powers on all sides, at odds with britain and dependent upon france. That is not what happened and the reason it didnt happen is because john jay with his stupendous geopolitical understanding and imagination and with his stupendous American Initiative and entrepreneurship said wait a minute. I know i am here to serve my nations interests and i think i know what my nations interest is and i am going to do it. It was miraculously. Then comes hamilton about wh. Then comes hamilton about whom you have written so eloquently and i learned you should tell the story of the founding true short biographies from you because you have written a shelf of magnificent ones. Host you were my editor. Guest i didnt have a lot to it. Sometimes you get flawless copy and that is what i got. On hamilton, of course, you and i see it the same way. Hamilton was the man who imagined opportunity america. He wanted an economy which had a niche for every skill, every talent, every ambition, and it is because he thought of economics as schoolcraft. It would make people rich and it would make the country rich, but how argued going to fill your own potential if you didnt have the opportunity to find something to do with it that would allow you to bring out everything that was in you . Host only by a combination of brilliance. Guest and the luck was he got a job as a clerk in the west indies. That is one of the great new york trading firms. Even when he was a teenager working as a lowly clerk in the west indies he was already although he didnt know it yet connected to the great dynamo. What was the going to become the dynamo of the United States, the economic dynamo that was the triangle trade. He was a genius. He really was just a genius. And then i have chapters about the republicans as the progenitors of the democrats were called. One about jefferson and his stupendous house. If anyone in this room hasnt been to monticello, go. It is the greatest house in america. I can tell you how beautiful. Host you write so movingly about the use of light. Guest triple high windows, for to ceiling windows that you can open up and walk out onto the veranda and skylights, glass skylights, it has got mirrors everywhere. Jefferson had his slaves level the top of the local mountain on which it is built. There is sunlight pouring into it from all these windows and skylights and it is bouncing off of all these mirrors. It struck me that it is this perfect enlightenment icon and it seemed to be crying out more light. You dont realize that right at first, but i remember you said when you looked at the pictures in the book you were struck by how beautiful the pictures of monticello were and where they taken on a particularly sunny day . No. That is what the house is like. It is enlightenment. And all its amazing rooms, the demi octagons host which eliminate dark corners. Guest which eliminate dark corners. There were peculiarities. There was the room called mr. Madisons room because madison and his wife would come and visit. Jefferson like these alcove bed. Here is an alcove bed. I always thought and the madisons would come not when they had retired from the white house, and i thought which of the old couple slept on the inside . Anyway. It was really a house built for a bachelor. Host a widower. Guest whose wife died very young. And then most people believe as i do, he then took her halfsister, his slave sally headings as his concubine and had children with her. So they had strange relations on the eighteenth century plantation. Host the slave corridors and passages dont parrot take of this. Guest it is like the eloi n and morlocks. Regular 18thcentury house has wings with kitchens and various Service Parts but the wings are like separate pavilions. Jefferson inverted them but they are underground and when you have art harriss that you can walk out on and it just looks like you have these beautiful promise nots but underneath a s the work is being done host jefferson is the only at man in america who knows a good bottle guest jefferson came to dinner last night and board us all with his talk about what the best wine was. Sometimes i suppose you can no too much. Than come two chapters on madison, one on madison the thinker and the brilliant brilliant brilliant creator of the constitution and astonishing degree of political sophistication and historical understanding and knowledge of human nature because these guys were not sentimental. He was making a government for real people if they really are, not prodigies of virtue or angels. These men were angels, we would need no government he said in federalist history. And the last chapters about madisons presidency which you and i disagree about. I love your madison book, i cant tell you how many hours of pleasure it gave me but i think that madisons presidency was a failure. It was not host i dont think it was that good. Guest i understand but i think it was fat bad. Wasnt necessary to fight the war of 1812 and it wasnt necessary to come so close to losing it. Host we certainly came very close to that. Guest fan going to open the door to questions now and i want to instruct you all to before you ask the question, say your name and please only ask one question, and also dont give a speech with the rising inflection at the end. Make a real question. There are two Staff Members on hand to help you with these arrangements. I will start with this side. Was the jefferson hamilton antipathy based upon philosophical differences or was it more personal or was it geographic . Guest it was philosophical for sure. That is a wonderful question. It had sort of two basics. One was jefferson really believed that agriculture was the only decent life for cumin beings. You never noticed it, his agriculture was done for him by slaves. The life of the husband, healthy, wonderful, close to nature, such hogwash. Feed he thought the idea of diversified economy and the bank and a funded National Debt were just plain evil. That was the philosophical difference. Philosophical difference 2 had to do with the french revolution. Jefferson who was minister to france when the revolution broke out, edited the declaration of the rights of man and the citizen for his friend lafayette believed the french revolution and host never bailed out. Guest and so many friends of his work killed and so many friends of ours, so many allies in the revolutionary war said i just look at them as casualties of war and if there were one adam and one evil left in every country, republican adam and eve, and hamilton thought it was and terror. A comment and question. Host question please. Okay. The question is in studying the revolutionary war it became clear to me one of the biggest reasons for the start of the war was the way that the french and indian war ended. Washington had done a lot of surveying as a young man out west. He knew the property. When the french and indian war ended, a lot of offices were given major tracks instead of money. Washington went around, bought up those properties. The proclamation of 1763 made it illegal to develop it. My question is it washington had a second agenda in saying i want to be commanderinchief . He could build longer use those lands. Guest the real result of the french and indian war was as sensible deal politicians saw at the time, it ended french power in north america. America had no need of british protection anymore. And it was only a matter of time. Why should anybody boss us around . We dont need them. George shea. I am wondering why you couldnt bring in Robert Morris who is so wealthy and so important the minute he wound up in debtors prison . Guest i am fascinated by Robert Morris and i really really wanted to include him. But he did not leave much in the way of writing is behind him. That is the problem with sam adams. Clearly a seminal major figure. The papers are gone. Guest and morriss accounts argon and everybody elses many. Including 40,000 that he lent him. And he owed 20 times more than he had. Wasnt he the richest man in the colonies . Yes. At his peak. So i agree he is a fascinating figure and if you could suddenly go into one of these houses and find a dusty leather bound trunk in the attic and open it up and there would be morriss papers, that would be wonderful. I would love to live to see it. You obviously impacted by the houses themselves of these great people. Would you give us a reflection on the notion that property is the rightful creation or value of what you productively do . Did they understand that in creating their houses . Guest oh yes. For washington, washington was always being condescended to in the french and indian war by british officers with royal commissions. He was just a colonial hayseed. They never thought that he was worth anything. He had a great issue with trying to show that he was just as much a gentleman as they were so mount vernon was the outward manifestation in the beginning of his in word ambitions to be that kind of a gentleman. This is important. Late in the war, a british sloop of war anchored off mount vernon and his cousin who was managing the estate in his absence, anchored to a bunch of his silver, took a bunch of his slaves and went on board with a slave burying a tray of refreshments. To say can i resupply you . Can i help you out . Wont you please give me back my cousins silverware and slave . You have to think of yourself as my representative. I cant believe you did such a terrible thing. He said i fully expect that before this war is over i am going to lose all my slave, i am going to lose all my houses, i am going to lose everything that was there at mount vernon and that is the price i am willing to pay. That is a nobleman. Host there is one fact that sticks in my mind about mount vernon. The english architect who came to america late in the 18thcentury. Guest Benjamin Henry latrobe. Host he write a description of mount vernon as a neat country gentlemans house of 500 pounds a year. This is at the same time jane austen is writing a first draft of pride and prejudice, so these houses are beautiful houses and they are impressive but compared to english standards of wealth of palmer and circumstance guest they are tiny. Alan greenberg, wonderful classical architect who is practicing now in building buildings as we speak wrote a book called the architecture of democracy about american architecture and he is absolutely right. These guys were building houses for republican gentleman. If you compare even mount vernon to some english country house, it is a tiny. It is really tiny. If you go up i hope everybody will get on the train and go to 141 141st street, compared to an english gentlemans house that is a tradesmans the love. The tiny little house. These guys did have their ambitions but they were not to the boards lords. Host any more questions . 19 will they let you into boston for stopping your survey . Guest i felt i had to wait for everybody to forget, i intend to devote an entire book, five volumes to john adams. I didnt think of that until you reminded me that oh my god i was going to go to boston and i didnt write about any single atoms. You want to come with me . Host well, the houses that survive, not just the last one, the most recent one in time was a piecefield, john and abigail came back. That stayed in the family until the 20th century. The adamses never threw anything away. If you go to peacefield, it is like an attic of american stuff. There is stuff you have seen in textbooks. And you turn a corner and there is pad painting and this and that. Guest so many houses are like that. Houses that stayed in the family. John jays house was quite a simple villa like thousands and thousands of others, just up the road