We have the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. We in massachusetts think that they copied us. Thatll me some phrases really make you feel like free americans that are in the constitution. Would say the right to bear arms. The right to bear arms. Where i come from in virginia, many people would say that. What are some others . To say the freedom of speech. Can you mention others . The fifth amendment. And everything there. We, the people . Other specific phrases that you like . No one mentions freedom of religion. The rights against unreasonable search and seizure, the rights against cruel and unusual punishment and so forth. The point i want to make is that with the exception of the first two things that were mentioned and the general phrase which i if you take those as exceptions, all of the other specific revisions of the constitution that you guys mentioned as things that make you feel safe and free are, as this gentleman pointed out, they are not in there. Theyre not in their any original cost of tuition that originalen in the constitution. We could have mentioned some of addedghts that related after the civil war, the right of women to vote, which came in the 20 century. So much of what we love about the constitution is not in it. The framers did not write bill of rights, not because they did not care about rights but because that was not their priority. They were there for other reasons. That ire the reasons want to talk about today. I have to tell you, it is a hard thing to talk about. Its this and be true of any nation, that its founding is ist of shrouded in mist, but is unique about the constitution and our founding is that there are some new different players of miss. Ordinary people dont know much about the constitution, they have their myths about the constitution but even people that studied it have their myths about it and even those that lot have myths about it. Think about these Russian Dolls were you go, it is a beautiful doll, but wait, as is actually just an outer cover. The outer cover, you take it away and theres something else. You keep taking more and more players and players of sales away to try to get at the real thing. Veils away to try to get to the real thing. I want to peel away the la yers on the constitution. Maybe you can help me peel away some more. To first myth that i want Start Talking about the constitution with is the notion of the constitution as a democratic document. Greats part of that whole democratic upsurge of the American Revolutionary era. If you look at the actual complaints of the people who wrote the constitution about the articles of confederation and the era that preceded that, you have 13 sovereign nations. The commonwealth of massachusetts, virginia, and the other 11 states were just as sovereign as the United States, canada, and mexico today. They had complaints about them but listen to some of the things they said. The problem was, an excess of democracy, and hedge fund democracy. 18thcentury people warhorse people, as you know. A couple of them used the analogy that really became. Seful for me when they quote silas deane, it seems like the range of government was held with two feeble of hand. Morris, another great horse man, despite having lost a leg, he literally had been to the manner born, he was born at his familys estate down in westchester new york. Was goingis of what on in the 1780s. Americans had become unruly thieves. Believe, the founders that it has started out great, it had gone too far. It had gotten out of hand. Theres a real sense in which the constitution was an effort to put this democratic genie back in the bottle, what specifically have gone wrong, all of the power according to the framers of the constitution was in the lower houses of the state legislatures. And these legislators were elected from very small districts, so everybody knew them and could put pressure on them, could know how they were voting on the state legislature ,nd these state representatives so, is a good time to think about this. These state rep as additives in all but the two states were elected every single year with the exception of South Carolina and connecticut, they are elected every six months. We see those 18thcentury versions of road signs. Those were real accountability. Too much in the eyes of the framers of the constitution. You have these legislatures with all of the power and in most states, the governor was not able to veto laws coming out of legislature. If you can get it to the legislature, courts could not overturn it. In most states, he couldnt. The is what led people like say would we have like the below legislature to say we have an excess of democracy. Arrivedtion that they at was to take many of the most important duties of the State Government and transfer them to the federal level, to create this new National Government. I focus on to duties in particular, one is control of the money supply. Before the constitution was adopted, each could write up this. Control of the money supply. The taxes for the federal government. Before the constitution, most of the federal government has no power to levy taxes. So, lets take these two powers newtransfer them to this National Government. The new National Government that was much less sensitive to popular pressure than any of the State Governments. The president did have a veto and not only could he stop laws but the senate could stop the laws. The Supreme Court could overturn this. They overturned federal laws. Look at all of these branches. The house of representatives is elected once every two years but the senate is elected for six years. The Supreme Court justices, as long as they behave, are in for life. We have people serving longerterm. All of those branches are elected indirectly, not by the people. Even the senate, which has been 1913. The framers decided to be independent of the people as chosen by the state of legislatures. Not an accident that they that was government less democratic. That was the point, to take the power out of the hands of ordinary citizens and in the hands of those they felt could rule better. I think the most important way that they did that was one of the things i mentioned that simply by shifting power from the state level to the level of , peopleral government knew their legislator personally. That is not true today. James madison defined it and that famous federals paper as extending the sphere of government. By shifting power to the national level, you make it ofder for these efforts people to put pressure on the federal government, the phrase that kept coming up was combating when they were right in the constitution which is concert. You want to make it harder and harder for ordinary people who have grievances to get together and to concert their measures, to put collected united pressure on the government. Letter thatvate madison wrote Thomas Jefferson, here is the goal that he set out. The reprobate it maximum tyranny is the only policy by which a republic can be administered unjust principles. This is latin for divide and conquer. Conquernot divide and the people because we hate them frome want to prevent them having a say in government. It is because we love them and dont want them to run things themselves. He wanted to stop that. One of the greatest pursuance of the era was the former commander of the connell army, george washington, and he put it this way in a letter that he wrote in october, 1786 before the constitution was written. Let the reigns of government be praised in time and help with a steady hand. The purpose of the constitution. That leads to the second myth that i talk about today, a lot of historians have said what i that the, but they say refrain for democracy was something that they got from the books that they read. There is a chapter on James Madison and his authorship of the constitution in which the a child of the revolution read some books. From madison, j, hamilton reading these books . Partly. I want to stress what i think was the more profound motive and that was the people who wrote the constitution believed that in the time after the revolutionary war, the u. S. Had become a bad credit risk. Not just the government, but the people themselves. The results of that was that the country had become unattractive to investors. Nobody would lend money to americans. So, they wrote the constitution in an effort to make the place a more safe place for investors. Again, that is something that they would do not just for their own economic benefit but for everybody. Articlecan see it in one, section 10 of the constitution which prohibits the state from doing all these things they have done back during the revolutionary war and after the revolutionary war. All of these things they had done for farmers. You hundredowed dollars, i can give them an old horse. They believe that the country had fallen under the sway of debtors and demagogues. That is what they were trying to stop. Not because they hated farmers come in because they were , because they thought that if we can stop oppressing creditors, if we can let them collect their dead, then they would be able to lend money in the future. Someone who really embodied this is James Madison. In the spring of 1787, when madison started writing drafts was 36constitution, he years old. He was still living with his parents. Like most 36 years old, he was hoping to get out of the house. So, he devised one of the classic Great American get rich quick schemes and that was to speculate in western lands, it indian land, we would now say. In the fall of 1784, he went what is friend up to now rome, new york for an indian treaty. He saw how fertile land was and is in its got home, he formed a monroe,hip with james who would succeed him in the presidency a couple of decades later. They bought a few thousand acres but they wanted to buy a lot more of what was the one thing that they were missing, started capital. They needed to borrow money in order to invested in land, by this land, and then sell it. Course, it would be easy to pay back their creditors. Nobody would lend them the money. And so they had actually cut back the scale of their ambition. And then madison had the idea, americans wont lend us money, maybe people in france will. He wrote his friend Thomas Jefferson who was over there as the american representative and said, around these french anchors and aristocrats and see if you can borrow a bunch of money. Jefferson immediately wrote back and said, nothing doing. They were afraid if they lent money to madison and monroe and somehow the deal went at, they would not be able to go into a Virginia Court and sue them to get the money back. That is really the problem with the framers of the constitution. Lots of other problems, of course, but the fundamental problem they were trying to solve was to make it impossible for state legislatures to protect debtors. There was a real sense in which when madison wrote off the fundamental rights for which he was contending was the right to be sued. If you can be sued, you can borrow money. That is a short version of the framers economic interpretation, but it brings up another myth about the constitution, and that is the myth that the framers were right, and that is one i want to challenge today because so many historians have sort of gone along with the idea that sure enough, the American Revolution originally went too far. Many people thought that the American Revolution had also gone too far, and they have gotten a lot of endorsements from modern historians. If i just go across the Charles River here to harvard, the eminent scholar reported on the 1780s, the time leading up to the constitution, again and again, minority Property Rights had been overwhelmed by populist majorities. The next thing i want to do today is to try to disagree with all these historians who support that and say actually, there were two sides to this story. That, yes, there is a case to be made for the big problem here is we are not attracting enough investment, that there is a case to be made for the farmers as well, so lets look at it from their standpoint. One of the main motives for the American Revolution was to get out from under that british taxation without representation. Well, they rebelled in 1776 and succeeded with the peace treaty of 1783 in winning independence, and then what happened . The representatives, now that we have our own representatives, levied taxes on them that were four times higher on average than they had ever been asked to pay as british colonies. These were taxes to pay off the war debt. You can see why they were levied, but i want you to look at it from the standpoint of the farmers. You not only have these incredibly high taxes, but they are much higher even than they seem on paper because there was almost no money in circulation in the economy. Imagine if i told you guys, we are going to have a new federal tax of 1000. You would all go home going, thats no good. Suppose i said that you have to pay in green stamps. Those of you who remember what they are, do any of you still have any . I would expect peter is still have green stamps, but even he doesnt. If there was one person in the room who did have green stamps, we would all be going to her or him and saying, gimme, please. Thats what it was like with gold and silver in this economy. So little was circulating in the economy that when a tax was levied that had to be paid in gold and silver, to get somebody to had who had some to part with that, you had to give them four or five horses when it had to be it used to be you only had to give them one or two. It was massive deflation, and one of the phrases that got used up and down i have read petitions for legislatures and newspaper essays and also to of other documents up and down from New Hampshire to georgia over 13 states, and the phrase that keeps popping up is that when a legislature levies these taxes four times higher than we paid before and does not put money in circulation to pay those taxes with, it is making the same demand of us that pharaoh made of the ancient israelites, and that is to make bricks without straw. People just could not do it, and people were having the sheriff take away their cattle, sometimes even their pots and pans to pay these taxes because they just did not have the money to pay. So you can the white you can see why somebody would support Something Like paper money because that gives them a medium with which to pay these taxes. I mentioned briefly that the main purpose of these taxes levied in the 17 80s was to pay off the revolutionary war debt. If the debt had remained in the hands of the people who initially got these war bonds, the soldiers who fought the revolutionary war and had been paid off many times with bonds, or the farmers you know, the army comes through your town and says, everybody, give us your cattle, and we do not have cash to pay you, so we are going to give you i owe you ious. Initially, the bonds of gone to ordinary people, many of them, but they were quickly bought up by bond speculators, who could see that the soldiers you cannot eat a bond. If you have been paid off with a bond and you are hungry, you have to turn that into gold and silver so you can use that to go by bread. Soldiers who had initially gotten the bonds had to dump them at as little as three dollars for a bond that was marked 100. The vast majority of the bonds quickly ended up in the hands of the speculators. I have to tell you guys that was a major part of the research i did here into the whole land speculation business because i could see that was a critical engine of the constitution. Bond speculators demand these really high taxes, and those taxes cause the farmers to demand policies like paper money, and policies like paper money freak out guys like madison because they can see what it is doing to the Investment Climate chasing away investors. So people like madison write the constitution to prohibit things like paper money. I knew bond speculation was really important, but as i would start to talk about it, i could see peoples eyes kind of glaze over. Somehow there are people out there who do not get excited about government finance. I do not know how that is. All this time, im working on bond speculators, i was trying to find one guy that i could use to put a face on all the others, and i would find a letter by this one guy talking about speculation, but it was one list, and someone else would mention the account book, and it would reduce these scattered pieces, and i was not finding what i really wanted. That was one bond speculators who had left enough documentation that i could use him to really put a face on all the others. So one day here at the massachusetts historical society, i finally found my bond speculator, and it turns out the he i had been looking for all this time was a she. It was Abigail Adams. In june 1777, 20 years before her husband became president , she began the process that she would continue all through those 20 years of fighting these by getting these soldiers and farmers and other peoples bonds from them at a fraction of their face value and then holding them with the hope that the price would go up. She was ultimately very successful at it. There was one series of bonds she bought at 15 she would pay 15 for a 100 dollar bond, and she cashed out when they had risen from 15 to 90, so she made a profit six times her initial investment. But it took her a while to get going as a speculator because she initially had to overcome the objections of her husband, john. John adams hated on speculators. He saw them as these parasites who redistribute wealth without actually producing anything, and they are also a threat to the government, he believed. That is, that they are a small clique of people with power to influence the government and incentive to influence the government in their own favor. So she had to persuade her husband to stop investing in land, which he thought was a much safer investment safer for the person because, you know, you cannot burn down 40 acres of land, but you can burn the stuff on it, but the land will still be there. It was a safer investment for the person but also safer for the country because bond speculators were such a threat to the government, whe