There is much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving season – at least if we look away from a presidential race in which a majority of voters want to reject both candidates by wide margins in their parties’ nominations and in which international news is dominated by Hamas atrocities against Israel and Russia’s devastating invasion of Ukraine.
Historically, these problems are not the greatest challenges Americans have faced, and we do so thanks to a governmental framework and a capacity for resilience and adaptability that few, if any, other countries can match. These benefits derive largely from those who came before us, not from the Founding Fathers who pursued the American Revolution and guided the youthful republic through its turbulent beginnings.
I have a stake in this claim because next week my book, “The Founders’ Mental Maps: How Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders,” will be released. As the subtitle suggests, this is a discussion of the different geographic orientations of the six founders, operating at a time when the geography of most of North America and the boundaries of the up-to-date nation were unknown.
I wrote this book because I have always been fascinated by maps and wanted to learn more about the founders from the wonderful biographies and stories that have been written about them over the past generations. While researching and writing it, two things struck me.
One was how aware the founders were of the cultural diversity of the 13 colonies that declared themselves independent nations and drafted a constitution that united them. Many today speak as if the United States had only recently become diverse. The Founders knew otherwise and tried to create a confined government that would leave room for (to operate historian David Hackett Fischer’s phrase) different folk customs while providing enough unity to protect against foreign attack.
My second observation was how dependent the success of the revolution and the up-to-date republic was. If the flap of a butterfly’s wings can change the weather for a thousand miles, in 1755, 1775, 1786 or 1803 there were many petite and far from inevitable events that proved crucial to the development of the situation. If they had not happened, North America and the world would not exist as they do today.
If Lord Fairfax, owner of the extensive swath of Virginia between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers, had not hired 16-year-old George Washington in 1748 to explore his lands west of the Blue Ridge, would Washington have been entrusted with his mission to aid repel the French from the forks of the Ohio River six years later ? Without this military experience, would the Second Continental Congress have unanimously appointed him commander of the Continental Army in 1775?
A different commander might not have matched Washington’s boldness at Trenton with perseverance at Valley Forge or, more importantly, might not have relinquished his military command after the British surrender. Washington’s determination to abide by constitutional limits on his power as president and retire after two terms to his Mount Vernon farm created precedents without which American history could have taken a different, more tragic course at various points in time.
Today’s readers may find his 18th-century prose awkward. Yet without his almost entirely hushed presence at the helm of the Constitutional Convention, ratification of the Constitution is unlikely. And would another first president have had the confidence to appoint two cabinet members as brilliant and perverse as Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson? Could another first president have kept the up-to-date nation neutral in a world war between revolutionary France and mercantile Britain?
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson correctly predicted that in 100 years the American Republic would have a larger population than Great Britain. Washington expected America to become a continental power. Hamilton insisted that the United States become a naval power, and his opponent Jefferson ordered the navy in the Mediterranean to defeat the Barbary pirates.
In a recent New York Times op-ed, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein notes that liberals – his definition includes most of today’s Republicans and Democrats – have for years defended “republican self-government, checks and balances, free speech, freedom of religion; freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; due legal protection;
This is a good list of what the founders fought for and wrote on parchment during the turbulent years of 1776-1791. The founders in their wigs and knee-length pants may seem unknown today, but they have given us much to be grateful for – and support – this Thanksgiving week and many Thanksgivings to come.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His up-to-date book, Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders, will be released on November 28.
