America’s Founding
Fathers left succeeding generations a wonderful gift, according to a scholar
who has studied and written about the Founders. However, he believes too many
Americans today fail to appreciate it.
“It was like [the
Founders] wrenched an immense and very amazing piece of gold from the earth
called self-government,” said Joshua Charles during a recent
appearance on Dennis Prager’s radio show. “But when they did it, there was still quite a bit of dirt on it
– you know, slavery, other things like that.
“But what I’m worried
about is that the left, the academia, you know, however you want to phrase it –
they make everything about the dirt. And so the great danger in my eyes is that
in acknowledging the dirt, we use it as an excuse to do away with the gold.”
Charles, a WND columnist, is well acquainted with both the gold and the
dirt. He spent five to six years combing through thousands of pages of speeches,
letters, diary entries and other lesser-known writings of America’s Founding
Fathers.
The result was his
recently released book, “Liberty’s
Secrets: The Lost Wisdom of America’s Founders.”
“There’s a lot more than
people realize,” the author revealed. “There’s the Declaration, there’s the
Constitution, there’s the Federalist Papers, which were all of course wonderful.”
Charles also pointed to
letters, diary entries and newspaper editorials.
“There are even books.
John Adams, for example, wrote a massive three-volume tome, ‘The Defense of the
Constitutional Government of the United States,’ and it’s an immense historical
survey basically putting forward the idea of separation of powers. So there’s
all sorts of stuff that people have no idea about and which I see rarely
quoted, rarely referenced.”
Unfortunately, the
27-year-old Charles doubts whether his fellow millennials would fully
appreciate all the writings he has dug up and documented in his book. He shared
an anecdote that happened when he was touring the National Archives in
Washington, D.C., recently. While he was gazing at the original Declaration of
Independence, he overheard a group of teenage girls ask a National Archives
staff member, “What’s the difference between the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution?”
Charles was incredulous.
“I was thinking to
myself, ‘These young women have been in public education for a decade or longer
most likely, and they don’t even know the difference between the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution,’” he said.
Charles and Prager, the
host, both worried that young people would initially think “white male
Christian slave owner” if they saw the writings Charles dug up. Charles
acknowledged slavery was a “great stain” on our nation’s history, but he urged
listeners not to lose focus on the unique nature of America’s founding.
“The United States was
the first nation in the world to be established by reasoned consent of its
people,” he said. “It wasn’t by war, it wasn’t by happenstance, it wasn’t by
conquest. We had a war for independence, but the actual establishment of our government,
the Constitution, that was peaceful. It was through debate, it was through
reason, and that was the first time that had happened in human history.”
In recent months,
Democrats in some states have tried to distance themselves from one Founder in
particular: Thomas Jefferson. Party committees in Georgia, Connecticut,
Missouri and Iowa have voted
to rename their annual Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinners because Jefferson owned slaves and Andrew
Jackson relocated thousands of Native Americans from the South. At least six
other states are considering the same move.
Charles urges Democrats
not to let Jefferson’s slave ownership override all the great things he did for
America. In addition, the author pointed to one passage from his book that he
said demonstrates Jefferson was not a racist. In 1861, Confederate Vice
President Alexander Stephens gave his famous “Cornerstone Speech.”
“He specifically references
Jefferson’s ideas, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence,” Charles
said. “And not only does he specifically reference them, he specifically
eschews them. … [He] said the Confederacy is based on the exact opposite.”
Indeed, Stephens stated:
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations
are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not
equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is
his natural and normal condition.”
Take note, says Charles:
a Confederate official claimed his racist ideals were “exactly the opposite” of
Jefferson’s.
Of course, Jefferson and
the other Founders wrote about more than just slavery. Charles revealed that,
while researching for the book, he discovered numerous writings on issues
people still care about today.
“One thing I discovered
is you’ll go through their writings and there’s so many things that are utterly
relevant today,” he said. “I actually coined a phrase I called a ‘one-niner.’
Whenever I’d be reading, I’d put it in the margins, and it comes from
Ecclesiastes 1:9 – ‘There’s nothing new under the sun.’ You can read so much of
what they wrote. They wrote about banks, they wrote about financial corruption,
they wrote about what we call crony capitalism, they wrote about moral
degeneration, they wrote about education in ways that are simply stunning.”
Prager, who is also a WND columnist, offered effusive praise for Charles, calling
him “a living, breathing reason for optimism for the United States. ”The host
said he was so impressed with Charles’ book that he agreed to write the
foreword.“ So he has written this book, and it is so good that I have to say
that if you read three books on what America stands for and its founders stand
for, this has to be one of them,” Prager enthused. “And if it was the only one,
you would do well.”
http://www.wnd.com/2015/09/lost-secrets-of-founding-fathers-revealed/
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