consciousness that we do not speak forever. we are not gods. they were not gods. we'll leave the details to david boren, how to implement all this. there's a second point. and this is the more radical one on which i will conclude and leave a few minutes for your comments and questions. the second is to use my notion of space, of time, of segmenting the people, as jefferson says, every generation is like an independent nation with respect to every other nation. imagine international lawyers are going to have to sort this out. every generation is like a sovereignty. well, let's take that principle and that spirit and see how you can apply it, how you can make it operational. the second idea is to take not that temporal dimension along what we might describe as a vertical axis, but to flip it to the horizontal, to think spatially.

here is the solution that jefferson arrived at in his retirement. and that is, divide and subdivide. take the great national republic. break it down to states. to counties. to townships or wards as he called them. indeed, if you take this regression from top to bottom you go all the way to the householder, to jefferson himself, and to his neighbors who are sovereign over their own domain. over his own plantation or farm. nobody messes with me on my plantation. that's a basic rule of life and law in the antebellum south. but this principle of division and subdivision enables us to use the majority rule principle as a check against the excesses of majority rule. because those divisions between

the national or federal republic in which we act as if we were one. and when jefferson is president, he acts for us under the assumption we are one with respect to the rest of the world. and we might have to act with dispatch. we might have to suspend rule of law. we might have to respond to the injunctions of the first law of nature. and folks, that's self-preservation. number one. the first law of nature. no country, no constitution. country comes first. but then you move down from the federal level to the state level. and those states have rights that are inviolable. they have rights against each other. states can't encroach on each other. now i know all of you serious constitutional scholars and historians will say, federalism is very complicated. yet again, jefferson is

indulging in what we might describe as a thought experiment. but here's what this experiment yields. because at the federal level, we operate by majority rule where the delegates of the states, the senators, the representatives coming from districts or from general elections in the states, they operate under the majority rule principle. same thing applies at the state level. but one thing you can't do at the federal level is to interfere with the states wind the proper sphere of their authority. and the same principle goes down all the way to the bottom. in fact, i've described it as moving from top to bottom. what we've really discovered, it's the bottom that's important. that's where the spirit of the revolution of 1776, of the rights that we hold dear and sacred, those rights are the foundation of this republic. they must be secure.

secure against majorities at a higher level, but they must be governed by the democratic majority rule principle at their own level. does this begin to make some kind of sense? he's divided the world. it's not going to be checks and balances wind the federal government. it's federalism itself that is constitutionalism. and it's only a federal regime that can truly, can truly adhere to the foundational principle of democracy, majority rule. we have divided the country into many, many, many jurisdictions. many governments. all of which govern themselves, all of which have inviolable rights with respect to each other, all of which delegate powers upword to achieve common goals. collective security. the national good, whatever that is. the end of global warming. you could fill it in as you

will. we delegate upward to achieve common interests. and at every level, at every level we have a selection of slids who can best represent, articulate, and understand those common interests. and that's a kind of refinement, to borrow the term from james madison and gordon wood, a kind of refinement so that it is a fantasy of a kind of continental meritocracy where those at the top will have the wisdom to see beyond their own petty interests and to see the collective interests at all. i've gone on for too long but what i wanted to articulate is this fundamental tension between democracy, between our sense of citizens as having power over pow we are governed and ruled, having a say, participate tore democracy, and the notion of security in our rights, of

predictability, of rule of law. for better or worse, and whether or not he came up with a viable solution, jefferson recognized a tension which we overlook at our peril. the tension between a government based on our collective will, whatever that is, and a notion that vested rights and interests and property, the modern versions of aristocracy, corporate wealth and power, the new inequality, all these things are beyond our reach because they're just there. they are our version of the dead hand of the past. thank you.

did i disgrace myself? >> that was wonderful. thank you very much for such insightful and provocative remarks. we've all enjoyed it very much and you've left us all thinking. i want to pause in the middle before i ask for questions from the audience. i notice that our incoming chair and vice chair, the board of regents are both here this morning. they've been great supporters of this program and i'm really glad that both of them are here. our incoming chair, dr. leslie rainbolt forbes, and our incoming vice-chair rick dunning. would you both please stand? we have a microphone at the front. if anybody has a question i think it would be easiest to walk down to the microphone.

there are a lot of students i see at the balcony. you can make your way down and ask a question. while people are coming to the microphone, let me ask you the question. jefferson, with all of his intense focus on democracy itself and on the fact that each generation is sovereign, as it comes into place, do you think jefferson would trust this generation enough, their commitment to particularly not exercising their own rights at the expense of others, those who might be unpopular, for example, to have their right of free speech guaranteed in the bill of rights, all the other things we can think of. and you think about the classical education, some were self-educated yet they had read widely of the political philosophers. they had read locke, they had read others. compare that to the current

american population. how long and how deeply have they felt this. how much have they lifted up unselfishness and what we might call civic virtue. in other words, not the position of don't tax me, tax the other person. don't cut my benefits, cut someone else's benefits. are we prepared as a generation to assume the sovereign power that jefferson talked about, to rewrite our constitution again? >> i get to answer that question, that's great. you're taking notes, take this down. one of the points i wanted to make is that if you have problems with us, they had problems with them. never forget that. that's the original ism that we should channel. that is the sense of risk and danger and the lack of trust they had in each other. if you think republicans and democrats can't get along, that's not a question here in oklahoma because there aren't any more democrats.

[ laughter ] well, people in jefferson's age had profound reasons not to trust each other and to be afraid that the world would really be turned upside down. and what's remarkable about jefferson, of course, what the revolution portended for people like jefferson was certificate vile insurrection and destruction of the master class. these are real concerns. that is, they're sitting on a time bomb. it's not just that they can't get along with their neighbors. it's much more profound than that. i would say, david, in response to your question, this is for better and worse. we like to tell ourselves that we do well in bad times. when we get nostalgic about the greatest war or the greatest generation or the greatest period in american history, we tend to focus on periods like,

say, the 1850s when everything really did fall apart. when the constitution failed. i like to tell my students, don't get too excited about a constitution which is all about slavery and happily had to be, well, changed, to be honest. we say amended in the civil war amendments. that was a moment in which we nearly lost control completely. in fact, it's lincoln's great achievement to establish connection, a fresh connection with the founding, but particularly with jefferson's version of the founding, that is, with the declaration. that those principles needed to be defended. let this experiment not fail. this is the hope for the world. and this is a 19th century in which nations are beginning to declare their right to govern themselves. this is the century of the revolutions of 1848, the failed revolutions of 1848, on behalf

of nationhood. let's show that we can overcome our own tremendous problems and keep the thing, keep the spirit alive. so if we're good at making war and if lincoln was good at sustaining an idea of something worth preserving at the cost of so many lives, and if we honor that now, and if in doing that he honored jefferson, then there is a thin, vital connection that links us across the generations. it's war, it's crisis, it's catastrophe. if you're into this kind of thing, things will have to get a little bit worse before we come to our senses. is that happening now? is this the 1850s now? this is not my period. i'm barely alive anymore. i will say, and i don't mean this to be the usual sort of

pious -- it is going to sound this way. it's up to us. it really is. it's your sense of what the crisis is. do you really think that our biggest enemies are the people who disagree with us about entitlements? or about what we say about god in public places? are you kidding me? if that's what gets you excited, then yes, we could be in our own end times. do we have the vision to see what it is that we confront as a people? are we a people? really the question goes back to the beginning that i posed. are we a people? or not? was that inspirational? >> yes, it was. it absolutely was. [ applause ] questions? you want to ask a question? >> since apparently nobody else wants to step up, i'll try to get it rolling.

a couple of resoundi ining jeffersonian ideas you mentioned, state rights and agrarianism, have both suffered from a kind of guilt by association because of subsequent generations. association specifically with defense of slavery, secession, and jim crow. i'm just wondering if you could reflect on post-jeffersonian history and suggest that maybe some of these constitutional noti notions of -- that jefferson emphasized and saw as essential to the preservation of a republic, if you could suggest how we might view localism and popular control in ways that could dissociate those notions

from their perhaps unfortunate but i don't think necessarily constraining associations. thank you. >> i've been inspirational this morning. that's why i get paid the big bucks. no, i shouldn't have said that, that was awful. i think -- that's a wonderful question. it's a serious problem. i don't know if you can extricate the ideas from their contexts and implications. and history. that is, the history of states' rights. or even, and for me more distressing me, the foundational principle of individual rights for jefferson in his notion of ward republics is the sovereignty of the planter over his plantation. it's the most powerful justification of slavery in the early republic, that is the question of rights. the property rights. the family rights. domestic -- this is the domestic's fear. these are the family values. the householder, the patriarch, jefferson, controlling 200 people as if he were their

father. i think that's our challenge. because i do think these ideas speak to something vitally important, and that is the connection as i tried to put it between our sense of being children, parents, and ultimately ancestors as we move through the generations of, can we both think so intimately about our own welfare, that of our children, and think about everybody's welfare? i think jefferson offers us the opportunity to reflect on these issues. i don't think he has all the answers. but what he certainly does in the declaration of independence is to articulate what has now been received as a notion of universal human rights or natural ryes. they were bounded for generation himself by the circumstances of his time. all men are created equal does not mean that the captive and enslaved africans have those rights now. one day they would. jefferson really has a vision of what i would call a republican

millennium or democratic millennium. one day we would reach the end of over when all peoples would be free, including enslaved africans. but the historic associations of robust democracy at these lower levels of localism and those things that we hate most today is very, very powerful. can we take the civic energy of participation and engagement and defending our own interests, and jefferson's all for that, but can that be reconciled with the sense of something beyond ourselves? that's you might say the great crisis of our times and all times throughout american history. the tension between the local, the particular, the self-interested. and some kind of broader sense of identification with each other, as a people, with the peeps peoples of the world. so that's another glib and unhelpful answer. i'm good at this. i would really like everybody to come to the mike so this could be a true jeffersonian revival.

if that's going to happen, however, nobody else gets to speak today, and or every question has to be answerable by yes or no. >> we have to start the next program in about five minutes to stay on schedule today. such an intellectual feast. the courses will be served very quickly. this will be -- so this will have to be our last question, i'm sorry. maybe you can save the next questions for our speak bear george washington. there's certainly some conflicting ideas between the two of them. yes, go ahead. >> if you were channeling jefferson, how would you advise the people who are occupying wall street? >> well, i know jefferson. he lives in williamsburg. we call him bill barker but he's a jefferson impersonator. i'll send bill up to wall

street. i don't know. the thing is, jefferson hates banks. you've got to understand that about jefferson. he hates the kind of mysterious control that's exercised over our lives and deprives us of our liberties. now, it's not just a simple knee-jerk populist reaction to the masters of the universe, though it has some flavor of that as well. i think he would say that the energy, the kind of participation -- he would say this to tea parties as well -- that this is a civic resource. but can it be more than it is now? the criticism of the wall street people is they don't have a program. it's not their fault, i mean, this is an existential crisis for unemployable college graduates. there are students here, i should be careful. talk about the living generation. i don't know, is this generation going to get a chance? i think this is something -- i get to articulate my own opinions here when i'm

pretending to talk about jefferson. i think jefferson would have been appalled at the inequality thatinequality that characterizes the united states of america today. and that we can try to conjure it away by talking about how competition and markets is going to produce virtuous outcomes and we all benefit from a growing economy but there are elements -- and i think this is what jefferson would be sensitized to today. he was always on the lookout for recredescent aristocracy. sorry about that stupid word. but that there are aristocrats in our midst. and they will use any power they can to become rent seekers. take your pick. to live off the bounty of the work and the productive labor of others. i have to say, given jefferson's commitment to a substantive notion of equality, which

included violations of property rights. jefferson didn't think property was sacred. because that's exactly the principle of the old regime-s that what is must be. i think jefferson would be in deep sympathy. but he'd also be in deep sympathy with populists on the right, that sense of dissatisfaction that we're not talking about the things that matter to us. however we might question the motives and the programs of those people who are out in the streets now making life ugly and difficult, they are expressing something important, and i think jefferson would say, as he said about shay's rebellion, a little rebellion now and then can be a good thing. it's like a storm in the atmosphere. we have storms in our atmosphere. we've got the weather channel. so we can track them at all times. and i think we need to have a kind of political weather channel that's going to produce some higher wisdom beyond the schadenfreude of watching people suffer from drought and -- get me off the stage.

>> more american history tv come up on c-span 3. next, a look at the role of women in the revolutionary war. then a discussion on george washington's leadership as head of the continental army and as the first u.s. president. after that, a yale university professor on president andrew jackson and the constitution. american history tv continues on c-span 3 each night the rest of the week. wednesday at 8:00 p.m., historians consider who "time" magazine might have picked to be person of the year in 1862 when the country was in the midst of the civil war. among the names discussed, abolitionist leader frederick douglass, confederate general robert e. lee, and george b. mcclellan, the union general who commanded a failed 1862 campaign to take the confederate capital of richmond.

this is c-span 3. with politics and public affairs programming throughout the week and every weekend 48 hours of people and events telling the american story on american history tv. get our schedules and see past programs at our websites, and you can join in the conversation on social media sites. each weekend on american history tv learn more about the presidents, their policies and legacies, through their historic speeches and discussions with leading historians. every sunday morning at 8:30 eastern and again at 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. here on c-span 3. and to find out more about the series and our other programming, including our weekend schedules and online video, visit c-span.org/history. while the founding fathers get the credit for the creation of america, without the encouragement and work of many women things may have ended up differently. next, george mason university history professor rosemarie

zagarri examines the role women played in generating support for the revolutionary war. this is an hour. >> good afternoon. i am indeed robert griswold, hudson family chair of history and chair of the history department here at the university of oklahoma. before i introduce this afternoon's speaker and on behalf of the entire history department i want to thank president boren for making this event possible. he has a deep love for the study of history. he in fact majored in history in college. and that affection is reflected in today's event. i would also like to recognize and thank professor kyle harper for his great work in establishing the institute for the american constitutional heritage. thank you for joining us for "founding mothers: how women

shaped the founding," with rosemarie zagarri, professor of u.s. history at george mason university in fairfax, virginia. professor zagarri earned her doctorate from yale university, where she studied with edmund morgan. and before joining the faculty at george mason she taught at west virginia university and catholic university of america. her scholarship articles have appeared in leading journals, including the journal of american history, the american quarterly, the journal of the early republic, lehman merry quarterly, along with numerous essays in edited collections. she's been the recipient of such honors as the outstanding article prize awarded by the southeastern 18th century studies association, fellowships from the national endowment for the humanities, the american antiquarian society, and the

american philosophical society. she's also had an poimt by tappy the fulbright commission to the thomas jefferson chair in american studies at the university of amsterdam in the netherlands. professor zagarri has appeared as an on-camera historian on c-sp c-span, on pbs, and on the fairfax television network. in 2009 she was elected president of the society for historians of the early american republic, and in 2011 was appointed a distinguished lecturer by the organization of american historians. her latest book is titled "revolutionary backlash: women in politics in the early american republic." she's also published another book on women in the early republic titled "a woman's dilemma: mercy otis warren and the american revolution."

the william & mary quarterly described her book "revolutionary backlash" as both path-breaking and field-changing. the "journal of the early republic" likewise described the book as powerful, rich, and finely textured. as reviewer after reviewer has noted, the book compels us to rethink the meaning of politics, individual rights, male backlash, and women's history in the early republic. please join me in welcoming professor rosemarie zagarri. [ applause ] >> thank you, rob. and thanks to president boren and to the university of oklahoma and to all of you for coming. this is just a special occasion. i'm really honored to be among

such a distinguished panel of delighted that so many people care enough about the founding to come out and to listen to us talk about it. we think about it a lot, but we wish other people would think about it more, too. when the delegates to the continental congress gathered in philadelphia in the summer of 1776 to vote on the question of american independence, it's virtually certain that no one in that room with the possible exception of john adams was thinking about the consequences of their pronouncements for the status of women. in the revolutionary era matters of politics and government were thought to be exclusively the province of men. men were the primary land owners. ownership of land was thought to give men the virtue, independence, and stake in society that qualified them to

vote. women, on the other hand, were political ciphers. legal proscriptions prevented women from owning property. most women lacked the benefit of formal education and were believed to lack the knowledge to make decisions about issues involving politics and government. but perhaps most important, war, diplomacy, and state-making were considered to be beyond women's understanding and interest. women were supposed to care more about hearth and home than about tyrannical kings and the right to self-government. yet even as the delegates gathered in philadelphia, they had already set in motion a chain of events that would significantly alter women's participation in the nation's political life and change the assessment of women's political potential and