I’m a sucker for, "golly, if only someone had warned us" jokes.
These days, it seems like half the nation is waking up to unchecked government power like it came out of nowhere, like nobody could possibly have seen it coming.
Of course somebody did. A lot of somebodies, actually.
Today is the anniversary of the day the Constitution was signed, which makes it the right day to remember something most people never learned: nearly all of the men who built this government were terrified of it.
And most of them were pretty vocal about what they feared.
Patrick Henry looked at the proposed Constitution in 1788 and said, “absolutely not.” He refused appointment as a delegate to the Convention, claiming to “smell a rat” in the whole messy business. He warned that a distant federal government with vague, expansive powers would swallow the states, that the presidency would drift toward something monarchical, and that the federal courts would interpret the document in whatever direction grew federal power.
It’s like he had a crystal ball.
But even many of the men who did sign were scared of what they'd made.
Benjamin Franklin, at the close of the Constitutional Convention, stood up to warn that what they’d just created "can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other."
In other words, the Constitution had an expiration date, and the expiration date was us forgetting how to govern ourselves.
Thomas Jefferson spent his life watching the federal judiciary and not liking what he saw. "The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary," he wrote. "That body, like gravity, ever acting with noiseless foot and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains."
Noiseless foot and unalarming advance. He was describing, in 1821, exactly how you lose a country—not in a coup, but by degrees, like the frog in a boiling pot.
Madison, the so-called “Father of the Constitution”, warned that "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands... may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." He knew that tyranny often arrived as consolidation—power silently pooling in one place—so he tried to build the structure of this government with checks and balances in the hopes that what he knew was likely to happen, wouldn’t.
These men did not believe freedom was the natural state of man under government rule.
They believed it was a fragile, unnatural, hard-won arrangement that power would spend every generation trying to erode, and that the only thing standing between a free people and the "noiseless foot" was whether that people remembered what their role in protecting themselves was.
The Constitution isn't a magic document. It's a set of warnings and restraints written by men who'd studied every republic that came before and watched them all fall the same way.
The problem now is that most kids (and a ton of adults!) couldn't tell you what the separation of powers is for, or why Madison was so afraid of consolidation, or what rat Patrick Henry smelled. And people who don’t even know what the threat is are hardly capable of protecting themselves from it.
That's the gap our America's History series exists to close.
It's not the dates-and-names version that made you hate history in ninth grade. It's the real story of these United States—the arguments, the fights, the men who signed and the men who refused, the things they were terrified of and the structure they built to hold those things at bay.
Volume 1 takes them from the Magna Carta up to 1776. Volume 2 through the Revolution and the Constitution itself. Volume 3 into the early republic, where the founders' greatest fears started coming true almost immediately.
We’re running a Constitution Day Flash Sale starting today.
It includes the full three-volume bundle, curriculum and audiobooks for over $300 off their regular price, and the individual volumes are over $100 off! If you already have our history books, we’ve got tons of other resources on massive markdown too.
Check it all out here!
I think most of the Founders did the best they could with what they had. They certainly put tremendous time and effort into warning us of the threats and dangers to liberty that they knew were inherent in any federal government.
Things sure have gone off the rails, but it’s definitely not because no one tried to warn us.
I think a lot of that is by design. State-run money, state-run schools, massive entitlement programs and a bloated defense all depend on the tax farm (that’s us) to exist. There is very little incentive for anyone to ever be taught the lessons the founders tried to leave for us.
That means it’s up to parents and grandparents to do the work of saving what’s left of the republic by teaching the kids they love the truths that they won’t learn anywhere else.
We’ve spent the last decade creating the resources to make that job just a little bit easier.
— Connor
