Welcome to the sixth episode of our new podcast season about liberalism and the arts.
Zena Hitz, founder of the Catherine Project, and Hollis Robbins, professor of English, join Rebecca Lowe to read and debate the Declaration of Independence. They discuss its place in American life and education, its political context, its poetic and rhetorical qualities, its powerful impact over time, and much more.
New episodes of this podcast season come out every two weeks. You can find the first five episodes here, here, here, here, and here.
TRANSCRIPT
REBECCA LOWE: Delighted today to be joined by two of my favorite people, and they’re perfect guests for this season on liberalism and the arts. We have Zena Hitz. We have Hollis Robbins. Both of them great thinkers, educators, scholars, writers. Today, we’re going to be discussing the Declaration of Independence. Thanks so much for joining me, guys.
HOLLIS ROBBINS: Really happy to be here.
ZENA HITZ: Very happy to be here.
LOWE: Wonderful. So, at the weekend, I went to go and see the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives. It was exciting, but I had this feeling, which I sometimes have when I go to these great places of historico-cultural significance in America. I remember feeling this when I went to Annapolis, to where Washington made his resignation speech. I also felt this feeling when I went to Ford’s Theatre to see a play about Abraham Lincoln.
The feeling I had is, I think, a kind of epistemic limitation. I felt, you know, I haven’t grown up with this stuff. I’ve read about it. But I can’t really feel it the way the Americans feel it. But then I also think maybe this is a rosy-tinted view. I mean, just last year, Cato put out some stats suggesting only 53 percent of Americans know why they celebrate the Fourth of July.
So what do you guys think? You know all about the education system. Do people know about this stuff? How good is our education system at helping kids know about it? When did you first learn about it? Do you remember not knowing about the Declaration of Independence? [laughter]
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
ROBBINS: That was a good question that you suggested we think about, because I can’t remember not knowing about it.
LOWE: Great.
ROBBINS: But, as I’ve written about for Luke Burgis’s recent book, being brought up in an atheist household, the doctrines were the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. That was the scripture. So I always knew it. Then, we could talk a little bit about the bicentennial. The bicentennial was in 1976, though I think our listeners could have figured that out. [laughter]
LOWE: I don’t know. If only 53 percent of them know about the Fourth of July, I’m not so sure. [laughter]
ROBBINS: Well, the bicentennial was—it dominated the culture for about a year at least. Were you in California then?
HITZ: I was. I was quite small. I was three years old, so I am just about—yes, I was born just around the time of the bicentennial.
LOWE: Do you have memories of the bicentennial?
HITZ: A little bit, yes. I remember bicentennial coins. I remember the flavor of the bicentennial very faintly.
LOWE: I learned this morning, actually, from a mutual friend we were just talking with before recording, that this was a very state-based celebration.
ROBBINS: It was a state—Nixon had, there’s a new book out on it, Nixon really wanted to plan for it. I think his resignation was—it was painful to him that after all of this planning, and thinking that this was going to be a great event, to hand it over to Ford, was sad. And to look a little bit at this history—but, in order to calm some of the politics down, it was decided—I’m not exactly sure of the details—to sort of push it out to the states.
LOWE: Very federalist.
ROBBINS: Yes, exactly. “You do it.” I was brought up in New Hampshire, but close enough for the “shot heard ‘round the world” and Boston, and the Tea Party, and tall ships. And it was dominant.
HITZ: I don’t remember not knowing about it. I grew up in a very left-wing background. So I didn’t grow up with real piety about it, but the piety was still in the culture. And the style of progressive education that was in vogue then was much more open. So it was not censorious. It was, on the one hand, you tell the stories of the Native Americans and the enslaved. On the other, you tell the story of the Constitution and the Emancipation and the Civil War and so on.
So, I feel like I got a good sense of the American founding, and what it meant, throughout my schooling. I don’t even remember where or when I learned about it. As for what happened in the time in between, I don’t know. We’re both middle-aged people. You might want to ask [laughter] people who are younger to see whether that’s been carried on into the later generations.
LOWE: I would ask whether your students at St. John’s have good awareness, but these are people who are lovers of reading. They’re people who are interested in tradition.
HITZ: Yes. I think that—well, it’s part of the curriculum at St. John’s.
LOWE: So it counts as a Great Book?
HITZ: It does. I think it is self-consciously a bit—it’s a moment where we become more provincial.
LOWE: Sure.
HITZ: So, instead of the Great Books of the world, or the Great Books of the Western world, we think about the foundations of where we live in the United States. We read the Declaration, the Constitution, Federalist Papers, speeches of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, some Supreme Court decisions. So we definitely study it. In general, the American students are the ones who are most engaged. International students sometimes less. [laughs] I think, my guess is it’s still in our DNA. It’s not gone. We still have this piety about our founding documents.
PIETY, POLITICS, AND AMERICA’S FOUNDING DOCUMENTS
LOWE: This is interesting, yes, because you said “pious” before, and you say “piety.” This is another thing that struck me when I went to go and see it at the National Archives. I mean, various people have made this comment, this is very unoriginal of me to say. But it feels a bit like a shrine.
HITZ: Yes.
LOWE: I think it’s an intentional point. I read some of the Pauline Maier book, American Scripture—one of these great big classic books about the Revolution, about the Declaration. And she points up some of the ironies about this. So she makes a comparison to Lenin’s tomb. [laughter] She also points up the irony of what she thinks is—this is a following of an English tradition. This idea of protecting the document. You have the Magna Carta tradition.
HITZ: Yes, yes.
LOWE: And, like, you’re breaking up with England, and here you go. [laughter] What do you do? You go and create a document that then you treat as some kind of religious idol.
HITZ: Yes.
LOWE: Is this true? Is this—?
HITZ: One of the many reasons why I brought Lincoln today [holds up book] is that Lincoln has this famous speech to the Lyceum in 1838, where he exhorts Americans to treat the laws as scripture. So, he’s talking about the dangers of lawlessness, the dangers of mob rule, the dangers of lynching, and similar types of mob action and lawlessness that he’s seeing in the 1830s. And he says:
How shall we fortify against it? The answer is simple. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor.
And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation, and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly on its altars.
At the end of it—this I found more shocking recently. At the end of this speech, he says, “Upon these pillars of liberty”—he’s talking about the founders—“let the proud fabric of freedom rest as the rock of its basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
LOWE: Wow.
HITZ: So, Lincoln is very self-consciously putting forth the laws, and the story of the founding, as a religious foundation for the country. And I think Lincoln understands, as part of his greatness as a political thinker, he understands that something like that is needed to hold the whole thing together.
LOWE: This is a moment. This is a change in attitudinal stance.
HITZ: That’s right. So, there’s not a founding religion, right? There’s a separation between church and state. You need something. You’ve got all these different states, and all these disagreements, and all of these problems that are getting worse and worse as the 19th century progresses. You need something to hold them together, and it’s got to be like a religion. It has to be that deep. It can’t just be a belief. It can’t just be a habit. It has to be something that is in your bones, like a religion.
LOWE: You also see this poetic language. We have a great scholar of poetry with us today.
ROBBINS: Well, it’s interesting. Thank you for reading—Lincoln’s always so beautiful to listen to. As I was remarking beforehand, this celebration, the 250th, has been so focused on words. And what I was recalling in 1976 was, it was things, right? There were tall ships. I know there was a lot of swag and joke things and balloons and paper plates and—
HITZ: Coins.
ROBBINS: The coins were big. It was tangible in a way that I don’t see it tangible now. And having grown up in New Hampshire, where so many of the place names were Native American. So, Winnipesaukee. I live on the Merrimack River. I was born in Nashua. There’s Nabnasset, just everything.
The native history is so present in the place names. And we very much saw 1776 as not the beginning of something, but as a kind of transitional moment. Like, I ask people, “What are the numbers of treaties that—make a guess of the number of treaties that were signed in the years leading up, in the year and a half leading up?” It’s like 12, where the colonists were saying, “Let’s get our affairs in order before we break up with England. Let’s figure out how to engage with our near neighbors.” And this part of the story is nowhere today.
HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT OF THE DECLARATION
LOWE: You see, one thing I think—I read a load of these big books over the weekend. And I’d been thinking about this in advance. I hadn’t quite realized the extent to which each of these states had this pretty big infrastructure, political infrastructure. You had these bicameral legislatures. Also, the fact—and again, this is a very unoriginal point that many of these historians make—that the guys signing this stuff were members of those things! It’s them who are being constrained!
You have this—and there’s this interesting question about how much power they really had. But at least there’s the implication that they’re being set up at some point to get power. And just understanding—I mean, I knew some stuff—for instance, I live in Virginia, so I had been to some of the places, and I had read about some of the things—but understanding that this is replicated. And in this beautifully decentralized way, where they were all quite—they’re different—they have these certain shared features. Just getting to grips with quite how developed this political infrastructure was in these states, suddenly makes this make a lot more sense. Of course they’re annoyed! [laughter]
ROBBINS: Exactly.
LOWE: We’re doing the stuff, guys! Or at least we have the capacity to do the stuff. Just let us get on and do it.
HITZ: Right, right.
ROBBINS: Patrick Henry is a really interesting—
LOWE: Yes, I went recently to—
ROBBINS: He’s in the House of Burgesses. And he’s the, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Rhetorically. But I would put him, and many people put him, in the anti-Federalist, right? So, he’s probably not in the canon of the Great Books. Everybody reads The Federalist because it’s nice bound together in one book with the footnotes and—
HITZ: Well also, they prevailed. [laughter]
ROBBINS: Well, the anti-Federalists gave us the 10 amendments.
HITZ: Okay.
ROBBINS: I almost said “the 10 Commandments.” [laughter]
HITZ: See?
LOWE: There we go.
HITZ: See?
LOWE: The piety. [laughs]
HITZ: It’s our piety. That’s right.
ROBBINS: The anti-Federalists and why they agreed is such an important thing, but because he was mostly known in the House of Burgesses—so.
REVISITING THE WORDS OF THE DECLARATION
LOWE: It’s a great point. I think at this stage, partly because we have some non-American viewers, but partly because we’re talking about the content of this. We’ve already—Hollis has mentioned that it’s focused on the words. At this point, I think we should read this. This is not something you always get on video podcasts, but I think we should read this. Hollis, over to you.
ROBBINS: All right. I’m just—
LOWE: Can you kick us off with these—
ROBBINS: —wetting my whistle here.
LOWE: —beautiful poetic words.
ROBBINS: We’re going to start right at the top of the page.
LOWE: We are.
ROBBINS: The overview that people don’t usually read. So:
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government and to provide new Guards for their future security. —Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
LOWE:
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
HITZ:
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
ON PITCH DECKS, PRINCIPLES, AND POSTERITY
LOWE: One question I think I have is, “Who is this written to?” There are all kinds of answers to this, aren’t there? There are the practical answers, like, it’s written to the king and the parliament, and maybe France and Spain to get some money. It could be written to the world. Even, at one point, it says, “to a candid world.” I asked ChatGPT, and it’s like, “It’s clearly written to the candid world.” [laughter] I found this quite amusing. It told me it was in the first line. I’m like, “No, it’s not in the first line, but all right.”
There’s this great bit where, near the end, that you read so beautifully there, Zena—
ROBBINS: Yes, that was nice.
LOWE: There’s “the Supreme Judge of the world.” Is this the people of the world? Is this maybe God? Is this an allusion to God? I think there’s another answer, which is maybe it’s written to themselves on some level. Maybe it’s self-reflexive. What do we think? Who’s it to?
ROBBINS: I think of it like a pitch deck. [laughter] I’ve been thinking about it, more and more, as trying to get your seed funding, right? For, as you say, trying to get French armaments.
LOWE: That’s right. They’re going to need some materiel for their stuff.
ROBBINS: They need some materiel. They have to say, “Look, are you serious?” So they have to say they’re serious, right? You need a serious breakup document to say, [laughter] “We’re not going to get funding here. We’re going to get funding there.” And again, it doesn’t mention—of all the things that it does mention—it doesn’t mention much of their existing disputes and wars with the native population. Which is clearly, especially around the boundaries, and after the French and Indian War, a huge part of who they were, and why the troops were quartered there in the first place.
HITZ: I have to say I find the idea of the Declaration as a fundraising pitch just too cynical. I can’t bear it. [laughter]
LOWE: This is why I live in America. You know what I love most about America? The lack of cynicism. I left that behind in England. I don’t want the cynicism. That said, I think it’s a good argument. [laughter]
ROBBINS: I didn’t say it was only that. [laughter] But we—yes, there’s a certain amount of piety.
HITZ: Yes.
ROBBINS: I was raised with a pious youth. But I was also—it was very useful. It didn’t come out of nowhere. Not just the list of grievances.
LOWE: Yeah, yeah.
ROBBINS: But it was a uniting, the way that words unite.
HITZ: Right. I do think there’s a way in which it’s addressed to a very general audience. Not just the contemporary audience. They see themselves as doing something radical and new that hasn’t been done before. To found a country on ideas and principles. And they’re also setting it down, I think, for themselves and for their children and grandchildren.
So that’s the uncynical interpretation I would like to defend. Especially since, again, since I prepared for this podcast by reading a bunch of Lincoln. The Declaration played a huge role in the arguments for the restriction of slavery and the abolition of slavery. So, it had—whatever was intended at the time—it ended up bearing real weight.
LOWE: Yes.
ROBBINS: It was load-bearing, as Claude would say.
HITZ: Exactly. [laughter]
LOWE: It was load-bearing—
HITZ: Exactly.
ROBBINS: No, I think you’re right. And I’m not disagreeing with that.
HITZ: Yes.
ROBBINS: It is a forward-looking document, but it is also the culmination of decades. And, as you’re saying, lots and lots of arguments that played out in statehouses across the land. “Can we do it? Can we do it? Do you think we can do it? I think we can do it. Let’s have a convention the year before, to talk about how we’re going to do it. What committees do we need? Who’s going to be on these committees? How are we going to write this document?”
There was so much preparation up until the point. I think what I sometimes resist is the idea that—of course, especially with the Civil War, it played, and with Lincoln—the words on the page did a lot of work going forward. But, up to this point is, I think, a really important part of the story.
HOW RADICAL WAS THE DECLARATION REALLY?
LOWE: So I’m interested in this idea, and I think this comes in what both of you are saying, about how radical it is. So, is this something really new? Is this something that is the culmination of a process?
I read some of the big Bernard Bailyn book, and at the beginning, in one of the many prefaces, he says—I wrote it down. He says that the ideology—and this is of the Revolution as a whole, but I think we can see it coming through this—“The ideas and beliefs that were extremely radical for the time, and are implicitly radical still.”
But then you get this alternative view. And actually, in the Pauline Maier book, she says it was purposefully unexceptional! She even said, and I find this astonishing, “Virtually all Americans thought and said in words, and in other places, these ideas.” That’s about the Declaration of Independence. So possibly, they’re just talking about slightly different things. But both of these claims seem to me quite insane.
The idea that this is entirely radical? I mean, guys, you had similar stuff happening in England 100 years before. You’ve got similar stuff happening in France. As Hollis says, this has been being played out in the courthouses. But also the idea that this is just, every single person already believes this stuff, and says this stuff? That also just seems—is this just historians making over-claims? What is going on here?
HITZ: Well, I think—and you could help us out here—I think there’s no question that it’s drawing on an English tradition. The tradition of the Glorious Revolution and Locke. So there’s no question about that. In fact, the mode of the rule of law, in my understanding, is English. But the idea that you write a document with some principles and then say, “I have my own country now.” That feels to me like it was radical. [laughter] Not that rebellion was radical—rebellion is very old.
LOWE: Yes.
HITZ: But to say, “We rebel in the name of our rights as human beings.” That strikes me as being something strange and new. I think I would say it’s still radical.
LOWE: You do get, like you say, you get—don’t get me started on the social contract theory stuff. I’m obsessed by those things. [laughter] But you see it not just in Locke and in—I mean, I don’t agree with the Hobbes stuff, but you see the tradition coming through from Hobbes as well. You see this in the Levellers. So, the Levellers’ documents from the 1640s. They’re writing these agreements with these ideas, that they have rights, and the king should be held to account.
But you’re right. It’s not saying, “Hey, we’re going to go and set up a new nation.” That said, the right to revolution stuff—I was rereading some of the Second Treatise last night.
HITZ: Yes.
LOWE: And, yet again, it’s almost just lifted! Again, we have also George Mason and his work on rights to thank for some of this language. But again, that comes surely from Locke. You get the consent stuff. It’s just peppered. I don’t want to be the English person who comes over to America and says, “Guys, you know this great American thing. It’s literally all here in this book!” [lifts up Locke’s Second Treatise]
ROBBINS: Well, it’s—
LOWE: This is partly also why I love America. I’m not a patriotic kind of person. I don’t love England. But America, I love it, because these ideas are universal. They’re not American ideas. They’re not Locke’s ideas. They are truths about all people. They’re descriptively American and descriptively Locke, but I love them because I think they’re true and good and right.
ROBBINS: So, when you look at the Committee of Five that wrote the thing. And it was mostly Jefferson, who was mostly the best-read. But you have Sherman there. You have Livingston there. You have Franklin there. Right? You have people who are less interested in Locke, and more interested in property.
LOWE: Yes.
ROBBINS: More interested in shipping. More interested in equity law, right? Is that, we [laughter, looks at Zena] Don’t give me that evil eye!
LOWE: I’m just making faces. [laughter]
ROBBINS: Is that, yes—
HITZ: Everything Hollis is saying is true! It’s just that it’s at, you know, the material level.
ROBBINS: It is at the material level.
HITZ: It’s not at the spiritual level.
ROBBINS: I understand because, this was a document at the spiritual level that was designed to do material things.
HITZ: Yes.
ROBBINS: It was designed as that list of grievances—
LOWE: As these practical—
ROBBINS: Right. And so we see the history. It’s great to see the textual—I’m all for seeing textual echoes in text. That’s awesome. But we also have—again, thinking about the Massachusetts Bay Colony, thinking about Winthrop, thinking of “shining city on the hill.” This idea that we are doing something new on the shores was, by 1776, 150 years old already, okay? It was new, but again, it was going to unicorn level, right? [laughter] Rather than just a start-up there—Massachusetts Bay, you know— there’d been banishments—Rhode Island. This discussion, dare I say, of freedom, [laughter] different than liberty, was an old conversation.
Again, I’m not going to push—I know there was some controversy about the Ken Burns documentary, talking about the extent to which the framers and the founders had taken ideas of community and liberty from the Haudenosaunee, and from the various native peoples. The Iroquois. I do think some people are still left off the table in terms of influences. And I would say again, not the usual, you know, slaves are not involved. But there were huge communities of people here that were the main adversaries and antagonists and friends for 200 years, or at least for 150 years, that need to be part of this.
My pushback against the Federalists, a little bit, has to do with the fact that the Federalists erased that history, only to call these people “savages that must be dealt with”. So what had been a real sense of “We live among these communities. They are at our borders. We have learned from them. They have learned from us.” That history has disappeared.
LOWE: [Looks at Zena] Give us some poetry. Give us some—
HITZ: Well, I just wanted to argue a bit more with Rebecca about the sense to which it’s just English. [laughter]
LOWE: No, no, no! “Most” isn’t “only”! It’s not like I mean—
HITZ: And I have a distorted perspective, not having ever done a deep dive into the time of the revolution. But my sense is that England has thought of itself as being a continuous thing going back to, say, 1066, right? So, it keeps its—okay, it executes the king—but then it ends up keeping a king.
LOWE: Oh, we totally gave in. [laughter] Basically, the whole of that century is just, “We’re sick of killing each other. Too much warfare. We’ll just settle.”
HITZ: Right.
LOWE: So yeah, I do completely agree. The ideas are there. But no, we did not follow through, and we still have not. We still have a monarchy. [laughter] This is unjustified political power! Another reason I don’t live there anymore!
ECHOES OF THE DECLARATION IN THE CIVIL WAR YEARS AND BEYOND
HITZ: Okay! [laughter] Here seems to me an interesting factor that ends up playing such a key role in the Civil War time. And connects to Hollis’s interest in the role of the Indigenous people, indirectly. But England was a nation-state. It was a particular tribe of people, or in the end, a united kingdom, a variety of peoples. And I think at the moment of the founding, it’s ambiguous whether that’s the case.
But they, Jefferson writes these words: “All men are created equal.” He writes these words. The Constitution begins, “We, the people.” And what we teach with—what we read with our students at St. John’s, the Dred Scott decision—
LOWE: St. Louis.
HITZ: —where Chief Justice Taney says this shocking thing, which is, “Look, these founding documents, they say ‘We, the people,’ they say, ‘All men are created equal.’ They’re really just referring to the white people who are signing these documents at the time.” This is a principle of interpretation which seems utterly false. You can see it from—and even in the dissent—Curtis gives this dissent where he says, “There are Black citizens of Northern colonies. How could it possibly be that this only refers to one race?”
You could tell there’s a tension because—and it turns up in Lincoln’s speeches—when there’s all of these fights about slavery in the territories. In Nebraska, where they want slavery, some politician promoting the slavery-in-Nebraska point of view says, “The Declaration is garbage.” Like, wants to de-emphasize the Declaration.
So part of Lincoln’s argument is that, look, the Declaration is part of who we are. It ties our hearts to this country, not just our wallets. And it forces us to think of slavery as an evil. Maybe a necessary evil that needs to be preserved for a while, as he often argues, but in the end, an evil.
LOWE: Yes.
HITZ: Because it is not rule with the consent of the governed, which is the basic principle of the founding. I can read you a little more, but we can wait if you want. I have one more piece of Lincoln I want to read.
LOWE: Go for it!
HITZ: Okay.
LOWE: Give us a little more Lincoln. And then, I want to talk about Frederick Douglass.
HITZ: Okay, sure. This is a fragment from 1861, where Lincoln says:
Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result, that is our country. But even these are not the primary cause of our great prosperity. There is something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart. That something is this principle of “liberty to all”. The principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and, by consequence, enterprise and industry to all. The expression of that principle, in our Declaration of Independence, was most happy and fortunate. No oppressed people will fight, and endure, as our fathers did, without the promise of something better than a mere change of masters.
And here’s the very beautiful part that’s very famous:
The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word, fitly spoken, which has proved an apple of gold to us. The Union. and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple. But to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.
So, the golden apple of the United States is the Declaration. The Constitution is only a frame to display it and put it on display. The principles of freedom for all, liberty for all, government with the consent of the governed are meant for everyone in principle, most especially the people that live in the United States.
LOWE: That’s very beautiful. A comment that, I think, to many people is almost self-evident, of course, is that the Declaration of Independence is not legally binding. I mean, there is some debate around the edges. I read quite a fun Fred Schauer paper last night [laughter] arguing, at least, that it could become legally binding, if you buy into his particular conception of law and stuff. But maybe that is also something beautiful about it. It’s saying this is what should be the case, not because it’s being enforced, but because these are the truths. The truths self-evident.
HITZ: Well, I think the things which are entwined about our hearts, right? This is also the thing about piety. This is, I think, the core of Lincoln’s political understanding. We need more than self-interest. We need more than “this is working for now.” We need to love this thing.
LOWE: Yes.
HITZ: This needs to be deep in our hearts, the way our religion is and the way our families are. So I think that’s what he’s really getting at. So, whether the Declaration is legally binding, I think, might not be interesting to him. Because the point is that the attachment to the Declaration is what holds the whole thing together.
LOWE: And out of choice.
HITZ: It’s the object of the heart. It’s the golden apple of our desires. It’s the promise of happiness.
LOWE: Yes, and we choose to follow it, not because we’re forced to follow it.
HITZ: Exactly.
LOWE: Let’s talk a little about—we talked a bit about the reality on the ground. And the time, of course, it has taken for all people in America to be recognized as equal. Let’s think about the implications for—in the following century, we see the Civil War. Straight after that, we see these three big amendments in the 1860s: the end of slavery, we see citizenship, and we see voting. But, of course, we could argue that these matters are still not fully settled and determined today. Hollis, how much of a role do you think the Declaration of Independence plays within this? Positively? Negatively?
ROBBINS: Well, I think it’s huge. But again, I’m going to keep pushing back.
LOWE: I love it. Do it.
ROBBINS: The idea that what happens is we have a greatest hit. And everybody reads Douglass. Nobody reads David Walker, and David Walker’s Appeal from 1837, ’39, which is that Douglass read. We just can’t pluck Douglass and Du Bois out, deracinated, from a deep history—anti-Federalist—a deep history of conversations about this experiment. Of conversations that happened everywhere. Of Nat Turner, which, you can see, Nat Turner—and Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1837—as a kind of freedom fighter.
I mean, Douglass was quite savvy in drawing upon the language of the Declaration of Independence. He saw its power. He understood how it could be best utilized for his ends. But with the Dred Scott decision and other—he also saw that these words could be twisted. And in his great, which is not a speech I like so much, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”. I mean it’s a fine—
LOWE: You don’t like it?
ROBBINS: No, I don’t. I think it’s actually—it’s fine. And he’s right, of course, but—
LOWE: He’s like, the English were wrong! The Declaration of Independence has these great saving principles. The founders intended well. The Constitution is a glorious liberty document!
ROBBINS: I just don’t—
LOWE: It also, of course, does have these horrific moments of description.
ROBBINS: For, of all the things that Douglass has written, I think that is the least shaped. Let me put it that way. As a matter of his oratory, and how he shapes—I still think the 1845 Original Narrative is the greatest of what he’s done. But, again, certain texts get to be greatest hits. The Declaration is, should be, it’s holy. But it is a culmination of so many conversations.
The amendments are so many conversations, that I think it behooves us—even when you, and I don’t know how—this is a good question of how it’s taught in schools. When you go, “You’ve ravaged our shores,” or the whole list of terrible things that the kings have done. Do students actually know the thing? Why were the troops quartered? What was happening? What led to that particular sentence? Why that sentence in that list? What was left off that? If you’re breaking up with somebody, it may be overdetermined. By socks on the floor, or what have you. [laughter] What is put on that list, and what is not put on that list?
Certain phrases in the Declaration are held up as particularly poetic. I loved your reading at the end, because I actually don’t know the end so well.
HITZ: Yes. That’s right.
THE POETRY OF SALTPETER
ROBBINS: I think getting back to the materiality, the material reality of the Declaration grounds us. I recently heard Drew Faust talk a little bit with Jill Lepore at Harvard, which is an incredible conversation about—and Jill Lepore’s recent book is phenomenal as well—but about the farmers who put down their farming implements to go fight in the Civil War. And it’s a beautiful moment, or understanding of, like, “I’m going to stop working this land in order to fight for this land for a principle,” right? And these—
HITZ: You meant the Revolutionary War or the Civil War?
ROBBINS: No, Civil War.
HITZ: Civil War? Okay.
ROBBINS: Yes. Because of the principles of the Declaration—
HITZ: Right.
ROBBINS: That we see material reaching for the spiritual to go back to the material. I think I just want to keep grounding it there.
LOWE: It’s politics. There’s use value in the documents. [laughter] That’s sometimes how they rise and succeed.
HITZ: Use value!
LOWE: Not just—
HITZ: Ugh. That’s terrible!
LOWE: Not just the aesthetic quality. [laughter] Cash value!
HITZ: I don’t know. I think—
LOWE: I mean, hey, you Americans have a pragmatist theory of truth where truth is cash value. I mean, come on, right? [laughter]
HITZ: Yeah, but we don’t believe it!
LOWE: I know. Thank God!
HITZ: We just have the theory.
ROBBINS: But I mean, at the time, the colonists in 1776, in the summer of 1776, they needed gunpowder.
LOWE: Yes. This is right.
ROBBINS: They needed saltpeter. Right? Document after document went out to farmers to tell them how to get their guano. How do we get this stuff? How do we actually do it? We don’t read those documents. Perhaps we should.
LOWE: How poetic are those documents? [laughter]
HITZ: Those documents—
LOWE: What rhymes with saltpeter?
ROBBINS: Well, but we wouldn’t—
HITZ: Those documents are not going to—
ROBBINS: Right, but would we—
HITZ: —liberate the enslaved.
ROBBINS: We would not have—we would not be sitting here—
LOWE: They’re necessary conditions within history. Within our contingent history.
ROBBINS: If you think about this as a pitch deck [laughter]. Yes, it’s a great pitch deck. But the funders are always going to say, “Can you execute?” Right? And so, the real question is, did we execute? Yes, badly. [laughter] Some people were left out. The execution is why we’re sitting here today, not just the words.
LOWE: Big claim.
HITZ: It’s true. It’s a big claim.
ON FAVORITE STATES IN REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY
LOWE: All right, I want to have a final question for you guys. So, this is what brought the states together. We know, as Hollis has said so beautifully, that there was a whole history before this. That obviously, you had alliances between different states in the run-up to this. This is part of the point of it. You have these three different groups.
But it’s a state matter. So I want to know what your favorite state is. I want to know what your favorite state is, and ideally, I also want to know what state you’re interested in, in terms of the role they played in the Declaration of Independence.
I’ll go first, because I know less about this stuff. I can name—what, two states? [laughter] No, I can name more than that. My favorite state is Tennessee, because I love the lakes. I think it’s very beautiful. I used to go there when I was a kid every year. But the state I’m very interested in, in terms of the Declaration of Independence, I’m going to go for the easy one. I live in Virginia. Virginia is the place where Richard Lee introduced the Resolution. Jefferson did a lot of the drafting. George Mason, of course, wrote about rights in such a way that inspired a lot of the text, not just of the Declaration, but also the Constitution. Virginia had a pretty good run, right?
Zena, where do you stand? About Virginia? About your favorite state?
HITZ: My favorite state is California.
LOWE: That’s such an easy answer [laughter] It should be ruled out of the competition!
HITZ: Well, it did not sign the Declaration. It was almost 100 years behind.
ROBBINS: Though Junípero Serra was the same age as Jefferson.
HITZ: Yes.
ROBBINS: They were doing very different things, but kind of the same things, on two sides of the continent.
HITZ: Right, right. Yeah, I think I can’t really answer the question well, because I haven’t compared all the 13 colonies with one another. But I will say that the state that is iconically, in my mind, as the revolutionary state is Massachusetts, because of the things you learn as a kid in school. The Boston Tea Party. The battles in Concord, Lexington.
So that, for me—and when I’m in Massachusetts, that’s when I feel, I think, most the presence of the revolution. Apart from—I went to graduate school in Princeton, not far from where Washington crossed the Delaware. That too—the crossing of the Delaware. I think that the stories about the revolution itself are definitely wrapped into the document itself. So the sacrifices that were made to back it up.
LOWE: I love that. So, we have Tennessee, Virginia, California, Massachusetts. What are you going to add, Hollis?
ROBBINS: Well, I was thinking, actually, of Princeton. We knew each other back in grad school.
LOWE: That’s right. That’s where you guys—
ROBBINS: Right. I had never felt so revolutionary [laughter] as in Princeton. Nassau Hall. All the bridges that were burned.
LOWE: Princeton is like a copy of English university cities! [laughter]
ROBBINS: It really is.
HITZ: Shh! No, that’s true. I won’t fight that.
ROBBINS: A couple of things, though. I’m halfway between New Hampshire, growing up. It’s still on the license plates. It’s “Live free or die.”
LOWE: Love it.
ROBBINS: Right? And I happen to be, on my mother’s side, related to—goes back to Patrick Henry’s mother.
LOWE: Wow!
ROBBINS: So this is part of the reason—Sarah Winston—this is part of the reason I know a little bit about Patrick Henry. What most people don’t know is that his first wife, according to the history books when they do pay attention to her, went crazy. And he had to lock her in the basement. He fed her, not—
LOWE: This is like Jane Eyre.
ROBBINS: It is, it is. Except not mad woman in the attic, it’s mad woman—
LOWE: In the basement.
ROBBINS: In the basement. It was a terrible thing. The letters are like, “Poor Patrick Henry with his poor wife.”
LOWE: Oh, gosh.
ROBBINS: So some of the family stories that came down had to do with—you know, she was 16 when they got married. That was all normal back then, right? And she liked nice things, because what nice girl in 1770s Virginia doesn’t like nice English teacups? Cloth from England, for the curtains for their house. And he came apparently home from one of the big speeches in the House of Burgesses, and took all the British stuff out into the yard and burned it. [Zena and Rebecca gasp] Bonfire, like, “How can you do this? You’re a traitor.” Now, whether these things are true—when you look at her going crazy—she wasn’t there. Did she—was she bound up in this?
Does liberty mean, to an 18-year-old housewife in Virginia, married to a famous man, giving up nice things? Actually, yes. [laughter] But this is a conversation that actually goes on today. How much of the nice things are you going to give up for freedom? So my favorite state is Virginia for that reason.
LOWE: I went to the church in Richmond just a couple of weeks ago, and they did not tell me this stuff about him keeping the—
ROBBINS: Oh, yes.
LOWE: That said, they did touch on your use-value thing. He’s a lawyer.
ROBBINS: Right.
LOWE: That speech is a lawyer’s speech.
ROBBINS: Right.
LOWE: He walks around the church declaiming, trying to persuade the people. I think it’s an astonishing speech, but it’s pragmatic.
ROBBINS: My brother’s name is Patrick Henry Robbins.
LOWE: Beautiful.
HITZ: Awesome.
ROBBINS: It’s a story that we celebrate. But it’s also—it’s not so great.
LOWE: Not so great. Well, on that note, guys, this has been wonderful. It’s part of my trying to learn all the things about America. Getting to hang out with my favorite Americans, talking about all the American things. Thank you so much for joining us.
HITZ: Oh, it was so fun.
ROBBINS: Thank you, even if we disagree. [laughter]
LOWE: That’s what it’s about, you guys. This is what America’s about, right? Space for dissensus.
HITZ: Exactly.
