#1546 The Founders and the Cutting Room Floor

Madison doesn't have anything in Washington DC to commemorate his constitutional stuff. I'm glad Jefferson does, but

Madison is not quite, doesn't have quite the allure that Jefferson does. So why do you suppose that's true? I think one of the reasons is because Madison's presidency is not so successful.

Right? It's the war is not great. He's not a, you know, he doesn't have the eloquence and the presence and the mystique that Jefferson has to be Jefferson in that moment, because he's talking out of both sides of his mouth in a way that Madison didn't talk about slavery much, you know?

So I think it's, it's just a complicated legacy, but I think he probably gets, gets more condemnation than he deserves, but he also gets more praise than he deserves.

So let me stop you right there. This is the Thomas Jefferson hour. I think, you know, you're saying he, he gets more praise than he deserves. How, how can that possibly be?

I mean, I do think, I do think he deserves everything he, he that has come to him, but you know, he's not alone in some of the great advances he makes. He's not, he's not on an Island in terms of the writing that he does.

I give some credit to the Ben Franklin's of the world that helped him craft some of those things, despite the fact that he's the greatest, as I said, last time I was talking to you, he's the greatest poet of the 18th century, political poet of the 18th century. Jefferson is the greatest.

This week on the Thomas Jefferson hour, my conversation with Skidmore college history professor Bo Breslin about the things that wound up on the cutting room floor during the founding generation of American history.

Why was John Dickinson's guarantee of women's religious freedom removed from his draft of the articles of confederation?

Why did James Madison persuade Jefferson not to send his old friend, John Adams, a congratulatory letter after the 1796 presidential election above all,

how would American history have been different?

If Jefferson's attack on the slave trade had not been removed from the declaration of independence at the insistence of the Carolinas and Georgia,

would Jefferson's attack on slavery have brought emancipation to the enslaved people of this country?

Or would it merely have brought on the civil war right from the start?

Would we judge Jefferson more charitably if his denunciation of slavery had been included in the final draft?

Join us for all that and more on this week's Thomas Jefferson hour.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this special edition of the Thomas Jefferson hour.

This week, I talk with William Breslin of Skidmore college, the author of a constitution for the living.

We had that conversation a few months ago, and it was, you were the first person that I ever had the chance to talk about the possibility that Jefferson was right,

that we should revise or tear up the constitution once per generation.

But today, our subject is a little bit different, something you're working on now.

And that's what might be called founders edits, things that wound up on the cutting room floor,

that if they had stayed in these famous documents might have changed in some ways the course of American history.

So welcome to the Jefferson hour.

Thank you, Clay.

And please call me by my informal name.

My informal name is Bo.

So call me Bo.

I will call you Bo.

I knew that, but I just wanted to make sure that you were comfortable with that.

All right.

So Bo, let's start with the preamble to the constitution of the United States.

It's about 4,000 words long, the whole constitution.

The committee on detail was largely dominated by Gouverneur Morris.

Gouverneur Morris is, in some sense, the pro stylist who wrote the constitution of the United States in the late summer of 1787.

And as I understand it, at first, it actually enumerated every state rather than we, the people.

So tell that story.

The committee of detail responsibility for taking all of the, the ideas and debates and, and putting them in prose, right?

Putting them in actual constitutional documents.

We, we always, we under appreciate the committee of detail, but it had the responsibility of writing the text.

And as you said, the preamble was one of the, it was part of what the committee of detail did.

And essentially it came out with a preamble that we would not, we would not recognize today, right?

So the preamble, and I won't read all the states, but the preamble essentially said,

we, the people of the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and went through all the states,

do ordain, declare, and establish the following constitution for the government of ourselves and our posterity.

So the great lofty language that eventually Gouverneur Morris sort of takes over,

and the great lofty language of our preamble was simply not there.

And the committee of detail comes out with it.

And what's interesting about, Clay, about that, that proposal, right?

That the committee of detail had to preamble is that that would have fundamentally changed many parts of the direction or the evolution of the development of the United States.

And I'm going to talk about one in particular.

But let me just hold you there for one minute.

Let me make sure everyone knows what did happen.

So the final form, which almost all school children encounter and maybe memorize is,

we, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice,

ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare,

and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,

do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.

So that is the final masterful form.

And your point is going to be that it's not just better as literature.

It makes a fundamental difference on how we interpret the meaning of the Constitution.

Exactly.

And it is lofty, beautiful, eloquent language.

But it fundamentally changed the way in which we think about both the polity itself and the Constitution as a document.

Clay, the best example of that is to think about the great John Marshall case in McCulloch v. Maryland, right?

There's lots of ways you can think about how we, the people of the United States,

as opposed to we, the people of the various states,

fundamentally changed the direction of the United States.

But I think the most concrete example is in McCulloch v. Maryland.

And I know recently you did, with Lindsay, you did a thing on John Marshall, right?

John Marshall was a master at manipulating, and I'll use that term deliberately,

manipulating parts of the law and the Constitution in order to fulfill the notion

that the national government or the federal government was going to be supreme over the states.

And McCulloch is one of his great cases.

You know, Marbury, McCulloch, maybe Gibbons.

McCulloch is one of its great cases.

And for folks out there, the case was fairly simple.

It involved whether or not the federal government could charter a bank

and whether or not Maryland could tax that bank.

And one of the arguments that the Maryland folks made was that the federal government,

Congress, could not charter a bank because the Constitution emanates from the states.

And if it emanates from the states and the power, the locus of power is in the states,

then the federal government doesn't have the enumerated power

to charter a bank and thus cannot do it.

And Marshall said, ah, no, the Constitution doesn't emanate from the states.

It emanates from the people.

Maryland's retort was that, well, there were ratification debates in the states.

Marshall's response to that was, well, that was the efficient way to do it.

How else are you going to do it?

But my question for you in this conversation is,

what if that original preamble that listed the states,

we the people of the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and so on, was still in there?

Marshall could not have used that argument as in reinforcing the power of the federal government,

or could not have used it as easily.

And that's a critical moment in American history when Marshall says

the Constitution emanates from the people of the United States, not from the states.

The preamble, that change was fundamental to not only the development, but also

individuals like Marshall jumping off that notion that the Constitution emanates from the collective

people.

Justice Thomas is a great example of those people who will question that.

It's really fun to watch Thomas's opinions on things because he's a little,

but Justice Thomas has recently said it emanates from the people of the states, not the collective

people.

Marshall disagreed.

And I think the preamble helped him with that argument, even though he doesn't cite it.

First of all, I think Jefferson would have liked the original language.

He always believed he was a Virginian first, and that Virginia was its own nation commonwealth,

and that there was a kind of voluntary confederation, and that this was maybe not

sufficiently strong in fiscal terms, but that for all practical purposes, the state should be

sovereign in everything except international affairs.

So he probably would have liked that reading.

Do we know anything about what made Gouverneur Morris change from the original enumeration

of states to the much more beautiful general approach?

Yeah.

So there's not much evidence in the notes about what that change was, but I have some

speculation that I do think that for the most part, Gouverneur Morris, super smart guy,

Gouverneur Morris and most of the framers intended for the Constitution to emanate from

the people, that it was a collective decision.

And my evidence of that play is ratification, right?

Ratification, we take ratification kind of, we sort of don't spend a lot of time thinking

about ratification.

But of course, ratification was a big deal.

I think Gordon Wood said, this is a new idea.

And I'm always struck by what the project was, the constitutional project, right?

And I think Hamilton probably said it best in Federalist One, right?

The question is whether or not a group of people can collectively decide what form of

government they want by sitting around a table, right?

In Philadelphia and deciding that this is going to be the best type of government for

our national protection and for our liberty, that idea was new, but you had to get the

people to sign on to it.

And so this notion that Article Seven, that you had needed to ratify the text is a novel

idea.

There are several novel ideas, one of which is ratifying conventions in the first place.

My thinking is that Gouverneur Morris was well aware of the fact that ratification was

a big deal, that it was a novel idea, and that you didn't need to ratify.

All you needed was state legislatures to say yes.

But instead, we'll have ratifying conventions with the people because that's the way a

collective people can agree to live under these rules.

I think he was smart that way.

I don't know if everybody in the room was smart that way, but ultimately, I think that's

what he was thinking.

We tend to take the Constitution for granted, that you never really think about, well, who

actually sat down and wrote it, put all the notes in front of him of different provisions

for elections, for impeachment, for ratifying treaties, for coinage of money, the enumerated

powers, how you amend this thing and under what circumstances, etc.

But somebody had to gather all those notes and try to rationalize them and put them into

really strong prose.

And it wasn't Gouverneur Morris alone, but he was the principal draftsman.

I think we need to always remember that, that this was a literary moment.

These things don't just happen.

This had to be crafted and organized.

And that process, I think, deserves a lot more attention than it has received.

But then you have McCullough versus Maryland, Justice Marshall, no friend to Jefferson.

In all of his major decisions for his 34 years on the court, he emphasized national power,

national government, national sovereignty, and reduced the states to the extent that

he could get away with it to more subordinate sovereignty.

Two things about that.

First of all, absolutely would have appalled Thomas Jefferson, and he was aware of some

of it, but not all of it.

And secondly, it is kind of a coup d'etat.

I mean, Marshall's making these decisions.

He's not elected.

He's appointed for life.

He doesn't have to stand for re-election.

There's no vote of confidence or no confidence.

There's no appeal.

And so he is changing the Constitution.

He wasn't at the Constitutional Convention.

He is materially changing the Constitution to fit his own philosophy of government, which

he doesn't hold alone, of course.

But it does not represent a debate by the American people about how they should construe

this thing.

So it's amazing that he did it, and even more amazing that, in a sense, he got away with

it.

Marshall is, as I said, he's a judicial genius in some ways because of the fact that he was

able to, as I said, I'll use this term deliberately, manipulate particular things.

McCulloch is one of those instances where he manipulates a couple of things.

His most famous manipulation is, of course, Marbury versus Madison.

Thomas Jefferson, if it hasn't already done it, should do an episode on Marbury versus

Madison as a fascinating example of judicial statescraft, right?

It's Marshall manipulates or misreads various things, including the semicolon in Section

13 of the Judiciary Act, fascinating the way in which he set out to achieve two goals

play.

He wanted two things, Marshall.

One was he wanted to establish the federal government as a superior power over the states.

That's the McCulloch versus Maryland and Gibbons versus Ogden and so on.

Simultaneously, he wants to establish the Supreme Court as a co-equal branch with the

other two, and that's the Marbury versus Madison.

More so than any other justice, I think, in the history of the Supreme Court, he is able

to achieve those goals in ways that were beyond measure.

We need to take a short break.

We'll do a program.

You'll be in it.

We'll talk about Marbury v. Madison.

Every law student encounters Marbury v. Madison almost in week number one.

We need to take a short break.

We're talking with Bo Breslin of Skidmore College.

You're listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour.

We'll be back in just a moment.

Welcome back to this special edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour.

Bo Breslin, the author of a really fascinating book on the Constitution of the United States,

the Constitution for the Living, imagining how five generations of Americans would have

rewritten the nation's fundamental law.

We've had that conversation before.

So, Bo, let's move on.

Another one of the sort of cutting room floor moments or the edits by the founders was an

odd thing involving John Dickinson and the possibility of women being explicitly granted

religious freedom.

So tell us that story.

Dickinson, fascinating guy.

He's one of the great and underappreciated founders.

And as you know, Clay, his legacy was marred a little bit by the fact that he didn't sign

the declaration, right?

He felt like we weren't quite ready.

But he is, for all intents and purposes, he's at the table in almost every major founding

moment, right, the founding period.

He is the chairperson of the Annapolis Convention right before the Constitutional Convention.

Before that, he's in the Second Continental Congress and the First Continental Congress,

right?

He's in the Stamp Act Congress.

One of his jobs in the Second Continental Congress was to, he was given the task with

a committee, but he did the major part of it, of writing the articles.

He's a big fan.

He's not an actual Quaker, but he's a fellow traveler, and he's a big fan of constitutional

government.

When the resolution comes up to declare independence, there's also the resolution to write a constitution,

and Dickinson is given that task.

So Dickinson goes away, just like Jefferson did with the declaration, and writes up a

first draft of the Articles Confederation.

And he comes back, the articles, I will mention three things that are unique about the Dickinson

draft, which, by the way, you can find in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

The Dickinson draft is much more focused on the concentration of centralized power in

the federal government than the articles ended up being.

So he was a bigger fan of the idea of more power in the federal government than the rest

of the Second Continental Congress that edited his work.

Secondly, he has a statement in there that gets edited out about protections for Native

peoples.

He writes, their lands are to be secured to the, quote, their lands are to be secured

to them and not encroached on, and that there should be persons appointed by the national

government who will live with the Indians and make sure that all trade is just and fair,

and that occasionally their needs and wants are met with supplies delivered by the national

government.

Fascinating, you know, part of the Dickinson draft.

But probably the most revolutionary part of Dickinson's draft is his willingness to include

women in a clause protecting religious liberty.

His first draft says, no person in any colony living peaceably under the civil government

shall be molested or prejudiced in his or their person or a state for his or their religious

persuasion or practice.

I'll say it again.

No person in any colony living peaceably under the civil government should be molested or

prejudiced in his or their person or a state for his religious persuasion or practice.

And he crossed it out, Clay, and put instead of his or their, his or her.

And the one he presented to the Second Continental Congress says, no person in any colony living

peaceably under the civil government shall be molested or prejudiced in his or her person

or a state for religious persuasion or practice.

I think it is, Lindsay probably could tell us differently, but I think it's the first

example of sort of inequality extended to women in religious liberty written into a

document.

And it gets edited out by the Second Continental Congress.

He was influenced by his wife, Holly, and his Quaker upbringing.

And he felt like there was equality afforded to women.

All right.

So a couple of things.

First of all, amazing.

Thanks for telling this story.

Articles of confederation were the first constitution of the United States.

A loose confederation of states required unanimous approval for any amendment.

The government had to requisition monies from the individual states.

It wasn't a disaster, as the Hamiltonians like to say, but it proved to be insufficiently

strong.

And that's what led the Annapolis Convention of 1786 and the Constitutional Convention

of 1787.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was meant to revise the articles.

Instead, they tore them up and started over, which was in itself a pretty bold and maybe

illegal thing to do.

But these three provisions, of course, more centralized power, clearly rejected by especially

the smaller states.

The idea that the government of the United States had a fiduciary trust relationship

with native peoples and must go out of its way to protect them from unscrupulous trade

and so on.

In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance was passed by the outgoing Confederation Congress, and

they said that the government must always show the utmost good faith in dealing with

native peoples.

Well, you can put that sort of stuff in any constitution you want, but it wasn't in the

cards for this rising nation to really pay sufficient attention.

And so that's one of the things that's disquieting, that the Constitution is a restraining

document, but it can't overcome human dynamism in certain circumstances.

Racism is going to survive the civil rights laws.

We're going to treat natives as we're going to treat them.

And I don't suppose anyone trying to open a new settlement in the Ohio Valley said,

you know, there's that provision in the Northwest Ordinance that says utmost good

faith.

So it's a great thing, and it shows what sort of a character John Dickinson had.

I wish it had remained, but it didn't.

And then finally, this view of his or her.

I don't remember ever even hearing the phrase his or her before this document.

It got thrown out.

As you know, women were able to vote in, I think, New Jersey until 1808, and then they

thought better of it and disenfranchised women.

You know, Dickinson comes off as sort of a proto-feminist here.

And you think that the impulse largely came from Quakerism on the one hand and his strong

wife.

I mean, I think those are the two greatest influences in his life.

You know, I also think Dickinson's an interesting guy, right?

He's the guy who he spends a lot of time talking about slavery and abhorrent moral

reality.

He is just an interesting progressive thinker.

I think what he was influenced by was beyond just the two of that, two things to Quakerism

and also his wife.

I think he genuinely believed in equality in a way that some of the other framers of

the founding generation didn't necessarily agree with.

It came out in terms of religious liberty, which for him, as a fellow traveler and essentially

a Quaker, for him, equality in religious practice would have been the highest goal.

I think he was just a really, as you say, proto-feminist, but I think it's just his

moral spirit that essentially told him to do this.

And it gets edited out, which is a shame.

Interesting to think, Clay, what would have been any of the ripple effect or consequences

both for the 1787 Constitution and beyond if that anchor had been in place, the his

or her?

I'm not sure it would have been, but it's interesting to think about.

And we're talking with Beau Breslin about the things that wound up on the cutting room

floor, at least some of them during the founding.

In the first example that you gave of the preamble, I can see that that's fundamental.

If the states had been enumerated, the anti-federalists, the people like Jefferson, the states' rightists

would have seized upon that.

Jurists would have seized upon it.

I mean, it would be clear that this is a collection of state sovereignty producing a new national

government.

So when Gouverneur Morris changed it, that was material and its impact has been colossal.

But with John Dickinson, it feels a little less monumental.

So let's say that those phrases had stayed in his or her and his view that Native Americans

needed to be very carefully treated for fairness and justice.

It doesn't feel that this would have had quite the same influence.

And yet I can see Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton pointing to this provision if

it had stayed in.

In other words, it wouldn't have been just language.

It would have had consequences.

So yeah, it's clear that by the Annapolis Convention and certainly by Philadelphia in

1787, what we would describe as the drafters of the 1787 Constitution were mostly interested

in structure.

We needed to shift power, right?

We have power to the state from the states of the federal government.

It may not have had the legs play that the preamble change would have had.

But it feels to me a little bit there could have been moments in the 19th century in which

this would have been resurrected.

And at least we would have thought about it instead of the waiting until the early 20th

century to give women the vote, for example.

So I agree.

The goal for the Constitutional Convention in 1787 was not to extend rights to women

and that we were talking structure.

But I also think it's fascinating to think how the country would have evolved differently

if this had stayed in.

Impossible to imagine Mr. Jefferson saying, we hold these truths to be self-evident that

all men and women.

You know, Jefferson is a much more patriarchal figure than apparently John Dickinson was,

and he would have resisted.

He would have either said that men is a universal and therefore covers men and women and so on,

or he would have said, no, women, as Jefferson said, you know, tender breasts of ladies were

not formed for political convulsion and stuff like that.

Let me go to another one that's related to religion, and that's Jefferson's famous

letter to the Danbury Baptists on January 1st, 1802.

So the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut wrote to Jefferson congratulating him on his religious

tolerance, enlightened ways, in a certain sense, asked for an endorsement of his principles.

And Jefferson used this occasion, as he often did, to try to sort of say once and for all

the thing that we should keep in mind about a subject.

And he famously said, his reading of the First Amendment was that it, quote, erected a wall

of separation between church and state.

That was a very felicitous phrase by Thomas Jefferson.

In the 20th century, it was adopted by the Supreme Court of the United States as the

best paraphrase of the meaning of the First Amendment.

It wasn't until William Rehnquist, I think, in 1978, the court rejected that and said,

why should Jefferson have this much influence?

I mean, it's a good phrase, but it's not a constitutional phrase.

And so we've given it more credence and importance and jurisprudence than it deserves.

And so I have this friend at the Library of Congress in the rare books room, and I was

there once, and he was writing a book about natural rights.

And he said, you want to see the actual letter, the Danbury Baptist letter?

Of course, I said, yes.

So he showed it to me.

And then he said, we've used this super duper back scanner that can go under and over and

around.

He said, what I've discovered is that what Jefferson actually wrote was a wall of eternal

separation between church and state.

So not wall of separation between church and state, but wall of eternal separation.

And then apparently somebody, Madison or somebody, talked him off that ledge, and Jefferson

crossed it out and just left it at wall of separation.

It would have been so much stronger had he kept that phrase in.

But this is the technology of our time.

This wasn't discovered until we had technology that could read behind the crossings out and

the inkblots and so on.

Ripple effect.

So, you know, the founding fathers are at the source of this dream.

We're way, way down, you know, we're at Memphis and it's all muddy and flooding and it's chaos,

but they're at the source.

And so the things they decide are going to have monumental influence over the future

of American constitutionalism and American liberty.

So imagine if Jefferson had kept in wall of eternal separation, how would this have affected

the discourse?

Speculation is always my fun forte for me.

I think it might have been when you talk about eternal separation, there's a number of different

ways you can interpret that, Clay.

And I don't know what Jefferson meant.

I assume he means over a long period of time, but it could mean multiple things.

And I think depending on what he meant by eternal, that ripple effect would have been

different.

I know we're going to get to, I just want to say here, one of the great ironies, I would

say, Clay, is that maybe the greatest penman in the history of the United States is Jefferson.

So many of his things were edited either by him or by others.

He's the most eloquent and he's considered in the framing generation as the greatest

writer of that generation.

We're going to talk a little bit about some of his other edits.

I think that eternal edit also changes the fundamental meaning.

What do you think?

Well, I think a couple of things.

First of all, this kind of gets us in the direction of slavery, the anti-slavery manifesto

that was embedded at first in the draft of the Declaration of Independence.

And here's why, Beau.

I think Jefferson is a very great writer, the greatest of certainly the founding generation,

without question.

That's why he got the assignment.

He also needs an editor.

And that's a little odd to have to say of the great Jefferson, but he does because he's

an emotional man and he's a passionate man and he frequently, slightly overdoes it.

And so I think there's a little bitterness in wall of eternal separation as if he's,

there's anger there.

And I think that when he calmed down or when somebody looked at it, said, well, you know,

maybe that doesn't really add much there.

It may even discredit it to a certain degree.

You know, then he comes into a calmer state.

And remember in the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty and the famous preamble, so that his

greatest hit, he thought.

At the end of it, he says, and I understand this, that no law is ever eternal, that every

generation can sort of rewrite and do what they want with the law because the earth belongs

to the living.

But if you do, you'll be wrong.

Don't ever mess with this.

Don't ever touch this.

This is eternal.

This is not something that you're free.

And he says, I know that has no force of law, but I'm just saying it.

I'm just saying, please don't ever mess with this law, no matter what you think.

I think there's some of that in eternal here too.

Like there might be backsliding.

We might be moving back towards a collapse of the wall of separation between churches.

I want you to know how emphatically I believe this.

I think that's probably the right reading.

Let me ask you this question, and that is, Jefferson can be a pragmatic man.

He can be a practical man.

He wants to get things done, right?

He has a vision, as you've described to your listeners a lot.

He has a vision for the country, but he's a practical man.

And sometimes there is a genuine clash between his deep, deep respect for words and prose

and his practical side.

When Benjamin Franklin is editing his Declaration of Independence, he's pissed about a number

of those edits.

Educate me a little bit about that internal clash about, I need to have great prose,

but I also need to be practical.

Here's how I read it, and I'd be really interested in your response.

I see Jefferson as a utopian.

And in his mind's eye, he has a picture of the yeoman farmer working in the field by

day and reading Homer in the original Greek at night, and people sharing food, almost

a barter economy, and people being entirely self-sufficient and coming together as ideal

patriot citizens and not needing parties or faction and having rational decisions on all

questions, and that we would turn our backs on the rest of the world and be kind of a

super Canada, a nation that's kind of left alone because it's minding its own business.

It doesn't have any agenda in the world's arena.

I think that's his vision.

It's a magnificent vision.

It's why I love Jefferson, because I believe that he was our dreamer, and he dreamed of

what humans could actually achieve on earth if we ever got it together.

And I don't think that it's impossible.

I mean, Adams would say, are you nuts?

Have you looked around?

And Hamilton would say, no, man, it's corrupt.

There's no, you know, Jefferson's not an Augustinian.

He's not a Calvinist.

He doesn't believe in original sin.

He doesn't believe that humans are infected with self-destructive energies.

He thinks that's just bad government and the past.

So I love that about it, but I also know it's not true.

You can't live on this side of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and really hold that argument without

a number of important footnotes.

He said early on in his life, we must never attempt more than the people can bear.

And so I get the sense, Beau, that he had this vision, this magnificent pastoral Virgilian

vision of a small R republic, and he never let it go.

But he also knew, all right, it's Tuesday.

I've got to send a message to Congress.

We have to handle the Louisiana Purchase Treaty.

You know, in other words, he was, he was a utopian pragmatist and a pragmatic utopian.

So that he was saved in two ways.

Saved because he did understand this concept that you can't, you can dream America, but

you can't necessarily convince everybody to go along.

And secondly, he had Madison and Madison would say, well, let's, let's think about this.

Let's pull back a little bit on this maybe.

And I think that's essential to understanding Jefferson.

I'm always struck by the fact that Jefferson is our, the poet of the framing generation.

And yet he sees the world with a lens that Hamilton disagreed with.

So Hamilton is the, you know, the engine of the framing generation.

He's the visionary because we ended, we live in a Hamiltonian world.