to make public service open to low-born folks who aren't independently wealthy, england doesn't do that until 1911. we're that far ahead of the world. now where are all these democratic ideas coming from? i don't think these guys at philadelphia are geniuses. they're lawyers and i know a lot of lawyers, very few of them are geniuses. lawyers copy what has worked before. on issue after issue after issue they actually borrow from best state practices. how should we launch? massachusetts and north carolina put it to a popular vote. that's a good idea. should we have a census, very democratic idea. should we have direct election? all of the states have direct election. represent the articles of confederation didn't. that's a big democratic reform. should we pay people? yes, pennsylvania does and that's actually a good system. how should we structure our executive, well, massachusetts

has the best model and so let's sort of copy that one and add to it. if you read gordon's first book, creation of the american public, it's how the federal constitution is a reaction to the first and second is round of the state making in 1776. more democratic than you thought. that's the good news. we the people. do establish this constitution for the united states of america. alas more slave-ocratic. they get one thing wrong, it's not so little a thing. three-fifths means this -- what does it mean? what should it have been? slaves are counted for three-50s of purposes. that's wrong, right? everyone should count for one, right? should be five-fifths, right?

no, should be zero-fifths. no state should ever get extra credit for having extra slaves. the question isn't whether slaves are voting. of course they aren't voting and married women aren't voting. rosemarie gave you a story about unmarried widows, but they can't vote easily because there's no secret ballot. if your husband and the laws can beat you up afterwards, you're not voting your own interests will. it was unmarried women. the question isn't how much clout slaves are going to have but how much clout slave states will have. three-fifths you get more voting clout in the house of representatives and that's the constitution. not in the house of

representatives. where else could you get credit? the electoral college. yes, they didn't believe in democracy and thought republics were different. baloney. i gave you arguments that it they were far more democratic than we've been taught and they believe in direct election of governors and direct election of the members of the house of representatives there is a balance between big and small zats. the big state guy always wins. we have three small state presidents, bill clinton, zachary taylor and franklin pierce. that's it. virginia is the biggest state and for 32 of the first 36 years it's virginian and massachusetts is the second or third biggest state depending on how you count anded adamses. they dominate. it's not big state, small state. it's house versus senate.

it's slavery, stupid, as james carville would say. that's what it's most about. before you have political parties to know if you're from massachusetts who is good from virginia and vice versa but once we have political parties merge, you can vote, even retrospective whether you like the incumbent, whether he's done anything good and you know enough to vote on that rhett respectively. this is almost the death of us. why did they get this one number down? they didn't have any track record among the states. none of the slave states had census formula so they didn't know. they just plucked a number out of a hat, plucked a number used for tax purposes and had representation in the house and the electoral college where it didn't fit. turned out to be a huge benefit

for the southern states. you heard about thomas jefferson, you heard about adams. who won the election of 1800-1801? you all say thomas jefferson, of course. take away the three-fifths, there are two elections of southerner against northerner, jefferson against adams and adams wins the first and then ohio flips. flips pennsylvania. the swing state at the time is new york which is a slave state at the time. but it flips but without a pro-slavery bias of the extra three-fifths, john adams wins even in 1800. he knows that and all the federalists know that. the constitution is amended but not that one. the 12th amendment makes it safe for a populous presidency.

jefferson and madison, in principle they are opposed to slavery but once they understand their bread is buttered on the southern side party, their founding has its base in slavery, you don't hear so much about anti-slavery from those guys. and even great northerners like john quincy adams, he doesn't say that much against slavery. afterwards he does. there's no openly anti-slavery presence before 1860. your simple test, someone gets up, slavery is wrong, you should eventually get rid of it. there's no anti-slavery cabinet officer before 1860. all american history. slavery is wrong, we should eventually get rid of it. andrew jackson, john c. calhoun from my college. residential college named after him.

it is pro-slavery. the democratic party more and more pro-slavery and ruthlessly so and aggressively so. it's a cancer that grows and grows and grows and that's called the civil war. we were lucky not smart. and sometimes it's better to be lucky than smart. bismarck said providence in its infinite wisdom, god has a special place in his heart for fools, drunk ardz in the united states of america. so more democratic than you were taught, more pro-slavery than you were taught and, finally, much more about maturity. that's andrew jackson, too. why would 13 -- and you know the history of the world, up to 1787, why would you ever think a

continental democracy could work? there's no model in world history. why would you think this could work? madison says and the federalist number, what is the federalist number? diversity will be good and the democracy will work better if it's modest diversity. mad madison persuaded everyone. federalist 10, that's what we're all talk. no one reads federalist 10. no one at all. nor for the next 100 years, you read federalist 10 because there was a certain scholar who thought federalist 10 was front and center, really important. that scholar was named charles beard. okay? it's all about the class issue and religious diversity and other things. madison's federalist 10 is brilliant. i disagree respectively.

i give madison tenure on the basis of federalist 10 and it's brilliant argument and precisely because of it no one pays any attention. no one understands brilliant arguments of their time. only after. if you had a good argument for why 13 separate colonies should quit one continental regimes, the likes of which you had never seen in history, would you wait until your op-ed to make that point. listen, this is what it is just so we see clearly, it's the equivalent of today proposing world government. a real world government with a world president and a world army and a world legislature. it's that audacious. what the heck are you talking about? virginia is has been on its own from the 1620s, the house of burge burgesses, it has been a separate entity. it's connected to the other colonies loosely before 1776 in the same way 1930 has a british commonwealth of nations

including canada, india, new zealand, australia, ireland, okay? a common crown but no real continental structure of any sort. now you're proposing to take these warm weather and cold weather people and create one sort of strong indivisible state. why would you do that? why the heck would you go for world government today? let your imagination roam as free as possible. there's only one reason today that would get you to vote for world government. if the martians were coming. don't really love the chinese guys but they are homosapiens. yeah, okay 0. if the martians are coming and that's what the argument is. you almost lost the last war. we were lucky to win it. david fischer told you about

some -- how fortunate. if you read mccullough 1776 you do see it seems the hand of providence even in the weather, you know, on all sorts of crucial days. we were lucky to win the last one. we might win the next one. here is the argument. my fellow americans, it's in federalist 2, it's continued in federalist 4 to 6, if you read federalist 9, if you read nothing else, if you read 8 and 9, look around the world today. who is free in all the world? apart from us americans. not the russians, not the chinese, not the indians, not the turks, not the poles. british and maybe the swiss and that's about it. the netherlands are in the process of losing this. now why? by the way, what do the swiss have in common? not language.

four of them. not religion, they have two which is enough to kill each other. these places have defensible orders. it's pretty hard to charge up a hill. it's naturally defensible and before it was unified, gordon mentioned scotland, when you had the scots battling, there's no great wall of china. he's not a defensible border and before actually the union of scotland and england, the sco it ts were on the english and the english were fighting back and mel gibson was coming down and the queen of france was intervening and playing and no one is safe in that world. the unionists in england means you don't need soldiers on the island. you just need a small navy that needs to be able to beat the spanish armada and navies are threat threatening. my fellow americans, we need to emulate the model of england and

scotland forming an indivisible union and here is what we're going to do. we will have this 3,000-mile-wide moat times 50 and it will keep the old powers at bay. we'll kick the brits out. a very small army, so small it wants to threaten domestic liberty, kick the brits out, kick the spanish out, kick the french out. we'll kill the indians. we'll control the continent, manifest destiny. no one will screw with us. that is andrew jackson. by the way, you look at a map of the world in 1943, who is free. it's basically the brits and von traps in switzerland is the same thing because it's hard to charge up a hill and hitler hesitates to launch an a.m. f amphibious invasion because that's not so easy to do. it's what our friends in israel would call defensible borders. more democratic, more

slave-ocratic. more about national security, more about -- andrew jackson's world. he can beat the brits, battle of new orleans. he doesn't like black people so much. he's emphatically pro-slavery, doesn't love the native americans. that's a structure of the constitution and it's not our world. i'm not -- i don't know which side i'd be on. i think probably the survile side in that world. why have i told you this story? so two ways of remembering the story and one challenge. if you forget, go to any atm, and you're going to get andrew jackson's. so that's just sort of remember our constitution. you're from the great state of oklahoma, and that's, of course, if you understand your state history it's all about the cherokee and the trail of tears and andrew jackson.

living through its legacy today but here is the most important point. the story i've just told is really inspirational in some ways. we give the world more democracy than it ever had before and we're feeling the reverberations before today. your lifetime. the wall comes down. india. this amazing multicultural democracy on the american model inspired by people like thorough and jeffersovejefferson. we showed it could work. that's the inspiring part of my story. the challenge, though, is you need to understand, one, their constitution failed because they didn't really -- they wished slavery away rather than coming up with a credible solution to it. they could have. they could have said three-fifths now but two-fifths in 20 years and one-fifth, you know.

now what are the issues today we are wishing away that might be the death of us? foreign oil, climate change. they fail because they ultimately -- hope is not a plan. for all their greatness we need to recognize that failure and then ask where we might be failing. that's one challenge i wanted to leave with you all. here is the second, the framers' vision was of an isolationist america, what made america safe is not the bill of rights. bill bill of rights wasn't even part of the original plan, it's not enforced for most of its history. it's not about the bill of rights even though i know that's what you were taught. what made america free for most of our history, we had no major standing army in peacetime of any significance. until world war ii. we don't have these military

thugs using other military thugs to sit on us the way saddam hussein sat on his people or gadhafi or thugs from around the world. that's what made america free. and 50 years ago this year general eisenhower, my son understands is like george washington. we've had three george washingtons. we called the second grant and the third eisenhower. three national generals and vic understood that at 6 years old so remember your presidents. you'll see interesting patterns here. so dwight eisenhower recognizes that the world he's hang to his successor is very different than the world he grew up in. we have to think about these things because you are facing a different world than the founders world, challenges of the military complex but the rest of the world isn't -- and much of it is not oppressive anymore, it will be defeated,

fascism and communism and the nazism. and so now the rest of the world is becoming more american. we are becoming more like the rest of the world. we're much more multicultural than ever before. we have immigration not just from europe but from all of europe and from south america, asia and africa, the world is becoming more like us, this is the challenge of your generation. i'm speaking especially to the students here in the audience to try to rethink in a big way the doctrines you've inherited in the same way and here i close, they're young people in their 30s, madison and hamilton. doctrines of their world. they were taught you can't have a continental democracy.

my claim is just as they had to really think hard about changes that were happening in their world that created unique opportunities, my friends, the same is true. history is still happening. there's lots of it to write and we can be founders for the future. thank you very much. >> thank you, professor amar, for that engaging, entertaining and thought provoking insight into the framing generation, into our jacksonian

constitution. we have time for a handful of questions. there's an open microphone so i would encourage to you come up. let me exercise the moderator's prerogative and ask the first question. i would like to turn the historical lens around and ask you to imagine, if you will, what the framing generation as well as what the jacksonian generation might think if they look through that historical lens at us and at the constitution we have today including all the post-civil war amendments, banning slavery, guaranteeing equal protection under the law, much later giving women the right to vote as well as brown vs. board of education, post-1937 that gave an expansive authority for congress to regulate the economy and many aspects of our daily lives. the one person one vote principle as well as perhaps more modern and controversial decisions like citizens united. what would the framing of the jacksonian generation think of the constitution that we have today and should their reactions

matter to us? >> wonderful question. you're hearing from people from different disciplines, trained historians often hesitate to answer presentist questions, what would a historical figure think about today. they often emphasize the pastness of the past. lawyers use history. we have to because we have to decide the case either for the plaintiff or the defendant and so we have to figure out in the end does the history support more the plaintiff's vision of the present or the defendant's vision. his t historians have the great luxury of not having -- you know, you put ten historians -- you lay them end to end and they'll never reach a conclusion but lawyers actual ly have to -- an judges -- decide i'll answer that question even though the pure historians may sort of cringe. our constitution intergenerational project. the founders' vision failed.

it gets reborn in the civil war and the story doesn't end. my claim is that the founding is like a big bang and it creates a tremendous democratic energy that sort of gives momentum for all that happens subsequently. so the bill of rights, which as i mentioned has five mentions of the word the people and the first amendment and then eventually look at the trajectory of amendments. isn't it interesting almost all of them have expanded liberty and equality and no restrictions with the possible exception of prohibition which, of course, fails. so no anti-flag burning amendments or anti-gay rights amendments or anti-catholic amendments or all sort of pro-liberty, pro-equality. it's striking. the constitution gives us a momentum. it gives us a narrative.

gordon wood asked, why do we study history? and i think he said partly to understand who we are, a people without a history is like a human being without memory, amnesia. so who we are, where do we come from and presumably then where might we be going? it sort of gives us a sense of -- and what i'm saying is i'm so proud to be an american, so lucky that this country let my family in a few years before i was born because in the history of the world we are part of an epic project. there are very few societies, i think, where i could get up and say this year in the history of this nation is the hinge of modern history and not be laughed at. so it's an extraordinary project. i'll give you one other example how you have to -- so i think they would say we've actually

been completing their project. they -- 7 of the 39 of them were foreign born. and you actually could be foreign born and be a president at the time, alexander hamilton was fully eligible. otherwise i'm not sure he would have wanted -- he would have liked the thing. so they were far more open to immigrants than anyone before and it if we made it still more open we'd be carrying forward their project in the same way that the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, legal immigration, the 19th amendment rosemarie zagarri told you how it is building on a certain tradition of more inclusion than what happened the day before. that's my claim about this year. it's more democratic energy, more free speech than we've ever seen before. so i think, although they'd be

shocked at the leveling tendencies and the fact that leaders actually don't lead so much anymore but just follow. there are things i think and gordon wood captures a little bit of this, their sense that something has been lost, some of the aristocratic virtues. but for all of that, i think they would recognize in us their posterity, the continuation of their radical revolutionary project. [ applause ] >> because the confederation of the states was in jeopardy, they wisely chose to stress unification of the states rather than the controversial subject of the abolition of slavery. as such the constitution was not necessarily pro-slavery. do you have any other proof that the constitution promoted slavery and, also, what is so terribly wrong with minding our

own business and not interfering arguments of other nations as the doctrine clearly states that america is to do? >> thank you so much for that very good question. so, look, the question is at what point the civil war becomes inevitable. historians often ask questions about inevitability. is this a greek tragedy? no matter what odeipus does he's destined to kill his father and marry his mother. the godfather is a tragedy because michael doesn't want to be like his father. that's my father's world. he gets sucked back in. that's why it's a greek tragedy. so the question is you see -- my claim is for geo strategic reasons you have to get south carolina onboard otherwise you have an undefended southern flank. how do you deal with that? you have to actually unify the continent geo tra tejcally

because that's actually important. but if in order to do that you have to make such compromises with slavery that it's eventually going to doom the project, then it's just for ordained failure. my claim is that actually wasn't the case, that it was a failure of state craft. there was a solution that was imaginable and they missed it. and it's the same solution in my view our depend enence on forei oil -- you see, slavery was -- we are giving billions of dollars to basically the most reactionary regimes in the world, these petro dictators. this is bad for the world. i happen to believe this is probably not great for our mother earth either. and we are addicted to it in the same way that they were addicted to slavery. that was part of -- so how do you solve this? here is how you solve it. in time using time, you have to compromise with evil now but

this is lincoln's -- lincoln says two things. slavery is wrong. if slavery is wrong, nothing is wrong. i cannot remember a time i did not think so. then he turns around and says i'm not an abolitionist. how can you believe in both? he says because we're stuck with slavery. what's his solution? thesis, anti-they sis, i will put slavery on the path of distinction. eventually we have to get there. and so here is what they did for importation. you can import before 1808 but after 1808 copping can prohibit interslave. must rather than can. but they could have said, you know, slavery what exists is okay but you can't spread it to the west. you could have said three-fifths of the existing states but not in any of the new states. you could have said three-fifths now but two-fifths in 20 years and one-fifth but eventually you

can't get extra credit for extra slaves. that's just wrong in principle. you have to use time because if we as moral human beings -- steven douglas says why can do we talk about morality? let's just -- and lincoln says because we are human beings and moral characters. we can't not talk about slavery. now once we all admit that, there's lots of things we can do. we may have to make certain compromises in the here and now but let's all agree one day our great-grandchildren should be freed from this blight. okay? so i'm saying that's what they could have done. and south carolina wouldn't have liked it. and the south carolinians with all due respect were nut jobs from day one. and in july 1776 -- the same month as the declaration, a south caroli south carolinian named thomas lynch, great last name, thomas lynch sa t