.. >> guest: the occasion when the british throughout james ii and reconstituted

the government. >> host: how did we get from the glorious revolution of 1688 to the american revolution of 1776? >> guest: a. [laughter] and the idea is that informed the glorious revolution cited to justify it. and for americans to justify their revolution? there was real continuity the ideas expressed from one the familiar% or other writers of the 17th century as they carried on and they were basic political truthsy. for the 18th century. >> host: what were cahal some of those ideas?sn't itsy when the government is not determined by got and together and associate with each other and form compaq's and

society and government and appointir officials to serveas their events. the idea is summarized veryla neat the in the declaration of independence that all men lived in aat a world where they weree we equal and every man was his own keying and the inconvenience of that world p or the desire to protect people's rights brought people together to form a government and to protectrot those rights to serve the people security and if ever a failed to do that it is the right of the people to replace them. >> host: in your first book "from resistance to revolution", you write the colonists sought a british revolution that would reconstitute they're britisheses government with the new routers and a firmer

establishment. and thereby save not only america. >> guest: the decade before independence butthe there was a problem inthe britain that they were corrected with the parliament and moving toward absolute power.lute nudges the american space but the people at home in the british isles were also affected. although across the sea ever.ndmed and with the bill of rights formed overheard john wilkes although with then

existence, when i first discovered it i was a graduate student for a teeing a similar paper hot.erta that dissertation followed from the discovery of the cross semantic correspondence. >> host: who is johnos wilkes and why is the>> radical?e >> an opponent to thego british government andrgue argued for greater politicalhe w rights with the corruption of parliament and also criticized the came and went into exile for a period of time and an interesting development his struggle hap that was help happening and america the freeholders of

middlesex county and nonetheless but americans weredly concerned they hadconc reason to think the problem just there they feel the army fired on and like the bostony massacre and asymmetry of issues they could workther together to get rid of the ministry and parliament to create a problem with britain. >> host: one more quote to "from resistance to revolution" "only under free governments were the people nervous, a spirited ready and able to react against unjust provocation. itedas as such popular insurrection could be interpreted as symptoms of a strong and healthy constitution.s s

even while the indicator lessers shortcomings.d >> guest: i heard people argue that they were inin trouble is a good sign of our democracy.y people use the word jealous part of that is not the word. did they are sensitive and reacted they did not just take it. they spoke up. >> host: pauline maier can you give us a snapshot of america in the 1775? >> guest: a snapshot is a very different place. they tend to think north or

south thinking to the civil war. it is a much more complex place them back. there is a lot of differences within the new england states. talk about the middle colonieslo of new york, new jersey delaware and pennsylvania period divers with their population, and again farming, largely greens then what will further south of very different place now you have plantations rather than the family farms producing tobacco slaves? yes.la but they were not unique to this south the chesapeake to a little further and georgia and i left at north carolina

but 40% of the population were slaves and you have that majority in south carolina but slavery was every where.... the remarkable part is that it was not much criticized. the real opposition except for quaker's yousaf but it was wrong earlier because it violated the principles thatec wereau expressed for example, in the declaration of independence. i don't know of that is what you mean but there is no one picture of the united states 1775 because there are so many. h the colonies have very h distinct cultures and economies. >> host: was there amood similar political mood in

1775? >> guest: we get to the issue how could they act together? they could because they had the same political value and and there is nothing like it to pull the diverse elementsment together and to the extent that britain had begun although not represented innt, parliament and then when the commies' resisted, yes. they pull together andin understood the interest of anyone colony that if britain could get to buy for example, to destroy the assembly of new york because it refused to supply british d troops, if theyo could do c that in new york theyou could do it with any other, and a. they are so diverse they would never get to gather.

[laughter] but they could buy the policies. >> host: in your book "american scripture" you write, in a decade or so after 1850, i discovered the documents the declaration of independence began to assume the clausedisc say religious attributes latern t institutionalized enshrined in the library ofrece congresscv and the national archives. i confess, you write, have long been and remain uncomfortable with the use of religious words and images for what are after all things of this world. that practice strikes me as adulteress and at odds with the values of the revolutionioui >> guest: i am not sure i would write that with such strong terms right now. i began that book thinkingegan

the declaration of independence was blown out was not the declaration that i knew. i knew it through the revolution it was a workingent, document from the was continental congress only when i wrote the book to understand how that became transformative with american culture i understood what was w going on it became a statement of rights because the constitution did not give us one. it gave us what americans held off your the in the revolutionary period but has not been stated so clearly and any of the goal documents. the constitution does not say anything that all men are not createdanyt equal, it does not have the language

of the virginia declaration off rights that all men are born equalll the three theyth take those slightly, george mason'seo words actually, jefferson took the words. lar who largely from the virginiargi declaration but these ideas were common and expressed but they appeared nowhere in the constitution and those that were ratified nobody oppose the bill of rights at the time. if you look at the whole panoply of of what congress had proposed 1789, you would't understand why. the first two to not look like a declaration of rights. one is a plan that be representation would be as

population grew and it also be for the congressmen. but americans to buy a those rights, it became our bill t ofhr rights to the greater part of our history. >> host: you write and "american scripture" that the declaration of independence was a press release? >> a way to tell the american people what the was congress had done. the critical vote was on july 2nd, then they had a draft declaration. we tend to date independence july 4th because that is when it was finally approved for dissemination. >> host: by the seconde s continental congress. >> guest: but the vote was july 2nd.e

but when asked when we should celebrate johnld adams said the second of july withof festivities and j people think that that was an argument in an accident that we ended up with the fourth of july 87 they did not release it right away.n they did not release it until they edited it. e the critical debate in of the second continental congress was early june. for two days they took it very seriously than decided they seem to have a majority they needed to be unanimous. if you delayed the vote, you don't goight out to fight the greatest military and the power unless the ducks are

and mine. there was a tremendous to effort between june 10th and the beginning of july toe get all of the state'sxpla inline then we shouldt explain that those that they couldco approve anything so long as that led to reconciliation. with their grievances and reconciliation but they wanted to remain british.tion they ended up excepting independence onlyerm because>> they had no viable alternative. but they did forcefully for thatn conclusion. >> host: but you write in "american scripture" the delegates did not send out the declaration to theclar states. >> guest: i see what you

mean. here we have an variousns versions of the document. what they approved on july july 4th, the text, they had it printed immediately where peoplediatel could see in blockmpri letters except john hancocks name appears on the bottom and those attesting to the side -- signature of john. hancock. >> host: who served as president of the congress. >> guest: but you don't see signatures. you just see the block letters because it is printed. it is printed in block letters. that was sent out so the text of the declaration waswaoen broadly send. is why it is possible to say it is a press release of the people of the state's and the members of the army

wouldd me know that they had changed radically now it would not the reconciliation of grievances but for independence. they did send a copy to france with orders to give it to the french court. but it is done by a i committee and they do in the. most lax the days ago way. they did it on one ship. if that is important you put it on to ships. they said maybe you would like it translated? i should think so. it did not arrive. it got lost or intercepted and finally they sent another and by then they were embarrassed it is all a over the newspapers and ihe f have to present this and

they did not even send it with a seal.seri they took this very important. congress really thought ital it was for a domesticly audience. but a you are talking about another version anotherocu familiar document new york did not vote yes. they abstained fell only khamenei that did not vote. of the managed to get all ofd the others in. but and but when make later the york who was not enthusiastic said if everybody else does it then they got describe to writehe, t it at this such a familiar document to to people now that

inscribed copy you cannot see too much of it, it begins the unanimous declaration of the united states of america had. >> host: in the national archives?ive we were just showing that up on the screen. >> guest: it is signed but they did not distribute right away.way, the war was going very poorly. this is what it starts with then defeat of brooklyn heights and i crosses the delaware and looks like it is almost all over. but not unnecessarily come only after wants to reverse the downward trend, did they issue a copy of the signed

declaration of independence printed and sent to the states for the record 27 goodnd afternoon and welcome to booktv in depth where wer feature one author and his or her body of work. ar this month we have am i tea history professor 39 the author of four popular books and worked on a couple of books.e's but here are the four books. "from resistance to revolution" in 1972, 1980 "the old revolutionaries" american scripture came out in 1998 then on the constitution ratification. coming out last year. what do you teach? >> guest: american history through 1865 and a course on the american revolution and i also teach a course on conspiracies in america and

another kors called american classics that are all of the good works he should have read but probably haven't. [laughter] >> host:wi with all of this information and with history being taught in schools what is thera, best way to teach we history? >> guest: we always try to figure that out. we teach it very well at to m.i.t. because we have small class is. we don't have the huged halls, i have a small group of people around a table and we read the documents and talk about them. students often remember best what they think, not what they are told them that them discover the path that speaks to them directly.um it isnd i possible at a placetis like m.i.t. and especially

for the humanities. [laughter] >> host: september 171787 saddam if that is what people would call of philadelphia convention adjourned until the country what it had been doing for the previous four months, at me through september -. >> host: what did they do? >> guest: what they're supposed to do was proposed

amendments to the articles of confederation and what they were authorized to doo but d instead they wrote to an entirely new plan of government which of course, is our federal constitution. >> host: who was responsible if there was 1% in going fromgoin amendments ton the articles of confederation to a constitution who was the person? >> i would have difficulty but simply that virginia was stationed virginia delegation was mostatio important but if washington was not there i am doubtful it would ever have match. been named his name was on the virginia delegation that this would be an event of significance and that encouraged other states to send important delegations, george mason, a man who wrote to virginia'sn constitution and state declaration of rights, a,

young james a madison who we like to think of as the father of the constitution, but god bless the man. he said the title was inappropriate and the work of many hands. it was a very impressive delegation. >> host: and. >> guest: and william randolph the governor. >> host: then why was it virginia soa responsible? >> tha that is an extraordinarily good question. suspect washington's presents hot and madison was of the congress and understood firsthand how debilitating but government was and there were termorre limits and medicis and had served his out back in the

legislature although he was sent back again that after you could not serve any more then he went back again. wen but he was probably one of the most forceful people arguing for it but could not have done it alone. edmund randolph and he probably had substantial support and the legislatureprtue as well. >> your book opens with 1787 and where does it go from there? >> the book itself starts from their. i have a prelude because i could not say now we have to figure out what to do with the constitution but why was there a constitution and peoplee thought it was important to do that? georgeat through

washington start with his getting noticed and hisit effort to get out howded randolph and other persuaded how they should go. that is my way to explain the situation of the countryn id for what people were thinking previous but once washington gets on his horseco , the conventionpr happenedel with the first chapteral but once it insurance, all it had given the country was a proposal but it was not authorized to produce progress that was not nearly enough, he told they to country how it should ratify.auth

those amendments which havewoul had to have congress's approval and the approval of all 13 states. the convention did not even ask the congress to approve it.ve but said the constitution and should be submitted to elections in the states and when nine states approved it would go into effect. not even unanimous. what happens to the other four states? a reconstituted government that left several membersd f behind? and this to say it was a shocking proposal but essentially from that point* alondra, the congress said what are we supposed to do about this? they debated and some said we should fix it. and they said it has some obvious the problems. weviou should fix it first

occurred but what do you have in mind?ha they had a list ofn changes but then decided it was too it much.o they simply send it out and one by one over the next 10 months or so of the states did call conventions and debated and decided whether or not they would ratify. of this was the equivalenthe of the first national election. not like the presidential election clearlyec because itda didn't happen in one day but more like a primary where one state votes and they have their own peculiar tradition. what are the iowa caucus this? [laughter] but the convention was covered fully in the press because people sayd knew it wasc very important purpose somebody in southnd carolina

falling massachusetts knowing their future is tied up, it is a nationalizing event. it is profoundly exciting. the debate over the constitution and the use were very different and the federal convention.he they did not tell anyone in say you cannot say what is on but they were to act. so there were the lines of people d that were crushed to hear the debates. >> host: in the various states. it took two years? >> guest: no. the last date to ratify amp june788. 1788 was new hampshire. at the time they voted against both virginia and

the york who were also meeting. virginia voted soon after then new york when it the end of july. there was one more convention which was northcaro carolina and voted the end of of july not to ratify the proposedif amendments to the constitution. sell september 1788, the congress met the confederation congress declared it ratified and set up the procedures for the first for federal election.n it took roughly one year, september 1787 through 1788 but north carolina and rhode island came in later after the government began. >> host: when did they say statesan instead of colony's? >> 1776.

of languages confusing but appears in the declaration of independence. >> host: this e-mail comes from bob, sports editor for the times review newspaper.re comparing to the road serious. >> could you please talk about the role of the press during the colonial period? out influential was the printed word and how wide the red for the papers ofa thels time? could you give us your u thoughts on benjamin franklin in the role he played to establish the american press? >> guest: the first one, we speak of the media. there was not media. there was one medium, the press. it was the only communication to get to the mass audience.t g of course, the audience is relatively limited compared

to today. it would be published within the city or the town. although there was somere published in the interior lim with the ltd parameter a circulation of the zeroiver there is a river they would go that you could expand the i leadership. but this is the main wave that you could get to arger larger audience.pa newspapers are profoundly important. the surprise to us is how one cited the press was. most newspapers are published by those who want it ratifiedfe because they were profoundly in favor

because it wanted a stronger government to support american commerce and is ahe laggard economy would start to w recover and they saw theirss future tied very o intimatelyf with the strength of the national government.ti so it was very difficult for i the idean is to get intoy circulation and i don't think they did it very successfully and still only a handful of newspapers that publish a substantial number of criticisms. franklin's career was tied up with the fact his brother was a printer and talks about h his father trying to decide where he should be

apprentice too and decides to apprentice him to his brother that has the second newspaper published in the colony. he was a good writer but he retired from active work in the forties. maybe you could call him like murdoch. [laughter] he had stuff that needed help set up and says how you went into politics. he kept an interest in the press but the role of the ratification the constitution he is the oldest at the convention giving a wonderful speech calling on people to pull together even if they have doubts and one of the greatest and vice to hisy i country is.

>> host: you're right on me 12 over 90 publishers branch essays critical during th ratificationlish controversy.ra what was the literacy rate? r >> guest: it was a reasonably high but literacy was always highest in new england from the beginningn because they believed people had to read the bible. they were taught to readoung from a young age. we have substantial evidencemers of the then ordinary farmers or artisans who could read day she read and write in many cases. it gets a little less certain if you talk about the back sections of the carolinas but by and large, there is substantial evidence people are aware of the arguments being made.ndiat of people read the

constitution and they had thought sparc would help a lot that they had previousbati experience debating constitutions of statess, like new hampshire andsh massachusetts that had in new hampshire is case come had the early stateitut constitution they replaced some people were debating. but massachusetts did not get the state constitutiont o until 1780 people have rejected it earlier. there also asked to express their feelings on the independence of the articles of confederation and felt quite capable to discuss the issues to come to a decision. >> host: pauline maier is our guest. history professor at meditation may t the latest of her books is called for ratification. please go de ahead with your question.

>> good afternoon. when we hear people argue for the original meaning or original intent of the constitution, and it seems it is usually conservatives who make the argument, invariably they seem to i believe the original intent is exactly matches their ownr i interest. >> guest. [laughter] >> but the authors of the constitution often did not share the same intent at all. >> so can we honor the intent of those at the founding who thought to establish a fair and just society, or are we simply stock with the original intent of slaveholders. that is my first question. >> host: we have to leave there. >>igin guest: first of all, if

you ever look at the literature you understand itnd is tough to look like medievalound theology. however, now is my understanding people like scalia talk about theg, p original understanding whats. they meant to do if it is not in the words but toor understandds what the wordsstit meant to. my sense of the original understanding and a broader sense, that the founders understood full well below world would change and the constitution had to be adapted and even gave up one motive adjustment called the amendment process in article five. they had no idea they could predict the future and had no idea slavery with last forever. they did not use the word slave in the constitution.

they put a 20 yearn protection on the slave trade but after that day tha understood it would be made illegal.he e they anticipated the end of slavery and there would be other l changes that would be necessary along the way in order to make the constitution serve the basic ambition of stability, a continental freedom over time. >> host: bought franklin w e-mail to. >> when did the rev revolutionary war become the two be known by that name? >> guest: that is a good question is a revolutionary kind of four or the war for independence? people did speak of the revolution. that is clear. that was their political they wereuse ok founding a republic which is a genetically different form

of government. but if they call it a revolutionary war, i cannotolute give the authoritative answer because i have not looked carefully at the terminology used. >> host: good afternoon. >> caller: in your opening snapshot you left out north carolina. [laughter] on me 201775 the declaration of independence, did that really happened war is it fictitious? >> guest: all of the above. there is a version of the mecklenburg declaration that is largely a fictional and another version which is accurate. >> host: what is the mecklenburgac wlege declarationf >> guest: they had passed

resolutions that call forpend independence will be for the united statesst did it. they did made a radical thi stance but fell short. >> host: what is the true version? >> it is a little more modest than what was alleged. thehost: was there any danger during the ratification process following 1787 of some of the state's becoming independent nations? was there a real danger? >> guest: certainly.ws yes. there tha was a possibility. rhode island did not come in and tell basically it was forced by the threat of commercial coercion that congress a pass laws to say anybody that trade with rhode island would be subject to severe punishment and paid the revolutionary debt to ride awayvoeb and of course, it is a tiny little

state they could have solve the problem by invading and abiding. clearly a rhode islandy thought better.rh but virginia, patrick henry? virginia was the largest state in the union at the time with territory and population and could have been thebeen independent country. it was the california of its time. and he seriously argued that they did not have to ratify every way. others also argue that virginia needed the union more than the union needed virginia because it needed help from other places.er it had the slaven't

population, did not have a sufficiently high a militia militia, the arguments of the issue are the important o part of the virginia debate. he did not want to stay at of the union for ever but then there was new york. it had already been ratified a and arguably a majority going into the convention thought it should be rejected or not adopted unless certain changes were made before hands. there was a real problem there were states left out. without looking for new york or virginia? without rhode island it would be less of anrod issue. >> host: who was patrick henry?

>> guest: thehe greatest orator who ever lived according to thomas jefferson. a leading figure and living in theli age of four tory, they did not havethey microphones or voice sys enhancement system a spread that a speaker who could project, speak dramatically dramatically, commanded great audience is and one reason why people were carting to these conventions tot see the performances of the greatest orators of their day.rea henry, jefferson called him a good grade of ore raider that's never lived and he hated henry. [laughter] politics were 180 degrees. even henry's grandson and his grandfather was a very mean-spirited person. >> host: what didan he do for a living? >> guest: he was a lawyer.

he also had a plantation but mostly made his money byos law. and jefferson said he was not a very good lawyerd s either but he was very effective before juries because he was a good speaker. >> host: is it fair to say "american scripture" jefferson is the most overrated founding father? [laughter] >> guest: people have not be in him a up as much at that time as they have now but at that point*, he was god and i neverd. understood how his reputation turned on the declaration. it is the cornerstone and many americans basically assumed the declaration was a piece of legislation written by jefferson and if not for him we would not be or haveequalt inalienable rights.igh

that certainly was the story >> host: you call him the draftsmen and not the c author. >> guest: can anybody be the author ofuth a public document like the the declaration of independence? the drafted and was appointed by congress. he told the leader he submitted the draft they said thomas that is perfect just send jus it to congress with no changes but theow record will not support that. there was a letter he sent to ben franklin who was on the committee to say i have just shown this draft to the committee that ask me to make changes know i am sending it to you and could you please read it and get back to me buy the morning i t b because i have to get back

to the committee.pa they were not passive. intervened. if you go back one step whenn they first met it seemed wha likely they discussed what it was say and john adams said they divided into articles that they basically outi lined it and said nown, you write it up. o we have no support or account that supports what he saidt because it wasnti almost 50 years later but this makes sense. can you imagine being on the committee where we sit down to say you write it? i think you would talk about it and the committee did. i am persuaded by john adams cpe account that this problem slid -- probably is what

happened.d t he never disputed the point*. the committee that outlined and intervened with the text , and then send it to congresste which spent d two-- editing the document. jefferson was very. uncomfortable his pride ofy authorship was injured. they took out huge chunks hech wasun clear the very proud of.ra and produced the document we know and love and most modern leaders say they improved the declaration. i would call him a draftsman. he had a lot of good editorial help from the congress for a cut as much t as the constitution, the work of many o hands.

>> host: the next callpa comes from seattle. thank you forse holding.ood >> caller: good morning dr. maier i have to come to the defense of jefferson because of his teaching na nature from the naval forces in the barbary wars. but most americans think between 1783 and 1787, not much we happened then may have the constitution. do you have a book i could read that talks about the development of the articles of confederation or the period between 1783 and 1787? >> host: great question. >> guest: there is a book written by merrill jensen also another one from stanford the beginnings of national politics.y

but that had been written about the congress. >> host: give us a snapshot of 1783 through 1787. ba what basically zero occurred? >> guest: we have government under the articles of confederation after the war is done. a they have not gone into the fact so mostly the war was s fought under the second continental congress but now en without the war forcing to come together, the push came to shove and said karami told the nation together? it was by no means easy to do. the articles created a very flawed form of national government even as aar, confederation, it wasla flawed. the government had no

capacity to attack. of money had to come from the state's.ies they cannot put duties on imports. there was the idea to have it not have the unanimous consent. it had no money. those are the two majorof problems with the articles d of confederation.ef it had defaulted on interestpa payments and they can look forward to a big chunk the principal paid. with what? and only paying off by borrowing more money. sort i'd like the madoff's style ponzi scheme. but there were more problems with it. and orders to exercise come a they had to have the consent of nine states. te

often nine states were not represented and then ofan course, you need unanimous consent to do anything. and it had to have between two or seven delegates andma if there is only one person on the floor then they could not speak. if there were two merrillrs lenders and had opposite opinions, it was coming to winter while the rebellions were fought in massachusetts, the confederation congress isas d basically and capable of doing anything because it did not have enough states represented not until february. it was designed in a way that turned out to bene nonfunctional and with the unanimous consent to make

change turned out to be impossible to get to and the majority could not rule. it became powerfully clear by 1787. >> host: was 1787 the last gasp to save the country? >> peoplesoft it that way and people were terrified by the insurgency which we know of the shays' rebellion. >> host: what was that? >> the uprising by farmers largely in western massachusetts, the problem was the estate taxes that had to be collected, what they did not the have, basically unrealistic pressures put on people they felt they would lose their farms.

could not pay any debts because there was a system of deflationary.hey and they could not get a hard money because it was a deficit in trade is no gold or silver.de how they to pay their taxes or their debts? they feel they bring them into court and how doe support yourco family?r fami they petition for a grievances and decided to to be conservative fiscally and say that you just pay and tried to close the court so far as could not be foreclosed and a segment rose up against the government. this was extremely frightening to people because through studies of

history, they concluded that the republic failed because of popular unrest that the people who will be ruled and if not than what happens? happens is what makes a strong ruler, england and the 16 fifties, going to the french revolution they could not know that yet but thishat of the sequence being played out and it was the failure of the republic and the whole revolution would be proven a failure. >> host: and what was the book the recommended? >> guest: the articles of confederation or the of bookilld about congress and the latter is the most modern

and it covers the congress>> basically. >> host: the next call?fi the author of "american scripture" from new york. >> caller: i am reading "american scripture" now andmeri it is a wonderful book. i enjoy it. my question and to dr. maier is day controversy of the iroquois is the role model for the formation of the united states. t guest: i think it was of no significance. you look very hard at madison's notes at the convention for a a reference to the iroquois confederacy and settled think it was of much significance at all. >> host: dr. maier we have twitter.n fromit >> what was the significance of alexander hamilton's plan

to exchange u.s. debt for the state that? >> guest: a profoundly important proposal. all of the unrest on the states was in part response to the taxation of the 1780s which they tried to retire they revolutionary war by the taxes on the way and that were a multiple before but it was a brilliant idea that they could have become national debt. those issuing bonds on the united states paid 4% instead of 6% and not have to take the principal offo immediately but just the interest. the revenue that was coming

from the taxes on the imports plus the excise tax including the unfortunate one on whiskey, but he basically what he did was to relieve the states of ant o component of the budget which was the majority ofit whaty they were raising money for.oney when the state's head noio longern to have the taxes than the country became more peaceful. >> host: in the next call comes from dallas. >> caller: i am reading the history of propaganda in america by ewing and he speaks of a massive propaganda machine like the woodrow wilson administration and fdr and postwar corporate propagandama machine thriving ever since.min well with corporate a

dominationnd of lobbying to the degree hebb says we do not truly have purchase of the tory democracy anymore but the engineering of consent and that hamilton might have socked this is the way government should have been run but jefferson would have seen it the other way. do you have any thoughts? >>othe guest: people are used to people trying to sell it. we should have a more sophisticated population. we don't take this very seriously. they are taken with a grain of salt t w i am not sure that ic this as much a threat to participatory democracy as

one might charge. the influence of separation may be the end of lobbying may be anotheran issue todi discuss. we ask what the 18th century would have thought? they had no real experience so all we can do wo is putand words in their mouth v although they were very concerned with corruption in representative institutions institutions, what would they think of this and particular form that occurs in ourf day, most often a person says what they think. it is another question of their politics put it into the mouth of the people who never understood the situation that we face. .ve, er .

>> guest: in the spring and early summer of 1776 don't always repeat payne's argument. payne's argument was that the british form of government was flawed and that any reconciliation would yoke us to a flawed constitution and that we should start over. it doesn't have a lot to do with the revolutionary war. i think you may be hig of his -- his writings subsequently in favor of the war, but i think washington -- why did we win the revolutionary war?

it wasn't payne so much, it was france. we needed the support of france. without the support of france, we would have a more difficult time predicting victory, i think, or explaining victory. >> host: who was tom payne? >> guest: tom payne was an englishman who came to the united states only in november 1774. his life had sort of gone nowhere. he was the son of a stay maker who made those stiff little things in women's corsets that they then tightened. his father did this for a profession, but he was trained to it, left it, became a tax collector -- >> host: in england. >> guest: in england because it's, basically, union organizing. ended up coming to the united states for a new start on life after two failed marriages and went to pennsylvania, became an editor and, my goodness, a little over a year after he arrived he published this

pamphlet, "common sense," which suddenly got americans talking about independence which had been the forbidden topic, basically. everybody wanted to deny that this was where they were going. suddenly, he made a positive argument for it. and also laid down a plan for how we could go forward, how if we were going to found a new government, we might design it. so i think of "common sense" as a transitional document. it ends -- it doesn't end, but it marks the beginning, almost the end of the debate over who's responsible in england, can we ever, you know, patch things up and go on. basically, he says, that's a very bad idea. and then the whole new debate that came in with how do we design our own institutions, how do we write constitutions, how do we design the governments that are outlined in constitutions? and that became the whole new

issue. >> host: professor, did "common sense" get out into the public organically, or did somebody take it and really push it? >> guest: oh, it just went through the country like wildfire. i mean, people were reading it. we have letters from members of congress who went home and came back and all along the road they see people in the taverns, in the coffeehouses were reading it and talking about it. it's difficult to get concrete figures on how many copies of the pamphlet were actually published, but it was clearly america's first bestseller. and, of course, any one copy, you can read it in half an hour, and then you give it to your friends. so how many people read any one copy, there's another issue. clearly, it was enormously influential. >> host: chris smith tweets in to you, was there a global audience for the declaration? who was listening, and who was with inspired to political action from it? >> guest: as i have argued, i

think the declaration was meant primarily for an american audience. there are historians who disagree with this, but as i look at the way that congress dealt with it, i think that argument is justified. it was, however, sent abroad, and it was reprinted in the press. a whole series of american revolutionary documents were collected including the first state constitutions and translated and published in france. it's clear there was an international audience that was interested in what was going on in the united states, and the declaration was one of a whole series of revolutionary documents that a attracted their attention. >> host: another tweet, this is from a.j. jones. what book would you recommend for a bright high school grad joining the army? >> guest: depends -- joining the army.

depends on what this bright high school grad is interested in reading. [laughter] of course, i recommend "american scripture," you know? or "ratification." >> host: if a.j. jones picked up "american scripture," what would they learn? >> guest: "american scripture" tells the story, essentially, of the last stages in the development of american independence. it talks about the -- the first chapter gives the background to the document itself -- >> host: to the declaration of independence. >> guest: right. and how people, you know, the chronology of it. it also, the second chapter looks at some of the local documents. i mean, what was the documentary history of it? the great discovery that's in the book, probably the greatest contribution to scholarly knowledge of the topic was my discovery of all these local documents that towns wrote, what

they thought about independence. massachusetts is probably the most dramatic because the end of may 1776 the legislature asked the towns to debate the following proposition: should the congress decide for the safety of the united colonies to declare their independence of britain? would you, the inhabitants of the towns, be willing to support that decision with your lyes and for-- lives and fortunes? the that isn't just a graceful way of putting it. it u it -- everybody understood that the punishment for treason was death and confiscation of the state. so lives and fortunes meant are you willing to risk the punishment for treason? and the towns debated this very seriously, and some just, you know, said, sure or no. hardly any said no. but several of them explained why they had come to the decision. and those are, those are

wonderful documents. and then i discovered there were others from counties in virginia, in south carolina -- >> host: multiple declarations. >> guest: many of them, statements, and so we get the voice of the people in a way we wouldn't. and they're interesting to compare to the language of the declaration of independence. >> host: from your first book, "resistance to revolution," you write: the colonists were emotionally and intellectually unprepared for war and a potential withdrawal from the empire. >> guest: yes, yes, yes. >> host: jay in asheville, north carolina, you're on booktv's "in depth" program. this month, professor pauline maier of mit. >> caller: yes, thank you for taking my call. most high school students that i

talk to don't know anything at all about the american revolutionary period. they don't know anything about really pivotal military leaders like nathaniel green, daniel morgan, even washington himself. and what a bitter struggle it was. my question is, why do you think this portion of american history is so abysmally neglected in public schools? and i'll take my answer off the air, thank you. >> guest: well, is it always abysmally neglected in public schools? i think american history in general is not taught terribly well, but there are some extremely bright spots not necessarily on the revolutionary war. i've become aware of a national competition called we, the people, where high school students understand the constitution and issues that are related to it, to the whole documentary tradition of the revolution with amazing fist

caix. i gather the program is in some funding peril at present, but i, you know, there are bright spots like this. but, you know, on the whole the tradition has been to have history taught by, you know, coaches. they always say the first name of your history teacher is always coach, and they keep one chapter ahead of the kids. you have to know the history better than that in order to make it interesting, i think. >> host: this e-mail, by the way, if you'd like to call in and talk with the professor, 202 is the area code, 737-00 o 1 in the east or central time zones, 737-0002 mountain and pacific time zones. this is from jan in boise, idaho. i've never been able to get an explanation of why and how madison evolved from being a co-author of the federalist papers to being a staunch republican. what am i missing? i don't think it's as simple as

jefferson's influence on him. i really hope you take my question because i've been passionate about american history all my life, and this has puzzled me for years no matter how much i read on the subject. >> guest: well, one problem -- i guess what she's really trying to get at is why this strong supporter of the constitution could become a critic of the federalists in power during the 1790s. and i think -- well, first of all, the federalist, we misunderstand the federalists. glses who were the federalists? >> guest: well the federalists, sometimes called the federalist papers, are a series of essays that appeared during the ratification debates in the newspapers. they were written by john jay, by james madison and by alexander hamilton. they are often taken as the essence of everything that was said during the ratification debates on the constitution or the most profound analysis of the constitution that emerged

during that time. in fact, they were relatively ineffectual with regard to swinging votes. they were not circulated very broadly until they appeared in book form in the spring of 1788 when most of the states had already met. that was late in the game. i think it did have some influence at that point, but rell thetively less. it did have some influence in new york. it was written primarily for new york which was a swing state where the opposition was very strong. now, it did not equal jay plus madison plus hamilton. publius with was a fictional character, so what he said wasn't always what the writers honestly believe. and i think this is particularly the case with ham hamilton. and the views changed in the

1790s in some of the debates you'd see. madison and hamilton were taunting each other with passages from the federalist which were inconsistent with their current politics. but the real thing with madison, i think he expected -- he really believed that power was, would almost automatically go down to the states. he saw no real danger of having a centralized government that seemed to be a threat to the freedom of the people. and he changed prison view, certainly -- changed his view dramatically by the time of the alien and sedition acts and went the other way. so i think it's really the development of national politics in the 1790s that made madison rethink some of his assumptions that he had expressed in the federalist papers and elsewhere, to see a danger in national government he had not anticipated. >> host: your second book, "the old revolutionaries: political

lies in the age of samuel adams," why did you write this book? >> guest: i wrote this book because after "resistance to revolution" i remained a little unsatisfied. i mean, i could explain the course of politics, i could explain, i thought, reasonably well why it was that americans had come to embrace independence. but i didn't think i really knew them personally, and i wanted to look at some of the individuals who were in that earlier story more closely and try to understand what they did and how they differed from each other and why they took the political courses that they took. >> host: who was samuel adams? is. >> guest: samuel adams was with probably the leading massachusetts politician of the period before independence. >> host: so the 1750s, 1760s? >> guest: well, he was of an

older generation, so actually he was active in the 1750s and then in the 1760s i think became a clerk of the massachusetts legislature. he was a boston tax collector. but his, he was mostly important in the boston town meetings and became, he proposed and was the chair of the boston committee of correspondence which was formed in 1772 and then carried on correspondence with the town. now, one earlier, a viewer, an earlier caller asked about the newspapers. it was a caller. newspapers didn't always circulate to all the towns, so if you wanted people to be joining the resistance, they had to know what was to be resisted. so what the boston committee of correspondence did was to establish contact with the towns and then tell them what was going on and encourage people to discuss these and to respond in an appropriate way. in this way he managed to get

massachusetts rell -- relatively united in its politics. >> host: who was isaac sears? >> guest: he was a member of the resistance movement in massachusetts. he came from -- new york city. but he was a sea captain, and in new york that was extremely important politically. there isn't a boston town meeting. he was the son-in-law, actually, of the owner of a very popular tavern, jasper drakes. and this, too, gave him, you know, access to a large part of the pop husband that would go into these taverns and talk and fight and argue. but sea captains were very influential over all the sailors. they looked up to them and, you know, he was a big supporter of the revolution, and it was interesting to see what a different kind of a role he played in the development of independence. >> host: henry, in miami. good afternoon to you.

>> caller: good afternoon professor maier. my question concerns john marshall. we all know he was central as a federalist and nationalist on the supreme court, but i'm curious about his role in the ratification. >> host: all right, henry, thank you. >> guest: well, john marshall was in the virginia ratifying convention and, clearly, the young john marshall was already highly respected by his, his fellow delegates. he did speak up, he was in favor of ratification and, indeed, in some ways he -- pardon me. he defended article iii. on the court. >> host: and we'll let the professor, who's been talking, now, for about an hour and 17 minutes very general generously, we'll let her get a sip of water, anything else you wanted to add about the john marshall?

>> guest: his memory of the ratification turned out to be extremely important. in an important case of the 1830s, baron v. baltimore. this was a case that had to do with whether the states were bound by the fifth amendment. and in the case, pardon me, marshall basically said the whole of the rights amendment -- we would say ten, but certainly one through eight are specified specific amendments, bound only the federal government. and he said this on the basis of his memory of the ratification debates. i would argue that the words of the amendment do not support that. so it was a decision of lasting significance because it means we needed the 14th amendment in order to make the first eight binding on the states through separate court decisions. >> host: our next call comes from doug in aberdeen, south

dakota. hi, doug. >> caller: hi. dr. maier, wondering if you could comment, please, on colonial script, the currency used between the colonies at the time. finally, i believe it's article x specifically p demand withing the use of silver and specify being exactly what the monies for the nascent nation would be and, finally, the coin act of 1792 and the penalties thereof. thank you. >> guest: oh, you raise a very large, complicated issue. in the colonial period, the states did often issue paper money. look, they needed paper money. you needed a circulating medium, otherwise, you know, how do you, how do you have economic exchanges by barter? and you cannot have a specialized economy on the basis of barter. the difficulty was that sometimes the currency lost value, and the british ultimately said that they

couldn't pass, that the states could not issue legal tender currency, and this is one of the big grievances. but in some states they held value, and they supported the economies quite well. later in the colonial period, after independence, pardon me, this became an issue again. i mean, the states issued paper money, or they did not. and there was a tremendous fear that they were issued, that they would lose value as continental currency had lost value in the early years of the war and that they were simply a means of trying to defraud creditors. that is, if you negotiated a death, say, in -- a debt in sterling, and the debtor tried to pay it off with depreciated paper money, well, the creditor might, you know, come out having lost a great deal of money on

this particular transaction. article i, section 10 which has limits on the state said the states could issue no money except gold and silver as legal tender. this was one of the reasons why states like rhode island were very hesitant to ratify. they had issued a fair amount of paper currency, and they had no idea what its status would be once the constitution went into effect. >> host: we have two teachers who have tweeted and e-mailed you. >> guest: okay. >> host: this is from stan brown of macon, georgia. just a comment rather than a question. your contributions to the pbs series on the american revolution, "liberty," are so wonderful. i use that in my high school u.s. history classes. >> guest: that's wonderful. >> host: and this tweet is from a middle school history teacher. it seems it is not possible to determine original intent. your thoughts, please, and that's from chris.

>> guest: well, depends on what you mean by original intent. as i've said earlier, scalia said he is not interested in original intent, that is that he's not interested in what people meant to say which is very difficult to determine. but in what they say in the meaning of the words of a given statute. i think, i think that it is useful to look, for jurists to look at what either the drafters or the ratifiers said about given provisions of the constitution. there you can, i think, find information that is of use. there is no original intent, there is no original understanding of the constitution as a whole, but usually the questions are much more specific. and you can find some information, but i see no reason to think that we are bound to understand those or to continue the provisions, to say precisely what people originally thought.

as i've said earlier, i think the original understanding was that the constitution would be adapted over time to changing circumstances that the founders knew they could not anticipate, and that's why we have the amendment process. >> host: you've worked on textbooks for high school or middle school level. >> guest: right. >> host: if you were to -- what do you think middle school and high school kids should know about the revolutionary period? >> guest: well, i think it's extraordinarily important that they should understand what the revolution tried to accomplish. and have some idea of the revolutionaries' origins of our current institutions. you know, it came to me as epiphany in writing "ratification" that most americans had not even read the constitution. perhaps they'd read it in high school, but they hadn't read it since then. now, there are those that say, well, that's for lawyers and

courts to decide, but certainly the ratification itself gives us a very different read on that. but to put it into effect, americans knew it inside out, they read it carefully. we had the debates on the local level. i mean, this is our government. if we're going to decide whether it's acting legitimately or illegitimately, if it's acting consummate with the ideals we hold or whether it is, you know, being true to the documents that we, the people, have enacted. it helps a lot to know what we enacted. of i mean, this is just civics, isn't it? i think we have neglected this over much in our educational system. >> host: what's the relationship between the declaration of independence and the constitution? is. >> guest: well, the declaration of independence ended the old regime. it said britain had no more power to govern us. and with that the states went about enacting their own

constitutions, that is their alternative governments that would be for the states themselves. the constitution, ultimately, was a -- the constitution was a similar government for the national scale. the articles of confederation had provided us a form of national government that proved to be wholly inadequate, a kind of a league of nations of sovereign states. and finally, we created a government whose authority itself was founded on popular consent and that could enforce its authority on the people directly. >> host: ron in seattle, thanks for holding. you're on with professor pauline maier of mit. >> caller: thank you very much for taking my call. before i get to my question, i'd like to make a comment on an earlier question and response. dr. maier, you may recall in an earlier interview regarding the neglect of the american revolution that even professor alan taylor in his multicultural

book on the american colonies which however valuable you said virtually ignores the revolution itself. [laughter] so i think that might be one reason. but beyond that, i'll get to my question. in the opening paragraph of the book, your mentor and ph.d. adviser bernard baylin said the revolutionary's background constitutes an important chapter in american intellectual history and emphasized the importance of periodically challenging prior interpretations based on new evidence. in that book and in his subsequent work, he articulated a fresh viewpoint that has become known as the ideological interpretation. and from my reading of your first book, the old vintage paperback, you further elaborated on this quote-unquote real league restrained revolutionary viewpoint. so i'd like to ask you to, one, briefly summarize for the audience this ideological

interpretation and, two, now four decades later in the spirit of those earlier calls for continuing fresh interpretations, if you have modified those viewpoints at all, especially in the light of dr. t.r. breen's recent book, the marketplace of revolution: how consumer politics shaped american independence which includes a critique of the ideology school. i'll take my -- i'll stay on the line. >> host: thank you. and if you lost any of that, fortunately, ron also sent an e-mail. >> guest: yes. well, that's a heavy question and a couple parts. first of all, the ideological interpretation of the revolution. we should go back a few steps and say at mid century several prominent historians had argued that the writings of the revolution were propaganda, that is that they weren't sincere statements of beliefs, but they were efforts to manipulate the public, to pull them into a resistance movement that was largely self-serving or that served their private interests.

in the 1950s or '60s, a couple of historians and actually then a larger army of historians, basically, came to the conclusion that that really wasn't true, that the arguments made sense and that they developed not as an effort to pull in the public, but that they had a logical spine. and so the whole literature of the revolution was opened up again for serious study. when i teach the revolution, i take the students through the pamphlet literature of the revolution, and we see how thought was changing in a relatively logical forum. this also included the discovery of the colonists' attraction for a particular tradition in english thought which went back to the glorious revolution of 1688-'89. that is the whole basic what we call lockian ideas although they

come from a whole panoply of writers that the colonists were reading; that government is based on concept, on contract, that -- consent on contract, that governors and rulers are appointed by the people to serve their rends ends, and if they don't protect their rights and their security, they have a right to be replaced. or -- and, indeed, it would justify limited resistance to unjustified acts of authority as well as revolution if things went to a more extreme stage. these ideas were expressed broadly in the colonists, and i think it made sense in the literature once again. now, what do i think about this? well, you know, i think this -- what i thought was wonderful about this was that it got us away from our historically reading the -- our historical understandings of the revolution. we could get within the shoes, within the mindset of people who

were looking at unfolding events, and we could understand in their terms why they responded in ways that we might not have responded. that is, they were very sensitive to issues that we might not be sensitive about, and be it was important to understand the revolution in terms of those, of course, who lived through it and who accomplished it. all right. tim breen's marketplace of revolution. i, it's been a few years since i read it carefully. i did look at it again since i saw your e-mail before this program. basically, i didn't find tim breen's argument persuasive. i thought that one of the failures of the book was its, it was breen's unwillingness to look carefully at the ideology of the revolution, if you will, or at least the assumptions that a colonist took from it about how one resisted authority. i thought that he could have explained the nonimportation associations, for example, more

persuasively if he'd seen them in that context. that is, what the colonists were interested in doing is finding a nonviolent way of posing britain. of opposing britain. nonimportation or commercial boycotts were one way of doing that. in fact, that's very relevant today. you know, we see so many of these insurgencies in the middle east who are influenced by the writingings of gene sharp who talks about nonviolence as a way that you can move from dictatorship to democracy. well, the circumstances of the colonists who were, of course, very different, but i was struck in looking through sharp's lists of nonviolent techniques how many of them the colonists had actually employed. they understood that violence, gratuitous violence at least simply alienated people. and they were, they looked for ways you could bring pressure to change policies without the use of violence. and it allowed them to coordinate their support at

home, not alienating people who they might otherwise alienate, and they did not eshoo for us, but they needed to answer for it and that the rule of law should be held up to the extent possible. so i think a little more attention to the thought and the assumptions of the revolutionaries would have made tim breen's work stronger. >> host: and very quickly, who was bernard baylin? >> guest: bernard baylin was a leading professor of history at harvard, the man who whereon a pulitzer prize-winning book called the ideological origins of the late revolution in, i think, 1968. >> host: roger in burbank, you've been holding on for a long time. go ahead with your question. >> caller: thank you so much. the word "ideology" has come up, but i'm wondering if role of history or the historian has changed. and by that it seems to me there

were charges that professors and eggheads had rewritten american history, and now it seems conservatives are rewriting the history i grew up in. [laughter] i'm just wondering, maybe i should say i thought the role of a historian was to try to discover what really happened. but now it seems to be history as a means of furthering an ideological agenda. i wonder if you could comment on that, thank you. >> guest: well with, you and i are of a mind. i mean, i like to write a history that is true to the document that tried to tell the story in it own terms. i read the work of other historians not so much to see if i can make an argument against them or for them, but to see what they learned that is of help in adding to my understanding of the past. in "ratification" i worked very closely with a new set of

documents that are being published out of the university of wisconsin, the documentary history of the ratification of the constitution, but they have not covered all the states, and even for the states that they do cover there is, there is some literature that is of relevance, and i just tried to use what i, what i could of them. i made a very conscious decision in "ratification" to say nothing about its contemporary significance. i have some of my convictions, of course, on what it means for some issues that are important today, but i wanted the book to be what it was always meant to be, and that is a history, to tell the story. and like most stories, people can draw different significance out of it. but it isn't one that was shaped by my politics. i'd like to believe it was shaped by the documents i've studied. >> host: how is it that the university of wisconsin, the wisconsin historical society -- >> guest: yes. >> host: -- got ahold of all these original documents?

who started that process, and is this material available online? >> guest: they have -- some of it is. they have, meryl jensen who wrote the book on the articles of the confederation that i mentioned earlier was a major historian and of a progressive, a progressive tradition. one of those that was interested in socioeconomic determinants of politics, but he wasn't confined by that. i mean, he had a wonderful book on the founding of a nation which is sort of my bible if i want to know precisely what the stamp act said or precisely what the townsend duty said. he was meticulous in his faithfulness to the details of the historical record. and he founded a whole series of these documentary records books. and the documentary history of the ratification of the constitution is the one that seems to me of potentially the greatest significance, although there are others, also, of importance. he started it. it's been carried on by john

kaminsky in a serious of other wonderful editors, rich leffler -- >> host: all at the university of wisconsin. >> guest: all there. and he had, the project has the advantage of having seniority, people who have worked all of their careers on this. what they have done is to send -- where they deal with the ratification history in a certain state they'll send teams in, and they go through the archives, they go through the newspapers, they'll go through local libraries that have relevant documents. they'll survey the towns, see what kinds of documents they can get there. they pull them all together, transcribe them, order them and publish them. and this is a fuller documentary record than we've ever had before. what we had was really flawed and biased. the reports of debates even in the state conventions were often

taken by federalists or published by federalists, often they had certain biases in them. now we also have letters, we have other delegates' notes, we have newspaper accounts, and so we're not so dependent on any one authority, one source on what happened in these conventions. it's opened up the summit entirely -- subject entirely. but it's out of -- they just started this, and they've kept doing it. they still have five states to cover, and then they're going to work on the origins of the o bill of rights, and i think see if they can find some more documents on the state level to do this. now, you ask, are they available online? is some are available online. i think on the site of the state historical society of wisconsin, i think montana is up. -- massachusetts is up. i don't know that the other states are yet up. there are five volumes on new york. this is, this is serious stuff.

but it's fascinating. >> host: our guest this month on "in depth," professor pauline maier of mit. she is the author of four books on the revolutionary period. "from resistance to revolution" and "ratification." we have an hour and a half of live television to go with her, and we'll be right back.

pauline maier, who's jack gray could ha? >> guest: a history of law at stanford who writes extenly .n t >> host: and why is he appealing to you school. i was a little ahead of him, but in the old days we always worked in widener library, and there was a part of the library where you could have typewriters, you know, before computers came in. and he typed, and i typed, and we used to compare notes as we

were work withing on -- he was working on his dissertation, i was working on mine. so we have a friendship that goes back to when we were both in graduate school. this is one of the great joys, i have to say, of this historical profession. you make friends, and when you have been in it long enough, as i have, when you want somebody's opinion on something, you know who to ask. and i'm often asking jack questions. and he's asking me. so we e-mail each other. [laughter] >> host: who is maya jassnov? >> guest: professor of history at harvard who has just written a book called "liberty's exiles," which is the 60,000 loyalist refugees of the revolution. that is, those who were so alienated from the revolution and from the revolutionaries that they really could not stay in the country or decided they could not stay in the country and left the united states after

the revolution. and she traces them as they go to far-flung parts of the world. most meant to nova scotia, others -- some went to britain. she said each a handful ended up in australia. they ended up in, of course, india. some helped found the new sierra leone, so it's the loyalist exodus that is her favorite subject. >> guest: you mentioned joseph ellis' founding brothers and the biography of abigail adams. have you read and what do you think about david mccullough's john adams and ron chernow's bestseller on washington? >> guest: yes. i have not yet read the book on washington. i look forward to doing it, but i haven't done it. i did review john adams, the mccullough biography of adams

for "the new york times", and i thought he did a lovely job of it. people criticize him for not paying much attention to john adams' thought. but i didn't think he was totally blif crouse of it -- oblivious of it, and he was more interested in other parts of adams' career. and, clearly, he managed to get a large part of the american reading public interested in john adams, and, you know, he became a great fan of john adams, and i'm a great fan of john adams, so i like the book, and i cheer for david mccullough's success. >> host: who was john hancock and why did he serve as president of the second continental congress yet not president? >> guest: well, hancock was a boston merchant who inherited, actually, his fortune from his uncle. and a leading figure in massachusetts politics who was extraordinarily important in solving the divisions that came out of shay's rebellion during

the '70s and '80s. he was elected, wonderful support from the electorate, governor and replaced the hard-line governor who against the insurgence. he pardoned large numbers of the insurgents who had not already been pardoned, and he traveled to distance parts of the states to reach out to the people, to heal the wounds of the rebellion. so he was extraordinarily popular in massachusetts. and he had been a president, of course, this is looking at his later career. he was -- one member of the congress was elected to preside over it. you know, it was the president of the continental congress was not like the president of the united states. he was a presiding officer. hancock was also the president of the massachusetts ratifying convention although he did not attend until the end. he had a serious case of gout.

he was home suffering until, finally, a political deal was cut, and he discovered that he could overcome the pain and appear. >> host: this is booktv on c-span2. this is our monthly in depth program. our guest, mit professor pauline maier, and we're discussing the revolutionary period in american history. 202 is the area code. 737-0001 if you'd like to participate from the east and central time zones. 7347-0002 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones. if you have a question that you'd like to call in. you can also send us an e-mail at booktv@cspan.org or send us a tweet, twitter.com/booktv. next call for professor maier comes from william in manhattan beach, california. william, thanks for holding. you're on the air. >> caller: thank you. and, professor maier, and i want to know how you say your name, that's first. [laughter] you're a national treasure, thank you, madam.

>> guest: well, thank you, thank you. i say maier because i inherited the pronunciation from the family of my husband to whom i will soon be married for 50 years. so, you know, at this point it would seem to me to change the pronunciation would be an act of hostility. however, i will say i answer to meyer as well, and two of my daughters have chosen to pronounce it meyer, so it gets a little confusing in this family. >> caller: maier it is, and i have two quick questions. on booktv a year or two ago i saw a gentleman talking about his book that put the american revolution as much on the -- [inaudible] and the constitution, he put it in perspective worldwide and said that the american revolution was small potatoes worldwide at that time. and secondly, don't you think the way to change a constitution is to amend it and not have the supreme court rewrite it? thank you. ghg is the constitution -- >> guest: is the constitution and the american revolution of global significance?

you know, i think so. we founded the first modern republic. this was a very dangerous thing to do, or it seemed very dangerous in 1776. republics are everywhere now. we have the world's first written constitutions, even written constitutions have become an item in politics worldwide. not universal, but certainly this is, they're not unique to the united states anymore. so it seems to me very clear that this is part of a world narrative, not simply our national politics. and what was the other part of -- >> host: about amending the constitution? >> guest: oh, amending the constitution. this is extremely interesting. i kept saying this is the way the founders expected the document to be daytimed over time. adapted over time. maybe it's become too difficult. i mean, you think about it, we managed to ratify ten by 1791,

what we call the bill of rights although that terminology came in later, and after that we now have 27, so 17, but take off two because one enacts prohibition, and one undoes prohibition, so that means 15 in 200 years. well, more than that, 220 years. that's very few. really. is it because we respect constitutional stability? i think that's part of it. or maybe that the process is just too difficult. you need a two-thirds vote in either congress or a special convention which is not a chosen mode of proposing amendments, and then the consent of three-quarters of the states. this, like the procedure for electing the president, was written before the development of a two-party system. the 11th amendment took care of the difficulty with terms of the presidential election because of

the emergence of a two-party system, but the amendment process may be too difficult. i don't know. i haven't really made up my mind. but it's clear we've made very few and that the court itself, the questioner is absolutely right that we have been much more changing -- that that it'se court more than the amendment process which has been changing the constitution. and now, you know, of course with all the talk about originalism, putting the brakes on that as well. but it certainly is clear to me that the founders were not so sill crouse to think the document they wrote that enacted an understand anything the 18th century was going to work for all time. they knew it would have to be adapted, or it could be replaced. many state constitutions have already been replaced. by 1787. so, you know, we have not chosen to do that. massachusetts still has its

revolutionary constitution, but it has a little book like this of amendments. >> host: pauline maier, who's mr. pauline maier? [laughter] >> guest: i don't think he would answer to that. charles maier is a professor of history, does european history at harvard university. >> host: when did you first get interested in american history like this? at this level? >> guest: well, i went to college as a -- i thought i was going to be a political science major. i was interested in journalism and in government and so on, and i took early government courses, i was at radcliffe which is now harvard but was a women's college that was with harvard. and somehow my mind did not work well with political science. they made great leaps of assumptions, and i need -- somehow my mind needs to have the points spelled out as you go from a to b. and then i started to taking

history, and i just loved it. it was exciting to me. and the wonder, i had the wonderful joy of working in harvard's widener library with, you know, stacks and stacks of books and sources and, you know, to me to sit there in a stall in the widener library with the sun pouring in and all these books reading this wonderful stuff, to me this was heaven. and i thought, you know, the idea that i could spend my life doing this was just beyond belief. and, you know, i have done it. i still work in widener library. it's, it has been the joy of my life. >> host: where did you grew up, and who were your parents? >> guest: i grew up in st. paul, minnesota, and my father, irvin, who is alive at 97 in st. paul was a st. paul city fireman. and my mother was, she was a housewife who raised five children, and she died in

november 2009 and it's much regretted, but she lived to be 92. they are long-lived people, and we have a strong family, and i am the only one that left minnesota. >> host: did you you up with books and reading and learning? >> guest: i have a memory as a child of going to the library and bringing home a pile of books to read. i mean, this was something we did. it was part of our, you know, we did. but i can't say that my family was a family of readers. neither of my parents were college educated. i think my mother or read novels and read magazines, i think my father probably read the newspaper but, you know, he was a -- he was a fireman, and he fixed refrigerators in the his spare time. he didn't have a lot of time. they went fishing, and they gardened, and they did all of those kinds of things. but they were very supportive of education. my father never went to college

and always regretted that he hadn't gone to college. and so he was intent that his children would be able to do what he had not been able to do, and i was the oldest. so i was the first to get the benefit of all of his encouragement. and was lucky enough to get support to go to radcliffe which nobody had heard of in my immediate circle. it was a total fluke. [laughter] that i found out about it. and managed to go there. and, obviously, went on to graduate school, married when i finished, had a fulbright scholar and married in england charles maier and then went back to graduate school. >> host: what was -- >> guest: i've been doing history ever since. >> host: what was the fluke? >> guest: well, the fluke was that i went to -- this is a longer story than you really want to hear. i had been part of a program by the american legion auxiliary for girls' state where girls in

high school went and they reenact government. and i'd run for governor and lost, and the girl who won, i met her at a reunion, and she was going to a radcliffe tea that afternoon. and did i want to come along? and i went along. and asked questions which they noticed. [laughter] mainly because i'd never heard of this place, you know? [laughter] and they recruited actively. >> host: pauline maier's our guest. john in tupelo, mississippi. hi, john. >> caller: i'd like to ask professor maier and, first of all, she's spell binding in her explanations. but nowadays there's a lot of discussion about the separation of church and state, and so i would like to have her explain do we really believe that this is a christian country that is

founded upon christianity and whether or not the founding fathers would approve of what's going on today. thank you. >> host: professor maier. >> guest: all right. well, the one point where this issue came up in the ratification of the constitution concerned the provision that there would be no religious tests for office. and this caused a considerable amount of concern among some people. north carolina and new hampshire, for example, had provisions in their state constitutions that only protestants could hold office. pennsylvania state constitution of 1776 said people's religion, religious believes would not effect their civil rights. however, to sit in the legislature you had to swear that you thought both books of the bible were the revealed word of god which, of course, effectively excluded jews.

the founders, clearly, had moved on to another place that there would be no religious tests for office, and there were those that thought this was very dangerous. i think that their idea of religious freedom -- and we have to remember this was an intensely protestant country in the 18th century -- they feared catholic domination. they thought of the story of the hugh nots, they thought of the salzburgers. puritans had an old anti-catholic tradition. the founders really were having none of this, and at one convention after another if some rural delegate often questioned the provision on the lack of religious qualifications for office, somebody stood up, interestingly, often a clergyman and said that was precisely the way it should be, that we should have a level playing field, and whoever the people chose to select for office the people should be able to choose.

and i was very struck because the opposition would say, well, we would get what they called catholics or muslims by our language, and it made no difference at all. the constitution is not a constitution for an exquisitely catholic country. it is the constitution for a country where religious beliefs are irrelevant to people's civil identity, i think. >> host: laura monroe from cleveland, ohio. e-mail. the map of the colonies in the introduction to your book shows the colony borders extending all the way to the mississippi river, land that was later purchased in the louisiana purchase. ..

>> guest: i will confess. i can't answer this in any detail. there's a great deal that i haven't followed. >> host: who was he? >> guest: connecticut, yes. he was involved in the diplomatic corps, and there was a lot of questions of spies. >> host: okay. two questions, to e-mails, professor maier about canada. this one is from michael o'grady

of california. why did the 13 colonies break away from england when canada didn't? and secondly, along the same line, why didn't canada join in the effort for independence from britain? >> guest: canada was of course primarily french. and it was settled by the french and it remained french until after the french and indian war. that is in 1763, britain acquired canada. why didn't it come into the american revolution? well, the greater part of the people in canada in that part where french and they were catholic. and i've already expressed the rather powerful anti-catholic sentiment is very important in the 13 colonies. i could understand very well the french canadians didn't want to come into this revolution. the canada we know was people

who went to nova scotia, some went to québec, largely. so it was a result of the revolution that the canada we know is predominantly a british loyalist. empire loyalists. and subsequently there was something called -- canada invited in to settle their territory. you can well imagine a population that had a substantial component of loyalists might not have been the most excited about joining the united states. >> host: to e-mails about slavery. this is from noel in fairfield connecticut. can you tell how many and which philadelphia convention delegates were also slaveholders? and from tim anderson in michigan, there were several are

divisive issues discussed at the constitutional convention, particularly slavery? what kept the convention together with those controversial issues? why didn't the states walk out of the convention instead of compromising? >> guest: i have not seen a precise count of how many members of the convention had slaves. we know that it was the most important institution. south carolina, georgia, virginia, maryland. benjamin franklin was raised in a family that had slaves. he didn't have them i believe at this point in time, but people had experience with the institution. why didn't this -- well, why, one thing, why did they get votes based on the basis of the slave population? basically because south carolina and georgia insisted that there be recognition of slaves, or

they weren't going to join the union. and then other said representation for a percentage of the slave population you will encourage increased, and those were morally contemptible. which is why they limit -- they went into the slave trade for 20 years. they just didn't want this over them. there was hostility towards slavery in the convention. the result said why are we represent slaves? is it because they are people or property? if they are property, why are we represent slaves? these issues came up and were debated passionately. the constitution itself is a bundle of compromises. as madison said, we have allowed the slave trade to go on for 20 years, two in georgia and south carolina in the union. george mason said, and he's a

virginian, he said we should have let them go. he thought that the continuation of the slave trade was a mistake, although he himself was a slaveholder, that slavery itself was on republican and todd habits that were incompatible with the health of the republic. cigarette credits of slavery even within what we think of as slave states at the time of the ratification of the constitution. there's no real simple issue. all right, how did they overcame their differences? they overcame them by compromise. we know this. there are a whole series of compromises. the compromise over representation, delaware said we could agree to nothing that violates the equal representation of the states. delaware. you know, shock, pennsylvania through most of the colonial period which it shared together.

when they thought it through, new jersey join, other states join. via the compromise what we know. equal representation of the states and popular representation in the lower house. there were those who thought this was an atrocity. it was james madison who thought this was a violation of the republican principle that all representation should be in proportion to the population. so there's one compromise. then the compromise is over slavery. indeed, that commercial boat would not need a two-thirds vote they would pass a commercial legislation, simple majority. and in return, arguably the south got some protections for the slave institution. now, what does it mean? at the end of the convention nobody thought the constitution was perfect. and if you look at the final days of the constitution, one

person after another say well, this is not what i'd hoped for. hamilton says nothing, madison wrote jefferson this will never work. it's not going told the union together. franklin gives his speech saying i don't like a lot either but i'm not sure we can get anything better. we should pull together. what they said was this is the best we can get under the circumstances. and those who supported the transitory pull together to get it ratified as written for fear that any changes the whole thing would simply unravel. and that could be adapted over time and improved over time by the amendment process. so we look at this as saying, you know, the creation of men were brilliant and anyone who walked the face of the earth before, i don't think the record really supports that. between 1787-70 and 88, the

constitutional serving not that i compared it was a punching bag. people said was the most shocking negative things about it. but once it was ratified, the country pulled together behind it. i mean, you started -- people thinking as if it was divine origin. and people like smith in new york, they can't believe this is happening. it very quickly took on that, you know, sacrosanct quality. >> host: you write and record as saying these are ordinary men doing extraordinary things. >> guest: and we still have people who could do extraordinary things if they are called upon to do it. john adams said beautifully in the 1820s in a letter to a younger american, best i can tell, your generation, my

generation was no better than yours. in fact, he said shockingly there weren't that many talented people in the generation 1776. so it's much easier together, to make a reputation. and he said that there are more people with college degrees, more educated people, the population had increased. so there were more people, and even a given percentage of highly capable people and clearly the numbers were greater. i think in some ways the founders had more faith and posterity than posterity sometimes had expressed in itself. >> host: were any of the founding fathers harvard grads? >> guest: yes. there were some. now, who do you include in -- turn this around now. do you include only those who

were in the -- >> host: those that i have heard a. >> guest: oh, yes. the roof came down. there were, certainly there were. now, you count john adams? john adams of certain important in designing the constitution of the united states. he was not at the said convention. in massachusetts, i'm very proud of my chapter on -- chapters on massachusetts because it made such a lovely story i think i had a count of the main delicate who traveled to boston, i think there's nothing to get you a better sense of how much, how the passage of time, that to explain what it took to get from maine to boston. we can drive it in a couple of hours. it took them a week, and that he had to figure out who would take

care of his horse during the convention. as they say it makes the trip to boston child's play. and then taking home at the end. and the debates themselves were so rich and so tense because it wasn't clear what the vote was going to be. and the federalists, the federalists didn't want any votes until they knew that it was going to be in their favor so they were avoiding votes. they did want the opposition to be that strong. this was excited and i could book in debt with -- but often they said the federalists said, the critics of the constitution were uneducated, sort of rural -- what you would call it, you know, hicks. and they are often farmers. but they also had a number of people who counted as educated

in terms of the 18th century. they had a handful of harvard graduates among them. that's what it meant in massachusetts. >> host: and if you're interested in that texture view of the times, holly near an american scripture also recounts the journey down from boston of john hancock or from massachusetts of john hancock and john adams together as they come down for the second can't know congress on july 4, 1776, declaration of independence. tenet in connecticut, you've been very patient. banks are holding. you on with professor pauline maier. >> caller: professor maier, everybody has seen that famous picture of george washington standing crossing the delaware. but i don't think most people understand how an incredibly brave and critical that move was. don't you think it's entirely not only impossible but even likely that without trenton and

without princeton there might not even be a united states of america today? >> guest: absolutely critical. david isby wonderful job of describing washington's crossing in his book with that title. and we also, they could have been standing at. he said they were standing up because a couple inches in the bottom and this was a kind of boat that was used for ferrying across the river, and you stood up. yes, the importance of trenton and princeton, they are among the most important battles of the revolution. december 7 and in early january, 1776, ingenuous 1777. it look like they'll revolution, revolutionary resistance, because the continental army was simply unravel it. they lost at brooklyn heights. they lost in manhattan.

washington was retreating, crossing the delaware and in re crosses it. and those two victories, minor though they may seem in great military victories, at least stop the downward spiral. and through that winter as well as david fisher explains very, very well and washington's crossing, militiamen or groups throughout new jersey we claim territory that the british had help and put the british on the defensive. so it really was a turning point in the part of the war. on the other hand, you know, if you say what it the army had been defeated? what would have happened? we have the story in the south later in the work when, in fact, lincoln was defeated, gates was defeated. and before green had brought a third continental army into the field in the south, the war continued but it continued at a devastating way. one of the earlier callers talk

about the brutality of the war. we think of it in civilized terms as if it were lexington and concord with the americans militia. in the civil war, in the south between 17 -- after 17 -- you have a civil war and it is brutal. it's nasty. it's a bloody. and it continued even in the absence of the army. so it could be it would have been so easy for the british to simply take this country. >> host: but you do right in "american scripture" that the trenton battle and princeton, it was after them that the declaration of independence was finally distributed. >> guest: that's right. the congress had to think their way, a possibility of pulling this project off before they would distribute it. their necks were literally on the line. it is interesting that they did

for distributing copies of a signed declaration through the fall, but i think the only viable explanation i can come up with is that the army was doing so poorly. >> host: from michigan, this is william dilemma. kenneth roberts novel, oliver was well, pictures revolutionary america as around 50% loyal to britain. the loyalists were very badly treated. is this a true picture? >> 50% is way too high. in libby's exiles, she said a fifth to a third, i think the third is the wrong figure. the third comes off john adams is estimates. he says a third lawyerless, a third of loyalists, if you're new to. he did give different. this was off-the-cuff estimates. modern historians have made

estimates of the loyalists population, which is not easy to do. you have to take something that is measurable and then multiply it to try to figure out how much, what is measurable -- what larger group this is representative of. paul smith took a number of exiles who thought with the british. another store and looked at those who filed claims. but the general estimate is about one in five of the total loyalists regulation say of the population in the mid-1770s, that would be about a half a million people. the exiles, there's 60,000 by the more careful calculation. they are minority of the loyalists. most manage in one way or another to remain within the united states. the exiles of course, the trick

of those who were most alienated and really didn't think they could remain. >> host: was there a lot of fear and paranoia in this country in 1775-1776? >> guest: i think there was a lot of fear. paranoia, it assumes paranoia as the term assumes what the fears are irrational. i don't know if you are irrational. what happened of course, once the war began the divisions became very serious. i mean, if the british are moving into your territory and john smith down the road is going to help them, that's a question of considerable importance. so we did have these organize committees on the local level, starting actually with 1774 and the continent association, which was an economic boycott program.

we had local committees elected by those who were qualified to vote for members of the assembly, who were to enforce the policies of the continental congress. i think they moved into a military territory. so that anybody who was hanging back, they would get a visit from the committee. there are stories of people who found their cattle bed in the morning. the signal was there. some people did suffer a physical attack, and actually both loyalists, supporters of the revolution and the revolutionaries are loyalists as well, but it was when the army moved into a territory that people had to declare the sentiments. and they fled into british lions. so at the end of the war they are gathered in new york, charleston and savanna. >> host: next call for professor pauline maier of mit comes from alan, washington.

>> caller: hi. professor maier, you're very impressive. i want to go back to college. and sit in the front row of your class and ask a lot of questions. >> guest: well, i could use you. >> caller: i was thinking about the writer of the declaration, thomas jefferson. in my humble opinion i think he was a brilliant polymath. >> guest: oh, yes. >> caller: if you -- there's a few things i've read on his writings on religion. do you think thomas jefferson could be elected president of the united states today? >> guest: i think we would have and upward struggle to get elected today. he probably was a little too radical for the current temper of the country. certainly on religion. jeffersons great cause was, but i don't hesitate to call the separation of church and state. the point is, the phrase comes

from this letter, the danbury baptist association, 1806, and it isn't, it certainly is in the constitution of the first amendment. but jefferson himself, he drafted the virginia religious freedom which is one of the most important documents in american history, 1785-1786. which basically said the state had no business passing any regulations with regard to religion. the state of virginia out of the religion business. and it begins with those moving parts, where almighty god has made the mind free. for jefferson and for medicine, religion was a form, and the state has no business in your mind, in your credo. you can be anything you want and not be regulated thought.

within virginia they had a powerful political support from individuals who said that is not members of the established church which were anglican or episcopalian. they had suffered some legal discrimination in the past, and they really thought that the state should be out of the religion business also. so they have a constituency and they had their own radical enlightenment taught. it was not in the religious position, the opening words made that clear. and it goes on to say that religion which is practiced only because of the support other portion of the state is hypocritical. and distasteful to almighty god. so it was itself religious, but the state has no business in religion. this was the cutting-edge of religious freedom in the mid-17

'80s. it wasn't until the 19th century that new england states like connecticut and massachusetts finally got rid of their state churches. but this was the trend. >> host: back to your book, "american scripture," again how did you come up with a name scripture in the book you write that you're pretty uncomfortable with how the declaration of independence and the constitution are presented on the altar in the national archives. >> guest: they had we done it. yes. the national archives has -- my book is archaic. at least the description of the display is archaic. when i visited it, there was like an altar, and that particular configuration with certain changes -- will, this one back in 1952, but there have been an altar like device in the library of congress for the constitution and the bill of rights, pardon me, not right

there for the constitution and the declaration of independence from about the 1920s. so they've changed the display. it's now much more democratic. you can walk along a look at what seems to be much more appropriate. >> host: potomac, maryland, hi. >> caller: like professor maier, i think history is exciting. that was my major, history. and i agree with you. one of the greatest quotes is oliver wendell holmes, the past prologue to the future. and i wanted to find out in future opinion on the fact that during the revolutionary war it was earlier talked about the fact that someone had said something about the effect of a revolutionary war around the world. but i can imagine in europe there must've been some kind of steering because we certainly had several of the great military leaders come here to help george washington during war. and it's been said if it hadn't

been for that we may not have one of the revolutionary because their teachings and von steuben coming in, disciplinarian the troops and that, and i would like to get your opinion on that. >> guest: we had no engineers. you know, whenever earlier wars, the french and indian war where colonial troops were involved usually in a subsidiary function, was the british engineers who did all the work. so we were deficient to the revolution, the continental army was deficient in that category. foreigners helped to make up for our lack of capacity in that area. i think the french reliance was absolutely critical. we talked about at princeton but it was saratoga that absolutely was the turning point because it was at saratoga where the

american victory was sufficient. we defeated the british army, and it allowed french to say they could come in. they weren't going to come in for a cause that was clearly stated to lose, and the french alliance was necessary. why? the french brought in for one thing a navy, and the french navy was argued a superior to that of the british at this point. noticed that in the course of the war the british at one point or another held every major port. they held boston. they held new york. they held charleston. they held all the major -- they held philadelphia. they could hold any port because they had command of the sea. now, suppose we reached a stem and the british held all the sports and the americans held into your. what would be the logical result of? and it goes which would probably

have kept the americans under the british ground, exit the republic, exit the revolution. a very different outcome, but the arrival of french navy made a victory possible, and i think also the advice, the commander. look, the critical victory at yorktown was a siege. he never mounted a siege before. we had the expertise of the french officers to advise the continental army. and how to carry on this war. and we had their navy and we had their men, also. >> host: after yorktown, i'm thinking of v-j day or v-e day in the state anything like that? "american scripture" the british still held new york, charleston and savanna. so it didn't look like the war was over.

why was it over? it was over because when lord north got the news, he said my god, it's all over. because he could not get parliament to replace cornwallis is arming. the british had been taxed to the hell. their tolerance of the sacrifices they had to make for a war which didn't look like we were going to bring proportion to the cause, they were done. he knew. politically it was impossible to carry on. >> host: significance of benedict arnold? >> guest: benedict arnold, the greatest military hero of the american revolution, to a point. i mean, he was the great hero at saratoga. they told him go, don't go into an action but he couldn't get out of it and he rode his horse and he was shot and he kept fighting. i mean, he could've been the greatest military hero possibly, except washington in the revolutionary war. but the congress was slow and dancing him and he married, and

loyalist. he sold out. he sold out to the british, and the story of what washington discovered this treachery is the most moving story. i remember reading it in the library sitting on the marble floors, not breathing minute for minute as i read this account. because washington happened to be there and discovered him at the very last minute. but arnold fled, got away. it's a moving story aired and then, of course, he was fighting against the americans in the summer theater. he was in virginia leading an army against the americans. >> host: successfully? >> guest: well, they almost captured thomas jefferson in 1781. they didn't and there was a question whether, whether jefferson should be, you know, chastised for this by the

legislature. they decided not to any end. but, you know, a cause a terrific amount of fear and terror, fighting against his own countrymen. with the king's army in the south. and his sons ended up in india according to a book. >> host: lewis in washington, good afternoon to you. >> caller: good afternoon. could it be said, professor meyer, that the essential role of essential preference our constitution and bill of rights and declaration is to protect the individual from government? as some others have pointed out perhaps a flaw in our constitution was that unlike the declaration, we never mention the constitution them into the creator of god or and it leaves got but leaves of slavery in? >> guest: well, the references

to god in the declaration of independence were not jefferson's. with the possible -- there's two exceptions. the god of nature, nature's god and the god who endowed us with certain inalienable rights. but the references in the final paragraph were added by congress. these documents as you mention have very different functions. i mean, the declaration of independence basically it's british rule. it into the old regime which opens the way for the designing of new government. was the purpose of the constitution to protect individuals against government? i don't think the founders would have seen it that way. they understood that the actual exercise of freedom demanded protection. so they saw government as essential to the operation of liberty, to liberty any practical sense. that is, your security up robbery, for example, is rather weak without will of law,

without loss to define the rights and with an infrastructure that will protect you against people who would just us and help themselves to what you have. liberty in a practical sense demanded rule of law for the founders. so was it to protect the people against government, or has the government to protect the rights of the people? if you read the second paragraph of the declaration which is a kind of a summary of the basic political three of the revolution, government was created to help protect the people's rights. by the constitution, the protection of slavery and not of religious rites, i don't think so. slavery was understood as something which was not going to be lasting forever. otherwise, why did they avoid using the word slave in the constitution backs with regard to religion, i don't think that

the lack, for several religious qualification for office meant that religion was unimportant. i think that people had come to understand that religious beliefs was important, but it was a private affair and that keeping the state out about, out of that area was, in fact, protection for people's rights. as the virginia statute said, almighty god wants the mind free and that people should choose their religious beliefs freely and the allowed to follow those beliefs without any interference from the states. >> host: dear professor maier, professor maier, imaging at monster high school in munster, india. i participate in the we the people program and will be participating at the national level. >> guest: congratulations. >> host: my question is, during the ratification debates, some delegates argue that the traditional function of bills of rights, to mark the limits of a king's prerogative, made in a

relevant and republics, where the people ruled. do you agree or disagree? >> guest: i disagree, and many people at the time disagree. this was an argument made, i think very powerfully by james in the north carolina conventions, that you really did need bills of rights in a republican it and james wilkes of pennsylvania said we have a government that says what the, what the congress can do. anything else they can't do. so dangerous to say, for example, in a bill of rights that congress can't interfere with freedom of the press if they had no power over the press. some clever lawyer could say it must have powers over the press that are not enumerated in article 1, section 8, why would you have this provision in the bill of rights? and this is why in our first 10 amendments we say anything -- if

it isn't -- that really you can't read it that way. that everything that is not granted is to the states are the people, and there was tremendous concern about whether it could be, could be read in that way. know, jefferson made the strongest case for bills of rights. he said if nothing else, they educate the people as to what their rights are and what they should hold the government accountable for. moreover, and here he was really way ahead of his time, he said if they are written out they can be enforced in the courts are now, he's way ahead of his time on that point. but he was predictive of the way of the future would develop. >> host: patrick from baltimore who identifies as a student of david pierce quinn at st. mary's college of maryland, 1983 what founding father is the most forgotten in history but

very are critically important at that time? >> guest: langston smith of new york. i'm using founding father in a very broad sense but and that is not just those who designed the constitution but those were important for getting into a fight. smith was probably more responsible for anyone else giving about a fight in new york. and it was a courageous act on his part. basically he had to industry by voting for ratification. and he brought another 11 delegates with them. the country looked rather weird without new pics i think langston smith a summary we should raise our cups do. he was a merchant. sunset away but i don't think so. he sort of came from the hudson valley. had moved to new york. >> host: what was new york's resistance to the constitution?

>> guest: the opposition was largely in the upper hudson valley, the lower counties which, of course, are much more commercially oriented faith of the constitution because again they thought a strong federal government would be good for the economy. in the hudson valley, they read the constitution. well, the reason people oppose it were not irrational. they set the language is vague on critical points. it says you shall be no more than one member of the house of representatives for every 30,000 people, for example. now, get your head around that. it's like a double negative. you have to think about it. they said it should say there will be one member of the house for every 30,000 until the house gets to a certain size, and then you recalibrate. but it didn't, and they said

this is dangerous. it loses all enhance of congress, the rights and representation are much more important to be left in the hands of congress. they should be laid out in defend and the constitution. it's not a stupid point. not stupid at all. they said representation is so poor -- or inadequate that congress shouldn't be able to lay taxes that could well affect the welfare of the people. they won't know the circumstances of the people. they won't know what the people can bear. so direct tax should be passed by the legislature, state legislatures. or they should have a chance to raise their part of the burden because representation. that really through people like madison and washington. but it was not a stupid argument. >> host: what is the role of economics and taxes and the triggering of the mx revolution? >> guest: really important.

i mean, i think the reason there was so much unrest because the taxes to pay off the state debt. and that's the one major opposition to the constitution was as i say, congress, congress hadn't had their taxing powers under the articles get wall-to-wall taxing powers under the constitution. there's no form of taxes which are denied to congress. how would the state legislatures going to support themselves? the federalist said they have concurrent legislation, concurrent rights except with regard to taxing new ports. well, the critics had why doesn't it say that? that? you know? so that some of the rights of the states were protected. so there is enormous concern about if their taxing power in congress. this makes tremendous sense. the revolution was fought about taxes and representation. those were the central issues

for that generation, and they came up again. >> host: we all remember lincoln smith after that. >> guest: i'm surprised you didn't know him. >> host: atlanta, georgia, hi. >> caller: professor maier, we can tell you how much i am enjoying this. the idea of three hours being presented in a world of immediate soundbites is so impressionable. i represent the state legislature of georgia, and we're working on a constitutional plan to go after a problem identified as civic illiteracy. and we've been involved in this for 40 years, and it begins with a document that we thought so important. it is signed by 56 senators and 195 members of the house. the first document ever signed by the entire body.

and this effort is going to be so exciting, people are even calling it the last battle of the american revolution. >> host: and i asked you a question? when you say you represent the legislature in georgia, what do you mean by that? >> caller: that's a good question. our secretary of state at the time, he set it up for myself and a handful of people to utterly represent the legislature and advocacy of this. so we became what he called the first lobbyists for the legislature. which is the reverse of our experienced where people lobby the legislature. >> host: have you ever been an elected official? >> caller: no. i've done a lot of things, pretty much towards bad, but not that bad jet. >> host: now, is there a website for your organization? , it's not an organ station but

there is a website. it's called our republic walk.net. >> host: did you just want to acknowledge professor maier or did you have a specific question? >> caller: i have a specific question, because in her effort to try to figure out what we're doing, we came across a historian with amherst college named henry steele -- >> guest: right. >> caller: i was wondering, in your career and had the opportunity to visit with him, he was incredible. we spent quite a bit of time with him back in the '80s and '90s. >> guest: i've never met him. yesterday was a very distinguished member of the historical profession, however. have you heard of this group? >> guest: i have not heard about this group of. >> host: steve, high. >> caller: hi. my question is county of our

touched on it a bit, but the establishment clause in the first amendment, a lot of educators today side this establishment clause for prohibiting things like prayer in school, and also things like any reference to christmas, like a can of christmas vacation and so forth. now, isn't that an exact corruption of the establishment clause when they say that? because they are actually inhibiting the free thought, they're actually outline somebody that may believe in that. so when they cite that, on the incorrect or, you know, what -- >> host: thank you steve. >> guest: the first amendment, i suppose it is required everybody went to school on christmas, it would probably

violate that. you know, what does it mean? madison himself gave it the most generous interpretation. he didn't think there shouldn't even be chaperones, religious chaperones for the army or for congress. but how it is interpreted over time has changed tremendously. i think that these provisions to undercut the christian bias of our practice are well-meaning. i mean, are these practices offensive to non-christians in our population? of course the incidence of muslims, particularly increased. we have a substantial jewish population. are their rights violated by the provisions, by practices that are christian in nature? i think this is one of the

concerns which have been behind these practices. personally, you know, i think prayer has no place in public school, and that indeed that the big problem is that when we first started public schools they were intensely protestant and many catholics felt they couldn't even attend event. we want the schools to be so organized that everybody can attend him without giving to religious beliefs are offended by any practices. >> host: an e-mail, please discuss the role of the vanderbilt in the american revolution. >> guest: i know nothing about the role of the vanderbilt so i guess the answer is no. >> host: joe fisher, denver, colorado. at the time of the constitutional convention you mentioned there were several written state constitutions already. and, of course, the convention aimed at creating a written constitution. why do they seek a written constitution?

where did the idea come from when england had no written constitution and none yet? >> guest: this is what's kept interesting is through the whole period before independence, the colonists had argued that parliament did, the stamp act, were unconstitutional. and to the british, this made no sense at all because the constitution was basically the system. it's all of the laws, customs, practices, court decisions by which britain was discovered. so this made no sense. but the americans had the idea that a constitution should be written. why? that's the question. several of them had written charters. and they had a function like what we recognize is that of the constitution. it laid out the structure of government, what to do what, what could not do something else. others had the circuit.

the governors came with written instructions, and they sort of have the same function. so there had been experience of written documents that laid out the structure and powers of government. on the other hand, these were not constitutions in our sense. they were issued by the ground. and somehow in their heads the colonists had confused the experience of these written documents with what was called a social compact. that becomes the basis that the government comes, that the rule of government comes out of a compact among the people who create it. clearly their argument was very little to the british. once they declare their independence they had to face a challenge of trying to realize in fact is rather confused id in their head. clearly they thought that the constitution should be written. and our state riding and even before independence because the

congress tells them right at the constitution for this period, until we settle this with the british. so south carolina and new hampshire had early constitutions that were meant to be temporary. virginia was told to do this and he didn't do it until it wrote a comment one and is one that didn't have a clear answer. and then the question was how do you make these documents ask of the people? and that was finally worked out most successfully in massachusetts, where on the insistence of people in the towns, the constitution was written by special delegates to a convention that it only this. that is, that it only two of the constitution and then send it back to the towns for ratification. and the massachusetts constitution begins we the people of massachusetts dot dot dot who are ordained and established. where have you heard similar

words? i mean, the federal constitution clearly built on the massachusetts presidents host the next call for mit professor pauline maier. we have about 10 minutes left, comes from arizona. >> caller: thank you both for doing this. i'm so excited to hear the professor's dissertation you. like a previous caller, i'm so excited. if i was close i would sign up for your class and sit in the front row. >> guest: i wish my students were quite so excited about having as a teacher as your listeners are, peter. >> caller: my question is, my thought is, one of the previous participants have said, i believe it was madison, that he changed his views and became a republican. and i was hoping you could explain this ideology or the comparison between the parties

of the 1700s and the parties that we have today, the democratic and republican. so if you could do that i would appreciate it. >> guest: oh, this is a very big question and there's a lot of ink spilled on this problem. basically the ratification of the constitution was -- there were no national parties in 1787-1780. i don't use anti-federalist unless the people describe, accepted it and on it appeared in a quotation because it suggested there were parties. there were no national parties. national parties did emerge in the 1790s out of congress, first of all, in divisions over hamilton's financial plans and over foreign policy. and here, jefferson and madison became the leaders of what became known as the jeffersonian republican party.

and apposed is centralizing trend of the washington administration, particularly insofar as washington was by hamilton. and, of course, they didn't like john adams' administration either because the war with france et cetera. so you did get the beginning of a kind of party politics there. then they kind of die off by the 1820s. and emerge again it so you had jacksonian democrats and what were known as the whig party. and they fall apart in the 1850s when you get the new republican party of lincoln, who opposes the old democratic party. and those actually are still with us. but it's a complicated. and there's a reason to question when we got modern parties. what a modern party demands is i

think a respect for your opponent. you don't think the opponent is seditious trying to undermine the state. that you accept the legitimacy of differences and the willingness to decide who wins through the procedures of democratic politics. without accusations of disloyalty. and i think certainly we are there 1840s, 1850s. >> host: john clark, columbia missouri. you mentioned that isn't ideological origins of the american revolution there i suspect that they then used the term ideology in the neutral anthropological sense of the system of ideas. today the term ideology carries considerable negative connotations of limited prejudice unexamined beliefs. >> guest: beautiful. yes, i'm sure what bailyn met my ideology was a system of ideas.

it was a system of belief. that was what bailyn describe. and i consider this a continuing contribution. earlier one of the callers talk about every generation should dispute with the earlier one day. we should contest all of these interpretations. occasionally there are contributions to our understanding which are of enduring value. and i think our capacity to understand the events of the revolutionary period in terms of the ideas of contemporaries was an enormous step forward. >> host: this is from jim. why didn't rhode island ratified the constitution? >> guest: well, it had a lot of paper marks that had issued and it wondered whether it would remain valid. because article one section 10 said the states can issue nothing but gold and silver as legal tender. road island did this in order to

address a committed, it had with regard to its revolutionary war debt. the amount it had to raise just an interest was five times what the whole budget had been before independence. and this was held -- and it was held, the debt was held by a handful of speculators. it was going to impoverish everybody in order to enrich a few. so they try to address with paper money. they did in ways that was certainly very questionable. however, they were worried about what would happen, what would be the fate of the money if the constitution went in. that isn't really, really enough. i think it was also substantial opposition in rhode island to the constitution's provisions on slavery. rhode island had a very high incidence of quakers. >> host: jim's second question, what is your favorite painting from the revolutionary period? >> guest: i have great

affection of the revolution is about what would be my favorite? what a question? i have never thought about this. i really love the portrait of paul revere. ..

>> guest: how the revolution changed the kinds of values and the way people wanted to present themselves to audiences. >> host: who was copley? >> guest: john singleton copley was one of the greatest painters of the late 18th century. he was part of a loyalist family and ended up, you know, he certainly wasn't through all of his career. a painter found little consolation in a e republican country. he found much more business in england. >> host: gary in illinois, we only have a minute or two left. >> caller: eventually, i'll have my 15 minutes of fame if i get through to your wonderful show. i read a book called "america the possible: how and why our constitution should be rewritten" twice over the years, but not having a great memory, i can't summarize it for you. i wonder if you know about that. plus, a book that's rather

controversial, looked upon through the eyes of liberals and conservatives by howard zinn. >> guest: i don't know the first book, and i will confess although i understand howard zinn's history is very popular, mea culpa, i have never really read it. >> host: dr. maier, as a textbook clerk, i literally handled copies of your first two titles. in my own words, we are not actually guaranteed life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness. this is based on what his eighth grade american history teacher, the declaration of independence predates our federal government and is, therefore, not a document of that government. >> guest: well, that is a rather radical argument. without independence, of course, we would have no right to found

a new government. i would think it's a critical component of, certainly, the american political system. are we with guaranteed? we say that good has given us, our creator has given us life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that government is founded to protect them. why is the federal government exempted from that description of fundamental principles? i disagree. with the assertion. >> host: david eisenberg, i've long thought that aaron burr has been demonized in our history books. i'm going to leave it right there because we're almost autoof time. -- out of time. >> guest: all right, fine. >> host: what do you think? >> guest: he has been demonized. he had a very checkered career. i think his contributions are highly questionable. he certainly isn't one of the great heros for me. >> host: mit history professor pauline maier has been our guest