>> we have the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. we in massachusetts think that they copied us. thatll me some phrases really make you feel like free americans that are in the constitution. would say the right to bear arms. >> the right to bear arms. where i come from in virginia, many people would say that. what are some others? to say the freedom of speech. can you mention others? the fifth amendment. and everything there. >> we, the people? >> other specific phrases that you like? no one mentions freedom of religion. the rights against unreasonable search and seizure, the rights against cruel and unusual punishment and so forth. the point i want to make is that with the exception of the first two things that were mentioned and the general phrase which i if you take those as exceptions, all of the other specific revisions of the constitution that you guys mentioned as things that make you feel safe and free are, as this gentleman pointed out, they are not in there. they're not in their any original cost of tuition that originalen in the constitution. we could have mentioned some of addedghts that related after the civil war, the right of women to vote, which came in the 20 century. so much of what we love about the constitution is not in it. the framers did not write bill of rights, not because they did not care about rights but because that was not their priority. they were there for other reasons. that ire the reasons want to talk about today. i have to tell you, it is a hard thing to talk about. it's this and be true of any nation, that it's founding is ist of shrouded in mist, but is unique about the constitution and our founding is that there are some new different players of miss. ordinary people don't know much about the constitution, they have their myths about the constitution but even people that studied it have their myths about it and even those that lot have myths about it. think about these russian dolls were you go, it is a beautiful doll, but wait, as is actually just an outer cover. the outer cover, you take it away and there's something else. you keep taking more and more players and players of sales away to try to get at the real thing. veils away to try to get to the real thing. i want to peel away the la yers on the constitution. maybe you can help me peel away some more. to first myth that i want start talking about the constitution with is the notion of the constitution as a democratic document. greats part of that whole democratic upsurge of the american revolutionary era. if you look at the actual complaints of the people who wrote the constitution about the articles of confederation and the era that preceded that, you have 13 sovereign nations. the commonwealth of massachusetts, virginia, and the other 11 states were just as sovereign as the united states, canada, and mexico today. they had complaints about them but listen to some of the things they said. the problem was, an excess of democracy, and hedge fund democracy. 18th-century people warhorse people, as you know. a couple of them used the analogy that really became .seful for me when they quote silas deane, it seems like the range of government was held with two feeble of hand. morris, another great horse man, despite having lost a leg, he literally had been to the manner born, he was born at his family's estate down in westchester new york. was goingis of what on in the 1780's. americans had become unruly thieves. believe, the founders that it has started out great, it had gone too far. it had gotten out of hand. there's a real sense in which the constitution was an effort to put this democratic genie back in the bottle, what specifically have gone wrong, all of the power according to the framers of the constitution was in the lower houses of the state legislatures. and these legislators were elected from very small districts, so everybody knew them and could put pressure on them, could know how they were voting on the state legislature ,nd these state representatives so, is a good time to think about this. these state rep as additives in all but the two states were elected every single year with the exception of south carolina and connecticut, they are elected every six months. we see those 18th-century versions of road signs. those were real accountability. too much in the eyes of the framers of the constitution. you have these legislatures with all of the power and in most states, the governor was not able to veto laws coming out of legislature. if you can get it to the legislature, courts could not overturn it. in most states, he couldn't. the is what led people like say would we have -- like the below legislature to say we have an excess of democracy. arrivedtion that they at was to take many of the most important duties of the state government and transfer them to the federal level, to create this new national government. i focus on to duties in particular, one is control of the money supply. before the constitution was adopted, each could write up this. control of the money supply. the taxes for the federal government. before the constitution, most of the federal government has no power to levy taxes. so, let's take these two powers newtransfer them to this national government. the new national government that was much less sensitive to popular pressure than any of the state governments. the president did have a veto and not only could he stop laws but the senate could stop the laws. the supreme court could overturn this. they overturned federal laws. look at all of these branches. the house of representatives is elected once every two years but the senate is elected for six years. the supreme court justices, as long as they behave, are in for life. we have people serving longer-term. all of those branches are elected indirectly, not by the people. even the senate, which has been 1913. the framers decided to be independent of the people as chosen by the state of legislatures. not an accident that they that was government less democratic. that was the point, to take the power out of the hands of ordinary citizens and in the hands of those they felt could rule better. i think the most important way that they did that was one of the things i mentioned that simply by shifting power from the state level to the level of , peopleral government knew their legislator personally. that is not true today. james madison defined it and that famous federal's paper as extending the sphere of government. by shifting power to the national level, you make it ofder for these efforts people to put pressure on the federal government, the phrase that kept coming up was combating when they were right in the constitution which is concert. you want to make it harder and harder for ordinary people who have grievances to get together and to concert their measures, to put collected united pressure on the government. letter thatvate madison wrote thomas jefferson, here is the goal that he set out. the reprobate it maximum tyranny is the only policy by which a republic can be administered unjust principles. this is latin for divide and conquer. conquernot divide and the people because we hate them frome want to prevent them having a say in government. it is because we love them and don't want them to run things themselves. he wanted to stop that. one of the greatest pursuance of the era was the former commander of the connell army, george washington, and he put it this way in a letter that he wrote in october, 1786 before the constitution was written. "let the reigns of government be praised in time and help with a steady hand. the purpose of the constitution. that leads to the second myth that i talk about today, a lot of historians have said what i that the, but they say refrain for democracy was something that they got from the books that they read. there is a chapter on james madison and his authorship of the constitution in which the "a child of the revolution read some books. from madison, j, hamilton reading these books? partly. i want to stress what i think was the more profound motive and that was the people who wrote the constitution believed that in the time after the revolutionary war, the u.s. had become a bad credit risk. not just the government, but the people themselves. the results of that was that the country had become unattractive to investors. nobody would lend money to americans. so, they wrote the constitution in an effort to make the place a more safe place for investors. again, that is something that they would do not just for their own economic benefit but for everybody. articlecan see it in one, section 10 of the constitution which prohibits the state from doing all these things they have done back during the revolutionary war and after the revolutionary war. all of these things they had done for farmers. you hundredowed dollars, i can give them an old horse. they believe that the country had fallen under the sway of debtors and demagogues. that is what they were trying to stop. not because they hated farmers come in because they were , because they thought that if we can stop oppressing creditors, if we can let them collect their dead, then they would be able to lend money in the future. someone who really embodied this is james madison. in the spring of 1787, when madison started writing drafts was 36constitution, he years old. he was still living with his parents. like most 36 years old, he was hoping to get out of the house. so, he devised one of the classic great american get rich quick schemes and that was to speculate in western lands, it indian land, we would now say. in the fall of 1784, he went what is friend up to now rome, new york for an indian treaty. he saw how fertile land was and is in it's got home, he formed a monroe,hip with james who would succeed him in the presidency a couple of decades later. they bought a few thousand acres but they wanted to buy a lot more of what was the one thing that they were missing, started capital. they needed to borrow money in order to invested in land, by this land, and then sell it. course, it would be easy to pay back their creditors. nobody would lend them the money. and so they had actually cut back the scale of their ambition . and then madison had the idea, americans won't lend us money, maybe people in france will. he wrote his friend thomas jefferson who was over there as the american representative and said, around these french anchors and aristocrats and see if you can borrow a bunch of money. jefferson immediately wrote back and said, "nothing doing." they were afraid if they lent money to madison and monroe and somehow the deal went at, they would not be able to go into a virginia court and sue them to get the money back. that is really the problem with the framers of the constitution. lots of other problems, of course, but the fundamental problem they were trying to solve was to make it impossible for state legislatures to protect debtors. there was a real sense in which when madison wrote off the fundamental rights for which he was contending was the right to be sued. if you can be sued, you can borrow money. that is a short version of the framers' economic interpretation, but it brings up another myth about the constitution, and that is the myth that the framers were right, and that is one i want to challenge today because so many historians have sort of gone along with the idea that sure enough, the american revolution originally went too far. many people thought that the american revolution had also gone too far, and they have gotten a lot of endorsements from modern historians. if i just go across the charles river here to harvard, the eminent scholar reported on the 1780's, the time leading up to the constitution, "again and again, minority property rights had been overwhelmed by populist majorities." the next thing i want to do today is to try to disagree with all these historians who support that and say actually, there were two sides to this story. that, yes, there is a case to be made for "the big problem here is we are not attracting enough investment," that there is a case to be made for the farmers as well, so let's look at it from their standpoint. one of the main motives for the american revolution was to get out from under that british taxation without representation. well, they rebelled in 1776 and succeeded with the peace treaty of 1783 in winning independence, and then what happened? the representatives, now that we have our own representatives, levied taxes on them that were four times higher on average than they had ever been asked to pay as british colonies. these were taxes to pay off the war debt. you can see why they were levied, but i want you to look at it from the standpoint of the farmers. you not only have these incredibly high taxes, but they are much higher even than they seem on paper because there was almost no money in circulation in the economy. imagine if i told you guys, "we are going to have a new federal tax of $1000." you would all go home going, "that's no good." suppose i said that you have to pay in green stamps. those of you who remember what they are, do any of you still have any? i would expect peter is still have green stamps, but even he doesn't. if there was one person in the room who did have green stamps, we would all be going to her or him and saying, "gimme, please." that's what it was like with gold and silver in this economy. so little was circulating in the economy that when a tax was levied that had to be paid in gold and silver, to get somebody to had -- who had some to part with that, you had to give them four or five horses when it had to be -- it used to be you only had to give them one or two. it was massive deflation, and one of the phrases that got used up and down -- i have read petitions for legislatures and newspaper essays and also to of other documents up and down from new hampshire to georgia over 13 states, and the phrase that keeps popping up is that when a legislature levies these taxes four times higher than we paid before and does not put money in circulation to pay those taxes with, it is making the same demand of us that pharaoh made of the ancient israelites, and that is to make bricks without straw. people just could not do it, and people were having the sheriff take away their cattle, sometimes even their pots and pans to pay these taxes because they just did not have the money to pay. so you can the white -- you can see why somebody would support something like paper money because that gives them a medium with which to pay these taxes. i mentioned briefly that the main purpose of these taxes levied in the 17 80's was to pay off the revolutionary war debt. if the debt had remained in the hands of the people who initially got these war bonds, the soldiers who fought the revolutionary war and had been paid off many times with bonds, or the farmers -- you know, the army comes through your town and says, "everybody, give us your cattle, and we do not have cash to pay you, so we are going to give you i owe you -- iou's." initially, the bonds of gone to ordinary people, many of them, but they were quickly bought up by bond speculators, who could see that the soldiers -- you cannot eat a bond. if you have been paid off with a bond and you are hungry, you have to turn that into gold and silver so you can use that to go by bread. soldiers who had initially gotten the bonds had to dump them at as little as three dollars for a bond that was marked $100. the vast majority of the bonds quickly ended up in the hands of the speculators. i have to tell you guys -- that was a major part of the research i did here into the whole land speculation business because i could see that was a critical engine of the constitution. bond speculators demand these really high taxes, and those taxes cause the farmers to demand policies like paper money, and policies like paper money freak out guys like madison because they can see what it is doing to the investment climate -- chasing away investors. so people like madison write the constitution to prohibit things like paper money. i knew bond speculation was really important, but as i would start to talk about it, i could see people's eyes kind of glaze over. somehow there are people out there who do not get excited about government finance. i do not know how that is. all this time, i'm working on bond speculators, i was trying to find one guy that i could use to put a face on all the others, and i would find a letter by this one guy talking about speculation, but it was one list, and someone else would mention the account book, and it would reduce these scattered pieces, and i was not finding what i really wanted. that was one bond speculators who had left enough documentation that i could use him to really put a face on all the others. so one day here at the massachusetts historical society, i finally found my bond speculator, and it turns out the he i had been looking for all this time was a she. it was abigail adams. in june 1777, 20 years before her husband became president, she began the process that she would continue all through those 20 years of fighting these -- by getting these soldiers' and farmers' and other people's bonds from them at a fraction of their face value and then holding them with the hope that the price would go up. she was ultimately very successful at it. there was one series of bonds she bought at $15 -- she would pay $15 for a 100 dollar bond, and she cashed out when they had risen from $15 to $90, so she made a profit six times her initial investment. but it took her a while to get going as a speculator because she initially had to overcome the objections of her husband, john. john adams hated on speculators. he saw them as these parasites who redistribute wealth without actually producing anything, and they are also a threat to the government, he believed. that is, that they are a small clique of people with power to influence the government and incentive to influence the government in their own favor. so she had to persuade her husband to stop investing in land, which he thought was a much safer investment -- safer for the person because, you know, you cannot burn down 40 acres of land, but you can burn the stuff on it, but the land will still be there. it was a safer investment for the person but also safer for the country because bond speculators were such a threat to the government, whereas farmers, those were the real people. as you know, he was a lawyer and had all sorts of public jobs, but he saw himself as first and foremost a farmer, and like thomas jefferson, he believed that the only truly virtuous people were farmers. and abigail would say to him, "that's all great, and i believe in that, too, but our land is making 1% a year, and i can make you 18% a year just on the interest on these bonds, and that is not counting when we actually redeem the bonds and cash out." as i said, on one of these bonds, she sex couples -- she sextupled, if that is the word, her investment. she took about educating john about the value of these bonds. by this time, they were together in europe, and she had been his business agent throughout the revolutionary war while he was off being a congressman and diplomat, but she was with him on april 20 4, 1785, over in london, when he started a letter to his new business agent, and there was a farm he wanted to buy. he was sending along 200 pounds sterling. he starts off this letter by going, "ok, i want you to drop on me for 200 pounds and use it to buy these bonds." that's on the front of this letter. if you flip over to the back of the letter where he continued, john adams says, "showing what i have written to madame, she has made me sick of purchasing. instead of that, you may draw upon me for 200 pounds in as good exchange rate as you may obtain and lay it out at most you judge for my interest." i imagine him writing on his table, and abigail walking by and literally changing his mind right in the course of the letter. a case can be made for bond speculators. those soldiers who sold their bonds to speculators like abigail adams, if the speculators had not been there, they might not have gotten anything at all for the bonds, so at least they got their three dollars out of $100, or whatever they got, but you can also understand the anger of the farmers at having to pay taxes in the 1780's, higher taxes than they had ever paid as british colonists, without a money supply in most states to pay those taxes with in order to further enrich bond speculators like abigail adams. not that they knew that she -- she used very clever techniques to prevent anyone from knowing she was speculating, but they knew about the bomb speculating class, and it is really galling to watch your only horse which you need to pull your plow being led away to pay your taxes and knowing where that money is going. after the sheriff has auctioned off your horse to further enrich some bond speculators. i think you can further see their side to the argument. to help with this last thing, i will say today i want to introduce you to one more character from the revolutionary era, and his name is herman husband. he was born in north carolina, but as a young man -- i'm sorry, was born in maryland but moved to north carolina as a young man and got caught up in the regulator rebellion when farmers were rebelling against the extortions of lawyers and merchants and judges and clerks. there is a great book on the regulator rebellion. he got involved in that and was crushed by the establishment. they put him in jail three times. they tossed him out of the legislature. an army came out and destroyed his farm. so he fled north carolina and moved to pennsylvania. he actually took a pseudonym for a while, and alias. this alias was tuscape death. you can see that on land deeds and stuff. he had gone through several different religions. by this time, he sort of was inventing his own religion. he became a christian millennial list -- millennialist and wrote a bunch of pamphlets making the case that farmers deserve things like paper money. if they're going to levy taxes, they have to give paper money with which to pay them off and so forth. he wrote in one of those pamphlets that the same then who refused to allow british tyrants to oppress them were now willing to tyrannize over others. you might not remember my saying at the beginning that people like james madison thought that we need to extend the sphere of government, shift some key powers from the state to the federal government because the state representatives are too accountable -- remember i said that? representatives are too accountable to their constituents. hudson believed just the opposite. he lived in pennsylvania, and in pennsylvania, the election districts were contiguous with the county. pennsylvania has very large counties, and that means that most people did not know their state representatives. herman hudson believed," him, "a county is too large a bound, and the reason is only a few men in the county are generally known throughout the whole of it, and these are generally the most unsuitable, they being chiefly tavern keepers, merchants in the country town, and the officers of the revolutionary war, lawyers, etc." at the same time medicine was saying we had too many ordinary farmers with dirt under their fingernails getting into power, hudson was saying just the opposite. we were ruled by the office it's am -- officers and merchants and lawyers, and we need to empower ordinary farmers. his solution was to set up county legislatures in every county in pennsylvania, and so the representatives to county legislatures would be chosen in the townships. pennsylvania has very small townships, so everyone would know their township representative, and they could hold him accountable, and they would choose the state assemblyman. it's fascinating that at the same time as medicine was trying to make election districts a bigger so you would have less accountability, you had people like herman hudson saying, "let's make them smaller so that we make representatives more accountable to the voters." if that was not enough, he also said that anytime you had a major lobbying decided on such as paper money, which he supported, ordinary farmers should actually have a chance to vote on it. i bring up people liked this not to say that i think they were right and the framers of the constitution were wrong, but just to say that there were two sides to this argument, and i think if i became convinced of one thing when i was writing the constitution, it's less something about the constitution -- the authors of the constitution but the main thought that i have is about historians, and that is that these comp >> struggles that led to the adoption of the constitution do not prove what the founding fathers and their historians had taken them to believe to prove, and that is that the reins of government reside most faithfully in the hands of a few. so let me sit down, and let's have a discussion. >> we are open for questions, so at the same time madison was saying we had too many ordinary farmers with dirt under their fingernails getting into power, hudson was saying just the opposite. we were ruled by the office it's am -- officers and merchants and lawyers, and we need to empower ordinary farmers. his solution was to set up county legislatures in every county in pennsylvania, and so the representatives to county legislatures would be chosen in the townships. pennsylvania has very small townships, so everyone would know their township representative, and they could hold him accountable, and they would choose the state assemblyman. it's fascinating that at the same time as medicine was trying to make election districts a bigger so you would have less accountability, you had people like herman hudson saying, "let's make them smaller so that we make representatives more accountable to the voters." if that was not enough, he also said that anytime you had a major lobbying decided on such as paper money, which he supported, ordinary farmers should actually have a chance to vote on it. i bring up people liked this not to say that i think they were right and the framers of the constitution were wrong, but just to say that there were two sides to this argument, and i think if i became convinced of one thing when i was writing the constitution, it's less something about the constitution -- the authors of the constitution but the main thought that i have is about historians, and that is that these comp >> struggles that led to the adoption of the constitution do not prove what the founding fathers and their historians had taken them to believe to prove, and that is that the reins of government reside most faithfully in the hands of a few. so let me sit down, and let's have a discussion. >> we are open for questions, so let me start off with one. the constitution was famously written behind closed doors. you are skeptical, shall we say, of the people who wrote the constitution. to what extent does the term "conspiracy" apply to the constitution? >> similar to the conspiracies that my wife and i engineer against our 16 month old daughter in that we are conspiring against her with reference, and we took her trick-or-treating dressed as a duck, and she is a very good quacker, i might tell you, but the chocolate that she was collecting would disappear. that was a conspiracy for her own good because she is 16 months, and she should not be eating, and our opinion -- nature nuts at we are -- a lot of chocolate and nuts and sugar. people would put chocolate into her plastic pumpkin, and then it would be empty again. where did that chocolate and sugar go? we also benefited. [laughter] a conspiracy that i think they literally believed was for the benefit of the people, but it was a pretty sweet deal for some of the framers as well. >> you started your discussions today asking for impressions about the constitution. most of the responses you got work not the cut -- were not the constitution itself but the amendments, particularly the first 10 amendments. how long do you think the constitution would have lasted without the amendments? >> that is a drifter question, and i think my answer to that is two things -- one, not long. and two, i think it would not have even been adopted. this state of massachusetts was one of the most important. my state of virginia, which was one of the most populous of all time as well as new york, would not have ratified the constitution if supporters of the constitution had not said, "ok, let's make a deal. you give us the constitution, we will give you what people were demanding in every state, which was a bill of rights." i start off by saying that the authors of constitution were not that interested in the bill of rights. they got into this position during the efforts to get nine out of 13 states to ratify. during the ratification campaign, they were in this awful position of opposing a bill of rights because they saw it as a trick, a conspiracy on the part of opponents of the constitution because the opponents of the constitution said it was not necessarily a bad idea, but it needed a bill of rights. people like madison, who were strong supporters of the constitution said, "no, no, we do not need a bill of rights." there were arguments against it because if you protect some rights then you are not protecting others and so forth. it is ironic to think madison ended up being the author of the bill of rights because he was one of its most fervent opponents during the ratification struggle, but he and other supporters of the constitution came around to the idea that "we are going to have to make a deal here in order to get what we want, which is a capitalist constitution. we also have to make it what they want, which is an underdog constitution, one that protects freedom of speech, freedom of religion, even for minority religions, and protect people accused of crimes and so forth." the important point i want to make is that if we really cherish those freedoms that you guys mentioned when i asked that question, the people that we should be thanking are not the authors of the constitution but the opponents of the constitution. they are the ones that we really -- because if people had just sort of sat down meekly like sheep when the constitution was written and when it was put out on september 17, 1787, then there would have been no incentive for the framers of the constitution to include the bill of rights. you can look at it from the framers' standpoint as a strategic concession. "we got to give the people a bill of rights in order to get the original seven articles, which attract capital to this country." or you can look at it from the stamp one of ordinary americans -- they are really the ones who deserve the pat on the back for what most of us most cherish about the constitution, which is the bill of rights -- you can look at it from the standpoint of ordinary americans. it was ordinary citizens who turned the constitution into an underdog's constitution. that is something that has continued, with the possible exception of prohibition, which was almost immediately repealed. there has never been an amendment to the constitution that has restricted freedom. they have all moved more in the direction of being an underdog's constitution. massachusetts was the first state to allow people to marry, despite whether they are heterosexual or homosexual -- there are efforts afoot because of what you guys have done in massachusetts to add an amended to the constitution prohibiting a state from doing that. if they do that, it would be the first time in the history of the constitution that it has been restrictive in a way that makes it less free, makes it less of an underdog's constitution, so i hope we do not do that. >> [inaudible] past town meetings. they are described as democracy in action. many parts of the rest of the country do not have quite the same opening. i wonder whether in your state, virginia, whether it would differ from ours and his feelings towards democracy in action -- and its feelings towards democracy in action. there was one guy in this state who made it public fortune out of the revolutionary debt, and that is dexter. did you ever run across him in your studies? >> i did not ever him across that name, but there was a good large class of them, so i will have to look into him. >> they called him lord timothy dexter. back to the town meetings. >> obviously, that is something you cannot do beyond the local level, so i have been to some new england town meetings, and they can, of course, be rights, but generally, my sense is they work pretty well. the success of the new england town meeting reinforces the point i tried to make in the book that these are real -- there's a real sense in which ordinary people have gotten a bad rap. the constitution is predicated on the notion that we let ordinary farmers run the government, and look what happened -- they ruined everything. and the people like i was talking about today were saying, yes, there were economic problems in 1780, but in their view, they're what -- that was a matter not of popular misrule, but of elite misrule, so i think what you are saying totally fits with what i am saying. >> [inaudible] discussion of the bill of rights, is that not at cross purposes? where the argument you are making is about a broader, popular support for a had been oppressed by the .uritan establishment so there was a real popular desire to protect civil liberties, people who could see themselves as potentially accused of a crime they have not committed, and desiring that, but then i also think you are making a good point that to look at only the struggle that happened after september 17, 17 87, when the constitution was completed and signed, if you only start there and look at the struggle between the people who wanted the constitution as it was and the other people who basically said -- there were some people who said, basically, "give us a bill of rights and we will be happy -- that is not the whole struggle because there was a third group of people, and what they would say was, "this is not the fundamental argument. yes, civil liberties are important, so we certainly support that, but in a sense, both parties to the debate over ratification were missing the fundamental things because neither of those sides was saying, "we need to make the country more democratic." by -- that voice by that time, was just a clips and not present. it's kind of sad we kind of lost it. there's a lot of ways people can influence the government that are gone. obviously, so many more ways in which we are more democratic now. the vast majority of people then could not vote, but among voters, there's many ways in which we are less democratic. for instance, annual elections. john adams was quoting a very common axiom when he said where annual elections and, their tyranny begins, and we have accepted senators with six-year terms, supreme court justices with terms for life. how long do people in the federal reserve -- they are the ones who determine the money -- i think they have 12 years or something like that. these long terms. i think if they were to walk among us, they would be appalled at some of the things we settled for, not being able to instruct our representatives, having these really long terms, having a money supply determined by the federal open market committee, which is a branch of the federal reserve, or by members chosen basically by private banks. they privatized the money supply rather than letting the democratic process work that out. you can see the case for that because maybe there are people in this room who feel that if we let them, the legislature or congress determine the money supply, it's not really a good idea, but no matter how you feel about civic ologies, we have -- civic policies, we have settled for some steps back from democracy. >> "unruly americans" is not your first book, but you have written previously pertaining to the revolution. one gets the feeling looking at the first book that the founding fathers had to run as fast as they could to keep themselves from the people lower in virginia society who were pressing for a more populist kind of outcome. why didn't you try tying your present book to earlier things you had written on the revolution itself? >> right, that's a great question. certainly one thing the two books have in common, and i'm happy to be part of the whole group of historians who are writing this kind of history -- i have a friend in australia who just started a book called "politics of war" about virginia and focused on the military. we have this notion of the minutemen grabbing their muskets at a minutes notice and rushing off, and that happened, but there was massive draft resistance during the revolutionary war, and because ordinary people could see it had really become a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, and they said, "that's not fair that you are putting it on us rather than taking the burden yourself." there were elite people who fought in the world -- war, of course. in general, they could hire substitutes or pay their way out of fighting, so there was a lot of internal conflict. as mcdonald says, americans were at war with britain but also at war with themselves, so i show in my first book, yes, you have pressure on at least jefferson and washington from below. -- on elites like jefferson and washington from below. mcdonald continues that from the war, and i say it is continued after the war as well. there is a classic phrase that carl becker coined in 1909, and he said that the american revolution was a struggle for home rule but also a struggle over who ruled at home. that is what i think my books and the others i mentioned have in common. i think that's the biggest thing that most people in this room do know, certainly you do, but that most people do not know, about this continuing internal conflict. in the case of my first book, i argued that the gentry sort of got forced into the revolution by these pressures from below. and they kind of lost control of the revolution, and that is what "unruly americans" is about as well, and the constitution was there effort to regain control. as i said before, to put the democratic union back in the bottle. -- but the democratic genie back in the bottle. >> [inaudible] the rest of the colonies, keeping in mind that in virginia, there was greater disparity between the very wealthy and the rest of the population. and there were many others in the american colonies in rhode island or connecticut, for that matter, or massachusetts. >> it absolutely does, and i would say that the revolution was a real different thing. you cannot just take too -- colonies and say that it was two basically the same in these two places. economic motives were different, say, in new england. once the main thing they were angry about was not being able to smuggle. -- not being able to smuggle molasses from the french islands and things like that, which was not an issue in virginia. as you say, the social situation, you did not have quite the same extremes of wealth and poverty in massachusetts that you had in virginia. of course, you had slavery and -- in all 13 states. this was one of the things that was happening during the revolution, that you were going from 13 colonies in 13 states that each have to be considered separately, but i do think by the 1780's there were enough in common to write a book, as i did. my book is not organized, because that would be boring and nobody would buy it. but you could start to talk about an american even before they molded together in a single nation with the constitution, you could begin to talk about the united states. you and i have totally different perspectives, you and the revolutionary generation, but we both kind of are able to talk about the united states in a way that we might not, if we were talking even 20 years earlier. massachusetts is so different than virginia and all the rest. fascinated by the -- i guess i never realized the great influence that capitalism had on the creation of the constitution. i'm wondering if you think that as the years went on in the constitution changed and how was interpreted, was there still that sort of direct influence? maybe i'm not saying it right. i think i am fascinated by how it is almost -- i'm not saying it right. but the influence is so obvious and seems obvious and direct that it is not clouded at all. >> right. right. >> i was going to say, i'm not a 19th-century or 20th century person. so i would love to hear from -- maybe someone else has thoughts about that. i would certainly say the struggle is always -- you certainly -- you should read charles and mary beard on the civil war. their economic read on the civil war brings up a lot of this. obviously, the civil war was about slavery, but it was also about tariffs, so some of those economic issues were important. >> what about the beards on the constitution? do you feel like you are a grandchild of the beards? >> i do, but with a different, -- with a difference, and that is that charles beard believed the people who wrote the constitution, to say it crudely, and he sometimes did, were creditors. that is, they were people who were getting defrauded during the 1780's by all these policies i told you about. paying a hundred dollar debt with a hundred dollar horse. and by paper money in particular. they were private creditors, and they were tired of being paid paid with paper money and horses. they wanted gold and silver. they were also public creditors. that is, people like abigail adams who own bonds. he found that a lot of people who wrote the constitution had bonds in their back pocket and wanted to give the federal government is untaxed money in government its own taxing authority for the first time in order to pay them off. beard had that interpret -- that the framers of the constitution were creditors. i am in the ironic position of agreeing with beard that the motives were economic, but saying that they were not creditors, they were debtors. that is, they were would-be debtors, i should say, people like madison who wanted to be able to borrow money, but because creditors were "reading -- being defrauded" during that time after the revolutionary war and before the constitution -- because creditors were "being defrauded," and felt like they were being defrauded -- that was their sincere belief -- they were unwilling to lend money to people like james madison. so would-be debtors people like , madison who wanted to be able to borrow money, i think that was the economic group that really was the engine of the constitution. actual creditors -- like i'm going to look into mr. dexter -- and others, they also benefited from the constitution, so you had a strange coalition. i think beard is right. public creditors and private creditors were big supporters of the constitution, but what is new in my book -- two things, one is that there were also would-be debtors who wanted the constitution, and the other thing i'm really pushing that is new in the book is that there was this other side of the story that said, "what are you talking about? you creditors feel defrauded, but we farmers are the one losing our cattle to pay off speculators." so there were two sides to the story. >> time for one more question. >> i would like to say that there aren't too many differences between the russian constitution and the american one. -- that there are two main differences between the russian constitution and the american one. would you like to change anything nowadays? [laughter] >> i see my friend sitting right behind you there, and i think of one change immediately that i'm very excited about, and that is -- as you know, we have had several elections, including the election of 2000 where the loser won, the person who received less votes than the other guy won because of the electoral college. i think it would be -- and this answers your other question -- almost impossible to get rid of the electoral college because that would require a constitutional amendment, and the states who benefit from that -- wyoming and alaska and the other time he states who get these two bonus votes from the senators -- are never going to go for that. there is a proposal of foot -- that youosal afoot, would get at least half the states representing half the electoral votes to commit that those electoral votes would go to the candidate who receives the most votes in the popular tally so that we actually get the person who got the most votes being elected president. if that succeeds -- janet will not like hearing me say this -- that would be a direct violation of the intent of the framers of the constitution because the framers of the constitution did not want a democracy. they thought democracy had failed, that the revolutionary war had created too much democracy. it will be against the intent of the framers but with my content -- but it will be consistent with my intent because it would be a great idea, so this one suggestion i would make. >> thanks very much, woody. this has been a lively conversation. i appreciate having the opportunity to talk to you about your new book. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] >> you are watching american history tv. all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. to join the conversation, like us on facebook @cspanhistory for . >> next, the nation's 16th president described as a man with less than a year of former -- formal schooling but who schooled himself in america's founding documents. he uses abraham lincoln's own words to explain the principles that made him a self-made man of ideas. this event is hosted by the new york historical society and is about one hour. >> my dear friends of the new york historical society, we who love our country find it is called to admit how little we know about the vast terrain of our exceptional history. shall it is true that we never escape the burden and the glory of the amerin

Related Keywords

New York , United States , Australia , North Carolina , Alaska , Charles River , Massachusetts , Virginia , Westchester , Russia , Washington , District Of Columbia , London , City Of , United Kingdom , Connecticut , Mexico , Rome , Lazio , Italy , South Carolina , Wyoming , Maryland , Pennsylvania , South Korea , Hampshire , France , Britain , Americans , America , Chosen , French , British , Russian , American , Silas Deane , Abraham Lincoln , Carl Becker , Timothy Dexter , Abigail Adams , James Madison , John Adams , James Monroe , Sherman Hudson , Thomas Jefferson ,