America 250: Lincoln and Equality ft. Lucas Morel

But what Lincoln was trying to get people to understand is what makes us Americans and why he dated, for example, the country to its birth as the Declaration, not the Constitution, famously in the Gettysburg Address, the opening line, is what makes us a people is the things we believe. Now, yes, how we bring those into reality, a constitution and laws passed there under, supremely important. But what we cannot lose sight of are those apples of gold. We cannot lose sight of the fact that it's equality that justified our separation from Great Britain precisely because Great Britain was not a regime devoted to the equal rights, the natural rights of human beings. And we had to separate from Great Britain in order to live according to that principle. Hello and welcome to a very special episode of the Close Read, your official podcast from the Claremont Review of Books. I'm your host, as ever, Spencer Clavin, associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books. And this is part of a little miniseries we're doing as the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence hoves into view. I think I'm using that verb correctly. It's on the horizon is what I mean to say. And we're very obviously excited about it, feel it's worthy of celebration here at the Claremont Institute and high solemnity in the best sense. So even if not all of our organs of popular culture are going to roll out the red carpet like they should, we are going to do that. And we're joined in that endeavor today by Lucas Morel, who's a wonderful guest to be talking to for this very purpose. He is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. He's professor of politics and head of the politics department at Washington and Lee University. And I'm particularly excited to talk to him today because he's also one of our foremost Lincoln scholars. He's just a terrific interpreter of Lincoln and his penetrating thought into the meaning of the founding. His book, Lincoln and the American Founding, is a profound study of this very matter. I think we're getting into talking about it, but it's also due for a reissue with some new material that's coming out. So be on the lookout for that. Lucas Morel, welcome to The Close Read. Thank you, Spencer. Thanks for having me. Yeah, yeah, great to have you here. I think to set this up, you know, Lincoln is such a towering figure that we kind of have to narrow in our focus. And since we're looking at this profound moment in American history, the signing of the Declaration, I thought we could talk specifically about Lincoln's relationship to the Declaration. Some of his most famous observations are about it. And more generally, I think his interpretation of the Declaration of Independence and his relationship to the other founding documents was a major part of how he navigated the Civil War. So it's not just the abstract theory we're talking about here, but rather kind of practical kind of ideas that affected our great constitutional crisis. Could we start, please, at this famous quote about the apple of gold and the picture of silver? This is a private note in which Lincoln reflects upon the relationship between the Constitution and the Declaration, quoting from Proverbs. And I wonder if, just to begin with, you could kind of lay out what he means by that, what the significance of that is, and then maybe we can broaden out from there. Yeah, the quick background there is that he received a letter from Alexander Stevens, and they had both been in Congress between 1847 and 1849. The only time Lincoln was in Congress was that single term. He was on the heels of the Mexican War, and they were both Whigs at the time. Stevens, of course, famously becomes the vice president of the Confederacy. But in December, after Lincoln is elected in November, Stevens writes to Lincoln, because Lincoln's not going to be inaugurated until March 4th. So this secession winter, as it were, these three or four months when Lincoln's not in power, Stevens essentially says, look, the country needs to hear from you, as he says, to save our common country. And he says, a word from you now would be like apples of gold and pictures of silver. So it's Stevens that gives Lincoln this toe touch of this proverb. And of course, Lincoln knew the Bible as well as any preacher of the day. And what Lincoln essentially does is, as he's writing and drafting his first inauguration speech, his first inaugural address, he keeps mulling over what Stevens asked him to do. But the thing is, in this note to himself, Lincoln essentially says, instead of new words from the new president, what the nation needs is a reminder of the old words from our revolutionary fathers, as they said at that time, our revolutionary fathers. And so what Lincoln does is, he takes this idea from Proverbs 25, a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold and pictures of silver. And what he says is, the apples of gold is the concept of, and he puts it in single quotes, liberty to all. And he's not quoting something verbatim. When Lincoln quotes verbatim, he does the declaration, all men are created equal, right? But what was precisely contested at the time is, what is the meaning of equality? Southerners, white Southerners, white slave-holding Southerners had a peculiar or particular conception of equality. And Lincoln thought it was a derailment of the founding. And so what he said was, the apples of gold was this concept of liberty to all or human equality. He paraphrases it to define it. It's meant to be equal liberty for every human being. And so those are the apples of gold in the pictures or frames of silver. And the framing of silver is the constitution and the union of the American states. So the union of the American states and the constitution are the setting, kind of the bowl for the apples of gold, which are the principles of the regime. The central one, the central idea, as he called it, was all men are created equal. I mean, one of the consequences of this is really profound. And Lincoln draws it out in the note is that the frame is there to serve the apples, not the other way around. You don't have just the bowl, but you want just the apples, right? You can have the apples without the bowl, but you can't have the bowl without the apples, right? And this is urgent. It's something that I think nowadays you'll often hear people say, well, the declaration isn't law, right? It's a part of our history, but it's not the constitution. In other words, it doesn't govern or control us. Lincoln is saying almost the opposite of that, no? I mean, was this something that was contested at the time as well, or did the debate take a slight approach? I would phrase it a little differently. It wasn't so much that they were debating whether the declaration was part of the organic law of the country, which of course it was. The Congress actually passed, they made it part of the statute. So we know, in fact, technically it is law in the sense that it is actually a part of our US statutes. Now, it's not enforceable in the way a typical law is, what did you break and what's the punishment? It doesn't serve as law that way, but it serves as law in terms of what the thing is devoted to, and that thing being the constitution. And so what Lincoln was trying to get people to understand is what unites us isn't the process. What unites us isn't the how. As important as the how is, the constitution is important. Whigs turned Republicans were known to be the party of the rule of law. And in being the party of the rule of law, of course that meant they were the party of consent. Consent is important. You can't tell people what to do without asking their permission. But what Lincoln was trying to get people to understand is what makes us Americans and why he dated, for example, the country to its birth as the declaration, not the constitution, famously in the Gettysburg Address, the opening line, is what makes us a people is the things we believe. Now, yes, how we bring those into reality, a constitution and laws passed there under, supremely important. But what we cannot lose sight of are those apples of gold. We cannot lose sight of the fact that it's equality that justified our separation from Great Britain, precisely because Great Britain was not a regime devoted to the equal rights, the natural rights of human beings. And we had to separate from Great Britain in order to live according to that principle. Yeah. You pointed something out just in passing there that I think is perhaps overlooked or underappreciated, that, of course, it is a famous opening line of the Gettysburg Address, four score and seven years ago. But it's not always observed that he's making an intervention there. In other words, that's a claim, right? It's not just sort of agreed upon. The fact that now we say, oh, yes, of course, we're coming up on our 250th birthday. In some ways, we're inheriting what Lincoln kind of puts forward there. Is that fair to say? Yeah. But we have to be careful to say that just because Lincoln crystallized it in unimprovable words, right? I mean, he just set the gold standard for political oratory in America, especially with that speech, but also others. I don't want it to imply or suggest that because we inherited it from Lincoln's articulation, masterful articulation at Gettysburg, November 19th, 1863, that this was an unheard of connection or concept prior to Lincoln. John Quincy Adams famously made this tie between the Declaration and the Constitution, and in fact, more or less died on the floor of Congress the one term Lincoln was there. So in a way, our great teacher, Harry B. Balfa, said that there was this kind of, I don't know, providential passing of the baton between one exponent or proponent of the Declaration as having this abiding influence and engine of America to a man who would eventually become president at our most trying hour. And so, yes, we inherited it from Lincoln as he laid it out in the Gettysburg Address, but Lincoln's claim is that this was always the meaning of America, and this was always the way that we understood what we were about and what set our country into motion. And he comes to the foreground nationally, especially in the 1850s, when it looks like not Southern slaveholders are derailing the founding, but the most powerful white politician in America between 1850 and 1860, and that's his nemesis, his rival, US Senator Stephen Arnold Douglas. That's when Douglas, from a free state of Illinois, starts tempting whites north of not to care what happens to people who don't look like them, namely black people out in the federal territories. Hey, that's not going to be any skin off your nose. Who cares if they're enslaved out there? Let that population, that white population in the territories, determine whether they want to enslave black people. That's where Lincoln says, wait, wait, wait, wait. We're becoming a country I don't recognize. As he puts it in 1854, with the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, let's re-adopt the declaration. In other words, let's remind ourselves, let's reclaim the thing that put this country into motion. And that kind of brings us back to the point you made earlier about it's not even quite the declaration, but something which Lincoln says is wrapped even more tightly around the human heart. And this is this underlying principle that the declaration itself even expresses. And it's really kind of at the core of his argument against slavery as well, that it undermines white freedom as well as black because it compromises this central principle. Is that something that, I mean, nowadays you hear Lincoln faulted for this a lot because he was supposedly more concerned about white freedom than he was about black freedom, even in the case of the slaves. I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit and kind of why people do that. I mean, Lincoln focused on the rights of whites, if you will, for a number of reasons, both for principled and rhetorical reasons. In Illinois, for example, black people were not allowed to vote. They weren't allowed to do a number of things, right? They had no political rights, very few civil rights. And there weren't that many of them in Illinois, so it's kind of crazy. But at any rate, the reason why Lincoln is focusing on whites is he says, you realize, or I need you to realize that if you make an exception to the notion that there are rights that are the birthright of all human beings, once you start making exceptions, today you may be in the majority and it won't hurt you to exploit the minority, to act, as Madison would put it in Federalist 10, to act like a faction, right? To get my rights secured at the expense of yours. But tomorrow, it'll be Catholics, or if you're Catholic, sorry, the Protestant majority can say what it wants and do what it wants at your expense to the denial of your rights, and so on and so forth. In other words, once we establish that all that governs a constitutional law, the operation of civil government is simply whether you're in the majority, which is to say the principle of what Lincoln called mere self-interest. If that's where we're going, then we are turning our constitutional way of life that should be based on the things that we all share as human beings, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the requirement of consent. We're turning that into what, again, I'm going to quote Jaffa all day here, but we're turning it into crude majoritarianism, which is simply tyranny of the majority. Lincoln says, we don't want to go there. So you have to see that the present insecurity of the rights of black people out in territories actually could lead to the future insecurity for white people, depending on whether you're in the numerical majority or minority, if that makes sense. He had to show them that the sure basis for their own rights was at least affirming today in the near term, the natural, maybe not the civil and political rights, we'll get to that, but we've got to insist and admit and acknowledge that, yeah, surely you got to admit that there are natural rights that black people have simply because they are human beings, and that in doing that, you are actually securing your own rights as a white person. Yeah. The other one of these specials that we're going to do will be on Harry Jaffa. So you'll write in our themes, we're talking to Glenn Elmers about Jaffa. And of course, when you get into this question of, I think you would talk about it as popular sovereignty, this sort of debate that he has, it's really with Stephen Douglas that these arguments kind of emerge most clearly. And of course, Jaffa is one of the great, probably the great interpreter of those debates. I wanted to get your take on something that is very much in sort of Jaffa's set of concerns. And that is, you pointed out that Lincoln isn't inventing this interpretation out of whole cloth simply to meet the immediate needs of his rhetorical situation. He's picking up the baton from JQA. He's picking it up, we might say, from the very start. But there is another kind of line of thinking about this, which is that this represents a refounding or a reinterpretation of questions that were at least not yet settled. And I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit, tell us kind of what the shape of that debate is and why we should think that Lincoln is really in the tradition rather than altering the tradition. Right. I think this argument was put most famously and popularly. In other words, it entered into the popular lexicon when Gary Wills published Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize. It was a bestseller. I suspect it won historian prizes. So it was like the trifecta, made him a lot of money, got the prizes. And what he did is he, and that was that Lincoln was, quote, conducting a swindle, end quote, that he was picking the nation's pocket when he claimed, right, we hold these truths, excuse me, Forrest Gorman, seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, so far so good, conceived of liberty, so far so good, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, that Lincoln put equality on the front burner and foisted that interpretation onto the founders. And that that was an illegitimate thing that he did as successful as it was, and maybe needful as it was in terms of the times and progress and all that kind of stuff. But that Lincoln was actually imposing or imputing an interpretation to the founders that was not actually true to the history. And that the first thing they point to, and the first thing that Lincoln's critics today all point to is, well, Lincoln is misinterpreting the founders because we know they didn't mean equality for all because, gee, the guy who wrote that owned hundreds of slaves. Had some slaves, right, right. And in fact, not just Jefferson, we're not even talking like marginal founders. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, these were the leading lights of the founders, the leading movers and shakers, and they all owned slaves. Washington only freed his in his will, and even those would not be freed except for his personal valet until Martha Washington passed. She freed him a little earlier. Jefferson only freed a handful. They all happened to be the children of Sally Hemings, and then there's that whole debate. And I still think it is a debate, but we'll leave that for now. So look, if they didn't free all their slaves, then surely we're imputing an interpretation of equality that wasn't true for the founders because they didn't make it true for everybody immediately. And Lincoln, you know, magisterially refutes this, I think, in his speech in 1857, when he's excoriating the opinion by Chief Justice Roger Taney, which argued, right, that blacks had no rights that the white man was bound to respect. And then he actually quotes verbatim the Declaration of Independence, and Taney says, look, if we were just to take the plain language of it, it sounds like all men occurred equal really does mean all. But we would have to see these great men, these noble men as hypocrites if we were to read it that way, because we know they did not immediately secure rights for everyone. Lincoln just skewers this by saying, you know, it is a fact that they didn't secure the rights of black people at that time, but guess what? They didn't secure the rights of all white people either, right? Most whites were not allowed to vote. I mean, he doesn't get into those details, but he says, look, let's be, if we're gonna cite history, we need to be more capacious and comprehensive. And so he said, you know, as he puts it in 1857, they defined with tolerable distinctness the ways in which they thought men were equal in their natural rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, what we call today individual rights. And so Lincoln makes this very clear distinction that's lost on us today. The distinction between the possession of a right, what he calls the declaration of the right, and its enforcement, in other words, our actual enjoyment of it. And so you begin with stating what you hold to be true, right? We hold these truths to be self-evident, right? You begin with that, but then it's the operation of the structures of government that over time, consent leads to the practical security of the rights that all human beings, male and female, black and white, possess simply by being human. So you declare it, and then the enforcement comes, as he put it, as fast as circumstances should permit. Yeah. This is also how you described or interpreted the relationship between the declaration and the constitution as Lincoln frames it, that it's the constitution which kind of creates enforcement and the subsequent law and the declaration which articulates. So it's always good, I think, when you can answer an argument by saying, no, no, you haven't gone far enough. You said that they didn't release the slayers, but you don't even know the half of it. So that is, I think, a very powerful response. There is a sort of related part of this that I want to get into. It might take me a hot second to set it up, so bear with me. But John Quincy Adams is having a bit of a Claremont moment. I mean, he's always obviously dear to our hearts, but Chris Flannery just wrote a big essay for CRB about him, and Dan Mahoney did some stuff in The American Mind, and so he's- Bill Allen just published a book on John Quincy Adams' famous speech about the Declaration of Independence. So he's also a Jaffa student. Yes. Okay. Precisely so. And that speech is what I wanted, what I had in mind, because Flannery kind of reemphasizes, and I had not, I think, fully comprehended the extent to which that speech includes a kind of prediction about the march of history. He quotes Shakespeare, right? And he says that this scene that we performed in our revolution will be acted over in nations yet unborn or something like that. I can't quite remember what the Shakespeare is, but he basically says, look, we're not going to go looking for monsters to destroy. That's the famous line. But the monster's going to get destroyed. We only have to wait. It's going to happen on its own because this powerful principle just commands ascent now that it has emerged onto the world state. And this calls up a question, which is also asked of Jaffa, interestingly, but certainly of Lincoln, which is, he was a Whig before he was a Republican. Did he have a Whig interpretation of history? Was there this idea that this principle was going to unfold with a kind of- Madison, I think, talks about logical compulsion, right? Or not. I mean, I would say in this respect, not Stephen Douglas, but Frederick Douglass had more of a Whig notion of history that even Lincoln, as great as he was, according to Frederick Douglass, was kind of riding the wave of this historical movement of progress as if it was ineluctable just because of the logic of events. I would say that, I mean, good grief, what did the 1850s prove? But that it could go in the opposite direction, but for a Lincoln, but for political prudence at the highest level, right? True statesman. But for people like that, America could have gone a very different way. And dare I say, the world could have gone a very different way had we not had a growing, leading nation that was not perfect, two steps forward, one step back, but a nation that was devoted and certainly professed and by fits and starts acted out on these principles that we believed were universal and timeless. And so I don't think we see in Lincoln this kind of ethereal overtures to the inevitability of freedom on the march. Lincoln says, I mean, again, I quoted it, in 1854, good grief, you've got Kansas and Nebraska opening up to slavery. It's been for 30 years. It was that, no, we've resolved the Missouri Compromise, Missouri and Maine comes in free state, Missouri comes in a slave state, and then this huge swath of territory that remains to become states, we're not letting slavery in there, no way, because we want free states eventually to pop up. Well, bang, Stephen Douglas, the guy who masterminded the 1850 Compromise measures when Clay failed to get those passed, Douglas got them passed. 54, Douglas is on the scene, head of the Senate Committee on Territories, and he says what? Hey, why don't we resolve this by splitting up Nebraska into two territories and let them decide whether they want to have slavery? And Lincoln's like, wait, we get to make a decision about this? No. That's a categorical rejection of what slaveholder Washington, slaveholder Madison, slaveholder Jefferson believed, even slaveholder Patrick Henry. They knew what they were doing was wrong. They never justified it in the eyes of God or nature. So Lincoln said, we are going. And in fact, famously in his House Divided speech, when he accepts the nomination in 1858 from the Republican Party to take on Stephen Douglas to unseat him in the Senate, he says, the trend is not good. He says, experiencing the House Divided shall not stand. I don't think it's going to fall. It's going to become either all slave and all free. And guess what? We're going in the wrong direction. Kansas, Nebraska, 54. Dred Scott, 57. So I mean, these, for me, are hooks upon which you would hang Lincoln's, not that he didn't believe in the Whig view of history, but he certainly didn't trumpet it. He thought, no, we actually have to keep alive an understanding of equality, of rights, of government by consent. For example, the Mexican War. Lincoln didn't give a lot of speeches during his first only term in Congress, but he gives this one speech where he talks about how it's unconstitutional that we picked on the Mexicans in this area. And he says, anybody in an area where it's unclear who's ruling it, you don't even have to be the majority of the population. Even a minority can exercise, and Lincoln uses these words, the right of revolution to establish who's in control of territory. And he says, it is a sacred right that is going to liberate the world. So if you say something like that, it does sound like this idea can shape progress in human history. But Lincoln was fixating on the idea that, well, the idea is right. The question is, is anybody actually instantiating it? And for him, like JQA, you don't go abroad seeking monsters to destroy. What you do is, those monsters are destroyed when you destroy them at home. In other words, if Americans can have a successful experiment, generation after generation, in governing themselves, and governing yourself means what? Controlling yourself. Not making claims that you can enslave other people on the basis of arbitrary characteristics. If we show people across the world who aren't free, that they are born free, and they could actually establish the security for their rights with the right ideas and the right institutions, if we make that happen successfully here, that's the hope we give abroad. So I don't think he believes in this whiggish notion of history that it's ineluctable. Well, certainly you could hypothetically believe both that this principle has an irresistible force, and that you are not guaranteed to be the one who lives by it or puts it into practice. We can still have our own short successes and failures. And of course, we must either save or lose the last best hope of Earth. That's obviously not a foregone conclusion for him. You mentioned Frederick Douglass, and you've written a book, Measuring the Man, all about Douglass's compiling, I think, all of what Douglass had to say about Lincoln. All the writings on Lincoln. So what do you make of it? I mean, not to ask you to download the whole book, but I guess Douglass famously both critical of, but also ultimately hugely... It came around, as I understand it, to a huge admiration for Lincoln. Can you describe what some of his ambivalence was and then why he loved him so much? Sure. The short version is that my co-editor John White of Christopher Newport University, and who's just now going to UT Austin to teach there, John White doesn't like when I do this, but an alternate title to the book could have been Mad at Lincoln, because most of what you're going to read of these writings between 1858, which is the first time we could find that he publicly mentions Lincoln. And it's because of his reading, The House Divided Speech, 1858. And he's writing about Lincoln, commenting on Lincoln all the way up until 1894. In other words, the year before Douglass dies, he's still got Lincoln on the brain. But most of what you've got is Douglass during the Civil War, and he's frustrated with Lincoln, that Lincoln is not going fast enough and not thoroughgoing enough in what he is doing, especially for Black Americans. And I think it fundamentally boils down to a different interpretation of the Constitution. Lincoln held the conventional view, which was the Constitution only affected or addressed slavery insofar as the states were interacting with each other. So interstate matters or facing outward to Indian tribes and nations and foreign powers. So they could touch slavery in terms of importation only after 1808. Lincoln believed Congress could regulate slavery in the federal territories, territory that was owned by all Americans, of course, needs to be dealt with by their common legislature, the Congress. And of course, an agreement, a concession to South Carolina and Georgia, which is to assist in the return of escaped slaves, the so-called fugitive Slave Act. And then Electoral College, prior to the 13th Amendment, the Three-Fifths Compromise, which of course, if you guys read it, doesn't say the founders believed that Blacks were three-fifths of a human being. It had nothing to do with that. It had simply to do with taxation and more importantly, with representation in Congress, that the total number would be counted towards congressional representation as a fraction, three-fifths. If you're a free Black, it would have been the slaveholders who would have preferred a larger representation for Black people. And they would have said, yeah, five-fifths all the way, count them as 100%. So Lincoln believed that the government, most importantly, could not touch slavery in the states where it already existed. Frederick Douglass held that view while he was under the tutelage of the most famous abolitionists of the day, which was William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator. He's the one who called the Constitution a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. Both quotes from the book of Isaiah, by the way. He had an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible. Anyway, in 1852, Douglass' most famous speech, his coming out speech, breaking away from Garrison, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, July 5th, 1852, he calls the Constitution a glorious liberty document. But he only calls it a glorious liberty document if it's interpreted according to the plain text, not according to what he calls hidden intentions. We don't know what they were doing in that black box known as the summer of 1787, they met in secret for a reason. All we have are the words, and the words never contain slave or slavery. So he says, under the influence of guys like Lysander Spooner, William Goodell, his great patron, Garrett Smith, one of the richest guys in New York, if not the richest, also a congressman for a little while, but he was an abolitionist. Douglass said, we have to treat slavery as if it was an existential threat. I'm using our common parlance. He didn't use the word existential. But he basically says slavery is such a threat to the American Republic that Congress doesn't need to wait for a time of war, commander-in-chief, all that kind of junk, the president. Congress can actually ban slavery where it exists, anywhere on American soil. And he and Lincoln just emphatically disagreed with that. More practically speaking, once the war began, Douglass thought it needed to be an abolition war from the jump, and that black men should be enlisted as soldiers. And Lincoln, as we know, doesn't come to that as a fit and necessary war measure until well into the war, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, January 1st, 1863. The garrison thing is instructive. Was it he who stabbed a Bible filled with real blood or something in this demonstration? Oh, my goodness. Maybe that's too good to check, but for me, the most notorious thing he did, it was in 1854, he burned a copy of the Constitution. Now, blood out of a Bible, that's worse if that actually happened, but he burned a copy of the Constitution. That's how bad he thought. It was one of the slogans on the mass head of the Liberator, his newspaper was, no union with slaveholders. He said, let our erring sisters go. If they want to form their own country, go with God. He did not want to taint the blood on free soil hands by having to aid them in returning their escaped slaves. I will look this up after. I'm getting this from a dim recollection of Tom Holland's Dominion, which has a passage about abolition as a Christian movement. Oh, my goodness. I'll have to look that one up and use it then if it's actually the case. That happened, I think. It may not have been garrison is what I am not sure of, but we can let our listeners know next episode. Anyway, in the time we have remaining, I just want to ask, you have ably laid out, I think, the ways in which Lincoln doesn't guarantee us a successful outcome of the American experiment. He lays it upon us to carry it forward. This is a podcast we're recording because it's the 250th anniversary of this momentous occasion. We've been through some grim years, there's no question about that. We've also had some people feel a vibe shift, a renaissance of excitement about America and enthusiasm for the country. What's your outlook as we approach this milestone? Where do you feel the most concern and where do you feel the most hope about the nation? I'll begin with hope. We run out of time about concern. What makes me so hopeful is I'm on the federal commission. I'm one of two professors, I and Bill McClay, and if there isn't a God, it's amazing. But Bill and I are the two professors on this federal commission, the Semi-Quincentennial Commission. What's hopeful for me is how many books, how many conferences, how many lectures, how many Constitution Day talks. Nobody needed the permission of the federal government, even our great commission. Nobody needed to be told by us, hey, you ought to think about celebrating the founding of the birth of America as it's dated to July 4th, 1776. Ken Burns, years ago, decided to begin researching and filming a multi-evening, multi-hour documentary on the revolution. We've got our qualms with it, of course, but people have been waiting to do this and planning to do this, think tanks, colleges. Good grief, I teach at Washington University in the city of Lexington, Virginia. There's a Lexington 250 commission. Who told them to do that? So for me, the hope is everybody is looking back and not simply trying to find things wrong with it. They're not replicating Nicole Hannah-Jones' dreadful 1619 project. They're not looking to the founding to take down the founding. They actually think that there was something good and noble and right that we should hold on to or go back to to help us right whatever course that we're on that's wrong. So for me, that's a lot of hope that all of this is happening more or less spontaneously. The need for, what's the buzzword now? Civic education and to be educated about what the founders did right. And in fact, it's what the founders did right that enables us to see our failures. We don't have to go to any other country, any other philosophy to figure out what we're doing wrong. So that gives me hope. The concern is, I wonder if as much as I am lauding colleges and universities that are doing it, most of what they're doing has to do with the concept of civil discourse. In other words, let's figure out ways where we can agree to disagree with each other, and they aren't doing enough on a wide scale with regards to content, actual study, examination, and privileging, shall I say, of what was said and done at the founding. I mean, there are woefully too few colleges and universities that actually require a study of the American founding, American political development, et cetera. And so what gives me concern is, it seems like there's a popular widespread desire to learn more, but our leading institutions of education don't value the founding enough to actually make it a requirement of the kids they claim to be making future leaders. That's a deficiency that I think should readily be addressed. I'm going to give you some hope to close out because I think, so that we end on a note of hope, I'll tell you my hope, which is I think we're going to force them to catch up. I think your assessment of the situation is exactly right. The people actually want to feel good again about the country. The institutions of higher learning we know are dragging their feet about this, but it will become impossible to ignore because all the students are going to places where they can learn about the good stuff. So thank you very much. One of those places that people, students and non-students alike, I guess we're all students always, but we can all learn from Lucas Morel, who's been with us for this time. His books are Lincoln and the American Founding, due soon for a reissue, and Measuring the Man, the Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln. Thank you very much, Lucas, for joining us. Love this time with you there, Spencer, and go Claremont. Yes, sir. All right, listeners, Lucas and I were so curious about whether I had remembered or misremembered the anecdote of the Bible full of blood that we went and looked it up right away, because it was from Tom Holland's wonderful book Dominion, which I had just to hand on my shelf, and so I found it. It was not Garrison. That was the part that I got wrong. It was Benjamin Lay. But the anecdote itself is real, and it's so good as described by Holland that I'm just going to read it so that we know. So Sarah Lay and Benjamin Lay were Quaker abolitionists, and upon the death of Sarah, Benjamin sort of ratcheted up their already quite intense demonstration against slavery, and this is early. So this is early 16th century, pre-American Revolution, right back to the colonial era. He says, Attending the annual assembly of Philadelphia Friends, Lay pulled off his most spectacular publicity stunt yet. Called to address his fellow Quakers, he rose to his feet, smoothed back his coat, and threw out a sword that he had been concealing within its folds. The enslavement of Africans, he declared in a resounding voice, was just as justifiable in the sight of the Almighty, who beholds and respects all nations and colors of men with equal regard, as if he should thrust a sword through their hearts as I do through this book. Then, holding up a hollowed-out Bible in which he had concealed a bladder full of blood-red hookberry juice, he ran it through. The juice spattered everywhere. The meeting hall erupted in indignation. Lay, turning on his heel, hobbled out. He had made his point. So that's what I was half-remembering in our conversation about abolitionists in America to way before Garrison and Lincoln's era. I just wanted to add that note because I thought that our listeners would also enjoy it. All right, see you next time.