The Great American Story: The Experiment Begins

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Jeremiah Regan: Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.

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Juan Davalos: And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with the great American story A land of Hope. We're going to be covering lectures five and six today. The experiment begins.

00:00:23
Jeremiah Regan: That's right. So in our last lecture, we learned that America had won the Revolutionary War. It had established a new nation, and now it needed to go about the business of governing itself.

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Juan Davalos: That's a part that we typically forget because we focus so much on the Revolutionary War and how great America, you know, the idea of America is and and the beauty of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, those are incredible documents. The beauty of the American political thought as expressed in the Federalist Papers. But then we forget that we actually have to put that into practice. And that's very difficult. And that's that's what Americans start to do in this time period. And that's complicated. It takes a lot of prudence.

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Jeremiah Regan: Yeah. The difficulty wasn't a surprise to the founders. They knew that governing themselves would be difficult. All governing is difficult. And when you diffuse power among the people and require the people to think about the laws of nature and nature's God as the standard, that that's a good theory. It does work in practice, as our history has shown, but it doesn't mean it's easy. It means people need to figure out how to interpret the laws of nature and nature's God. They need to think about contentious issues and issues of justice and issues of prudence. What what is right by nature, and then what is going to be most likely to affect our safety and happiness. And so these are the types of questions that the founders had to wrestle with.

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Juan Davalos: This is a beautiful course, and it's appropriate for us to be looking at the history of America as a land of hope. As we are getting ready to celebrate America's 250th anniversary here shortly, at least at the time of this recording. And, uh, it's a bit of a long course because it covers so much of American history, but it's definitely worth it. And we encourage you to take advantage of our study guides. If you go to hillsdale.edu/course, that's hillsdale.edu/course. There's a lot of resources in the course, not just our study guides, but additional videos that you can watch, additional readings from the from American history that you can look at. So we encourage you to go to hillsdale.edu/course.

00:02:32
Jeremiah Regan: That's right. We're always pleased to have you listen to the podcast. But as Juan said, this is a long, beautiful but very involved and complicated course. So really take advantage of the learning that we offer. Now we turn to Doctor McClay for lectures five and six of the great American story, land of Hope. The experiment begins part one and part two.

00:02:59
Wilfred McClay: Now, you may remember from last time that I closed with a kind of ode to the United States Constitution and talked about the way in which, unlike other constitutions, it is almost identified with American history. It is a part of us, an expression of us. But I cautioned at the very end that it was in certain respects conceived as flawed, and I had in mind its inability to deal with the question of slavery, which was becoming a more and more entrenched institution in American life. In some ways kicked the can down the road, uh, and, uh, to, uh, our subsequent, uh, disfavor. But let me talk a little bit about slavery. Slavery is ubiquitous in human history. It's not peculiar to American history. It's almost the rule rather than the exception in the overwhelming bulk of human history. It's been underwritten and supported, at least for a time, by all the great religions of the world. Uh, the important thing to know about for the start about the British colonies is it was never intended to be any part of a sort of master plan for the colonies, for the development of English colonization. Of course, as we saw, there was there was no master plan, so there wouldn't be a master plan for it to be part of. But in many ways it arose in an incidental way, in tandem with a more consciously thought out labor system called indentured servitude. This was an important but brutal institution, important in that it supplied a way that poor Europeans who were willing to make the passage to America, uh, for and contribute their labor to the development of the colonies, could have their passage paid for by their employers in exchange for a period of, of, of contractual servitude to that master. And then they would be freed, and then they would be able to pursue their lives as free men. It's estimated that as many as half of the white male immigrants to the Chesapeake area, uh, were indentured servants originally. Um, and it may well be we don't know this for sure that the first black Africans who arrived in Jamestown in 1619 aboard a Dutch ship came as indentured servants, uh, rather than as slaves. What we do know is that over time, the African population grew very slowly in in the Chesapeake area. Uh, and, uh, that the first Africans experienced conditions fairly similar to the whites. But as time went on, the 1650s or so, uh, Ezra numbers increased slowly. Um, there were practices of discrimination against them because of their race that began to be imposed and hardened until by the 1660s, these were laws, slave codes kept by, um, or passed by colonial assemblies, which dictated that Africans and their offspring were to be held in permanent bondage. That is, they were to be chattel, human, uh, legal property of their owners. This interest in using slaves grew as indentured servants became more rare and more expensive. By 1750, half the population of Virginia and two thirds of South Carolina were the enslaved Africans. It should be remembered in this context that even though I've mentioned two southern states at the time of the revolution, slavery was still permitted in all states. So by the time of the Constitutional Convention, the institution of slavery was pretty well established in at least a section, a portion of the new nation. And it was economically entrenched because of tobacco and eventually cotton and other cash crops that were what the South depended upon for its economic well-being. So this when the revolution came and the revolution was made in the name of liberty, this fact caught the eye of perceptive critics of the Americans. Uh, the famous Samuel Johnson said in 1775, the year of Lexington and Concord. How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes? And it was a good question, particularly since the most eloquent yelpers were people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who owned slaves themselves. More than half of the framers of the Constitution were slaveholders. So it's a reasonable question to ask today. How can we admire, uh, or how can we even understand these otherwise enlightened, uh, individuals who are exemplary in so many ways, uh, buying into being so blind to, uh, the dehumanization of these, of these people who were enslaved, how could they have been blind to the fundamental humanity of the enslaved. Um. How could they be at peace with this practice? Um, and what made the American situation especially intolerable was the fact that it was, as Johnson was pointing out in his way, uh, that this practice was, um, uh, ethical to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the principles that Americans claimed to stand for and to practice the high and noble ideals. They were living in inconsistency, and they knew it. By and large, Jefferson agonized over his possession of slaves. Washington freed his slaves at his death. Jefferson did not. But both of them understood that in some way slavery was an offense, an offense, as Jefferson would later say. Events against God and an offense Against the well-being of the nation, a possible source of national dissolution. Many of the framers believed that slavery was on its way out, would naturally disappear after the revolution, and that nothing dramatic needed to be done about it. It was just an institution whose whose time had come and was passing. Roger Sherman of Connecticut, very influential figure in the compromise by which the Constitution came to be, took this view. Oliver Ellsworth said in slavery and time will not be a speck in our country. The Constitutional Convention, as I said, took an ambivalent view. It didn't applaud slavery. It never used the word. It never used the word slave or master. Uh, it didn't enunciate the principle of slavery. Um, it was, I think, a clear case in which the need to foster unity among the colonies to form a new nation took precedence over the writing of what many saw as a wrong, and that that would have to be postponed, which from our point of view, at times we say, well, you know, they should have taken care of it at the time. But this is a it's a different question for us to ask today than it was for them to deal with at the time. And that's part of what I mean when I talk about the need to think historically is to put yourself in the context in which particularly political actors are acting, and instead of saying that they should have conformed to an ideal good that really was not within the range of political possibility, we should admire him for what they were able to accomplish. I think this is something we're going to see in Abraham Lincoln, uh, very soon as an example of this. So slavery, uh, was there was a concession to slavery. The notorious 3/5 rule, which, uh, counted the slave population, uh, for representation purposes. Um, even though slaves had the no, no rights as citizens, by the way, northern delegates had wanted slaves to be counted at 100% for taxation, but zero for representation. Um, so they, they were in a way the ones forced to compromise. Um, but the Constitution's otherwise, uh, notably silent about slavery. There's a, there is a concession allowing the transatlantic slave trade to be abolished after 1808, which it was. Um, and there's a fugitive slave clause in the Constitution, although as I said before, it does not use the word slavery. It says persons held to service or labor had to be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due. They're really trying very hard not to use the word slave and not to use the word master. Um, and I think that's at the very least, this silence, this indirection, this euphemism reflects an unease with the institution, um, and a desire not to go so far as to enunciate the defense of slavery as a principle of to which the Constitution would be bound. I think what we have to do is to see this period as a period of moral transition. They're on the cusp of a transformation of moral sensibility in the world, uh, that leads by the 19th century to the abolition of slavery. Uh, and we are on the other side of that transformation so fully that it really requires an exercise of the historical imagination to see how good exemplary men could have nevertheless countenanced or or been willing to kick the can down the road about such an issue. Um, hence, I argue, it would be wrong, as so many people do in a casual way these days, to say that the United States was founded on slavery. No, it was founded on other things. It was founded on other things, principles of liberty and self-rule that had been worked out over many years in English and then American history. Uh, and, uh, the fact that these foundational principles didn't come into the world unstained, unmarred untroubled is simply, uh, an, an example of the way that history actually happens. There are no immaculate conceptions or virgin births in history. Uh, there may be one, but but only that one. So, um, onward with the Constitution. It had to be it had been drafted. It had been approved. Now it had to be ratified by the states. And that was not a for sure slam dunk outcome. There was a there was a lot of ingrained inertia, opposition to changing something like a constitution. Uh, there are always winners and losers whenever you change the structure of things. And many people who had it good under the old regime, particularly state and local elites, were not thrilled with the idea of having a much more powerful national government. Um, in every state, there would be a heated debate over whether or not the Constitution should be Ratified. And of course, the factions divided into the Federalists, who were very clever in seizing the high ground of a positive name for themselves, and the Anti-Federalists, who, you know, had the the negative name and were a much more heterogeneous group, but concerned about the concentration of power in a way reflecting this older American revolutionary concern about the dangers and corruptions that come with the concentration of power. Someone like Patrick Henry of Virginia, who was a great patriot in the time of the revolution, opposed the Constitution because, he said it squints toward monarchy. That it was would represent a repudiation of what the revolution had been fought to accomplish. So these debates were heated. And like many heated political debates, it gave rise to some of the most wonderful and rich writing about basic, fundamental political issues that we've ever seen. Um, the United States hasn't produced, uh, people like John Locke and Rousseau and so Hobbes and so on, who've written massive treatises. Instead, we have these occasional documents that are the, the focal point of the richness of our political tradition. And certainly the Federalist Papers written by Hamilton, Jay and Madison, um, as part of the debate in New York over the ratification, are among the most distinguished products of that debate, probably the most distinguished products of that debate, Thomas Jefferson's said, and others have echoed this, that it was the definitive work of interpretation of the United States Constitution, and people still go to it for that purpose. Just not to say the Anti-Federalists are all did not also produce thoughtful expositions that bear rereading now, and that influenced the course of the nation then and since. And many of these writers on both sides wrote under Roman pseudonyms, Publius was the name that the three authors of the Federalist adopted. Brutus and Cato were authors on the. On the Anti-Federalist side. And the choice of those two names indicating a Republican small r Republican sensibility over. Against the idea that this new Constitution with a powerful presidency would be, um, squinting towards empire. Uh, to paraphrase Patrick Henry, um, the papers of the Federalists, uh, bear extended analysis that I unfortunately don't have time for, but they featured a darkly realistic view of human nature. You remember Washington's remark about. We've had two too high an opinion of human nature. The Federalist does not reflect too high an opinion of of human nature. Um. If men were angels, government would not be necessary. Uh, Madison said Federalist 51, which, um, he clearly believed was a definitive statement about men. Uh, ambition, he said, must be made to counteract ambition because the sources of faction are sown into the hearts of men. And the only way to, to counteract, uh, the excessive ambition, uh, power, mad tendencies of, of, of some men is to have other men who are similarly ambitious, uh, to counter them. Uh, so the need for a constitution that would check use checks and balances in opposing forces to harness, as we saw last time, that tendency toward conflict, towards the exercise of power. Um, something else that comes out in the Federalist is the, the huge stakes that the authors of the Constitution, the framers, as we call them, saw implicit in their enterprise. Uh, they really thought that, uh, this was the last, best chance to use words that Lincoln would use later for the whole world to establish a Republican form of government. What Hamilton said in Federalist number one, that the question before them was to decide whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political Constitutions on accident and force. In other words, can we self-consciously making use of what we know about history, about the ways in which republics have failed in the past? Um, all the way through human history, going back to antiquity, can we make use of this knowledge in order to create a republic that will not fall into these traps, will be, uh, to the extent possible with human flesh to be immune to them. So this is one of the great enterprises in their minds of human history. They were, uh, using this unique occasion to try to create a new science of politics for a new world. They were using history to defy history. Uh, so, um, the Anti-Federalists, uh, were not they were defeated in the end, but they were not completely defeated. They managed to wring out of Madison and the others a concession that there would be a series of amendments to the Constitution, which we now call the Bill of rights, that were designed to protect individual liberties against the incursions of this newly powerful national government. And thank goodness that they did. They deserve a lot of credit for seeing things the framers themselves did not see so well. Um, uh, we would not want to have the Constitution without the Bill of rights in it. Actually, to the extent that some people think that when you talk about the Constitution, you're only talking about the Bill of rights and not the Electoral College or the separation of powers or any of the other things that go with the Constitution. So it's seen by all of us as integral to the Constitution. At the time the Constitution was adopted. A lot of people were skeptical, even those who voted for it. Even George Washington himself confessed that he didn't expect it to last more than 20 years. He would have been surprised, as anyone, I suppose, to see it still going 230 some odd years later. Um, but the skepticism was justified. This was something new. This was a blueprint for a building that hadn't been built. It was the score for music that had not yet been played. No one knew what was going to happen with the building was going to look like what the music was going to sound like. Um, but it made a big difference that everyone knew who would be running the show from the presidency, at least for a few years, to get things started. And that would be, of course, George Washington, who was both blessed and cursed with the status of being the indispensable man, as his biographer, uh, once put it, uh, James Thomas Flexner. The Indispensable Man is the title of his biography of Washington. Washington didn't really want to do this. He wanted to retire. He wanted to go back to his beautiful home at Mount Vernon, on the shores of the Potomac River, and live the life of a gentleman farmer that he hadn't been able to live for 20 or more years, that he had been engaged in strenuous public service, some of which we talked about last time. But the country was one of the great experiments of human history, and he couldn't back away from accepting his responsibility to see to it that the experiment succeeded. He said in his inaugural address the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the Republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps, as finally staked on the experiment. He uses that word Experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. So, you know, he had to be there. He couldn't back out. He couldn't go back to the farm and take it easy. Among the most urgent tasks, tasks facing him was the country's parlous financial state. And he turned this task over to Alexander Hamilton, who was something of an economic genius. And Hamilton devised a basically three parts oversimplifying a little bit, a three part plan for bringing the nation into solvency. First, it would assume all the debts of the states and pay off the national debt in full at par value. Um, this was ingenious because it would bind the states, bind the most powerful force imaginable to the national government. It wouldn't depend just on affection. There would be material considerations involved. Second, he proposed high tariffs. Yes, you heard me right. High tariffs to protect American nascent American industries and help the United States to develop a balanced commercial economy, something he avidly sought. And third, he called for the creation of a national bank to deposit government funds and serve as a regulator of the currency through the printing of banknotes. These were the three principal things that he wanted to do in his economic program. There are other things, but we can look at the book for those. Um, and, uh, the National Bank was the most controversial. They were all controversial. But the National Bank, particularly Madison Jefferson, Virginians hated the idea. Um, on the other hand, Hamilton and they thought it was unconstitutional. The Constitution, in this view, was a charter of enumerated powers. Enumerated Meaning if it ain't there, you ain't got it. It's enumerated. It's spelled out. The powers that are given to the federal government, the national government. Hamilton, on the other hand, said, well, hey, look at article one, section eight. It says that Congress has the power to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying out the functions of government. Well, this went to a very fundamental disagreement that would last for years, arguably is still with us today between the strict construction and loose construction of the Constitution. Um, Jefferson and Hamilton symbolized these two approaches. Jefferson. The strict construction. Hamilton the loose interpretation. Jefferson thought the loose interpretation was just a fancy way of saying the end justifies the means. Uh, Hamilton thought that the nation was a Hercules in the crib, as he once said that it was just ready to bust out if. As long as it was given the economic tools to do so, including a government that was active enough to to produce results. So the two men came to symbolize these different views, not just of government, but of the nation as a whole. What kind of nation was America to be? Hamilton envisioned an America that was a commercial power, that was a world power that would be able to contend, go toe to toe economically and ultimately in other respects, too, with the great nations of the world. Jefferson, on the other hand, thought the ideal for a virtuous citizenry, and he used that older language of virtue was a fundamentally based in agriculture. His America would be an America of yeoman farmers, a freehold land holders who work their own farms and, uh, and in that way made a living a sufficiency. They would maybe with some sale of surpluses, but, uh, not capitalists in the full sense of a capitalistic agriculture. Those who labor in the earth, he once said, are the chosen people of God. And so he. He favored agriculture, even though he. He was not much of a farmer himself, and actually loved spending time in Paris and hobnobbing with cosmopolitan intellectuals. A very interesting guy in that regard. The two men also represented different views of foreign policy, which the United States, despite its distance from Europe, could not avoid, because, after all, France had been part of the successful revolution in America. And when France had its own revolution in 1789, a lot of Americans, including Jefferson, including those who followed Jefferson, were on the French side. They thought the French Revolution was great. They thought it was an extension of the same kind of Liberalism, the same kind of affirmation of universal rights that had been alluded to in the Declaration of Independence. Why not? Hamilton, on the other hand, um, uh, who favored, uh, imitating the British model in some ways he was he was, uh, more impressed with the British way of doing things than the American, even though he was a great fighter for the Constitution. Um, Washington, who was president for two terms, the first two presidential terms in American history, uh, thought the better path was neutrality. And so he tried to keep a neutral path, uh, which with great difficulty, because the nation was not inclined to follow, or at least the most activist elements in American political life were not inclined to follow. And indeed, this was a period, particularly getting into the 1790s of great stress in American national life. Constant worries that factionalism was going to break out, and even that those who supported the French might go to the extent of treason, uh, in their support of the French cause and their opposition to their homegrown opponents. Washington gave a wonderful farewell address on September 17th of 1796 as he was about to leave office, and he cautioned against excessive entanglements in foreign affairs and wanted to stress National Union as the most important principle of American foreign policy. Um, this proved very hard to sustain, particularly after he was um, had stepped down and was succeeded by John Adams, his vice president. Adams had a very turbulent and difficult presidency, a one term presidency, our first one term presidency, and Adams may well have been ill suited to the job. Washington was an impossible act to follow. All sorts of reasons for that, uh, administration being problematic. But there's one thing that he did or allowed to happen that especially marks him, gives him a black mark in historical legacy. And that is his administration's passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which basically were efforts to, uh, they were response to what was seen as the fake news of the time coming from the Federalists. Well, both from Federalists and Republicans. And it became a crime under these laws to publish what someone else might judge to be, quote, false, scandalous and malicious criticisms of high government officials. Um, 25 Republican newspaper editors were Prosecuted under this these laws. In response, Jefferson and Madison did something equally bad in in drafting the so-called Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, which were basically, uh, proclamations of the right of states because the Constitution was considered a compact between the states. An issue will come up very soon in another context, because it was a compact between the states. The states had the right to interpose themselves or to nullify federal laws that they didn't agree with. So which of these is worse? They're both pretty bad. George Washington was appalled by the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, and he said that if pursued, they would dissolve the Union. So both parties were fearing out of control at this point, uh, that the Republicans were acting like were being seen by the other side by the Federalists says wild eyed Jacobins. The Federalists were being seen by the Republicans, the Jeffersonians as crypto monarchists, people who wanted to impose monarchy on the country. And then, in the midst of all this, December 1799, George Washington dies at a time when all this acrimony reigns and there's no longer that figure, that enormous figure, not just physically enormous, but politically and spiritually enormous, uh, leader, uh, to hold things together. Miraculously, though, the election of 1800, which was a fiercely contested election, as you would expect it to be between Jefferson and Adams, um, which Jefferson won by a small but decisive margin. Uh, there's some complications there we can't get into. But he did win it pretty clearly. And as President Jefferson turned down the heat. He turned out to be a very, uh, unifying president. Surprisingly so. He gave one of the great inaugural addresses in which he began to express the desire for that kind of unity that Federalists and Republicans were all on the same side, that they were part of the same union. Um, so, uh, the first inaugural was almost as masterly a speech as Washington's farewell address. This is a great time for American oratory. So the revolution of 1800, as Jefferson would later call it, was actually a step in the maturation of the nation. Um, uh, symbolized by the venue in which Jefferson spoke. He spoke at the new national capital in Washington, D.C., for the first time, uh, of of an administration having an inaugural there. Jefferson's presidency. I'm going to pass over rather quickly, except to say that there's a pattern to it. And the pattern is that Jefferson, first of all, found himself unable to reverse and even unwilling in the end, to reverse Hamilton's economic program, to which he had so heartily objected. Um, he found himself unable to overcome the federal judiciary led by John Marshall. Uh, the Federalist Supreme Court justice, who was a very long serving chief justice and really established the role of the court through the Marbury versus Madison case as the agent of judicial review. That is a review of the constitutionality of acts of Congress. Um, none of which Jefferson, who really distrusted the judiciary, being a more radical Democrat, small d Democrat. Um, uh, he didn't really think that, uh, judges should be able to lord it over the popular will. Thanks to Marshall, the Supreme Court would have a preeminent place in American politics, one that was never spelled out in the Constitution itself. Although most of us think that the founders, the framers did intend for such a role to exist, the greatest achievement of his administration was the Louisiana Purchase, which was, uh, heretofore in American history, the most, uh, sweeping act using executive power to acquire 800,000mi² of additional land, more than doubling the size of the country. Again, the details of how the purchase came about are interesting. And there in in the book, land of Hope. But, um, it was the bargain of the millennium, arguably $15 million paid the French for this enormous tract of land to the west of the existing United States. So consider the irony. Just as Jefferson consolidated the Hamiltonian economic program under his watch, he affirmed a kind of Hamiltonian interpretation of the Constitution by acts like the Louisiana Purchase. And in doing all of this, he consolidated his power over against the Federalists. Hamilton's party, and by the end of his administration the Federalist Party was a shadow of its former self on its way to death. This is very ironic and very American. It seems to me in this way that the practice of politics doesn't always obey the ideological lines that you would expect. After Jefferson, his administration came in the election of 1808, his retirement back to Monticello in Virginia. Um, the problem of the British, uh, and British interference with American trade, which had been a sort of nagging problem for many years, became so prominent and so intolerable that James Madison, who was Jefferson's successor as president, ended up being pushed into war, the war of 1812, um, which is a war that just a few things to be said. The United States had no business fighting such a war where the United States is very fortunate that it got out of that war without too much damage, uh, to itself. There are two good things that came of it. One was the composition of the poem the Star-Spangled banner, which would become our national anthem. Francis Scott Key, observing the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore and the flag waving. And then a second. A good thing was a a glorious, if unnecessary, battle fought in New Orleans under the leadership of General Andrew Jackson, who defeated a superior British force and gave the nation something to be proud of and gave the nation a new hero who. A military hero on a par with Washington, on a par with the heroes of the Revolution. Um. Looking forward into a new era that would be dominated by the common man. So, um, uh, those were the two good results of the otherwise potentially disastrous war of 1812, uh, which the United States probably would have been better off not fighting if Hamilton had been a stronger. Excuse me, if Madison had been a stronger and more forceful leader. So things were looking better for the United States in terms of foreign policy after the war of 1812. It was really possible to. Absent itself from world politics, the Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed by James Monroe, who was a protege of Jefferson and Madison, declared the Western Hemisphere off limits to further European colonization. It was kind of declaring a sphere of influence for the United States and the United States, now free from foreign entanglements for a period of time, began to boom economically. The years after the war of 1812 were great years of economic growth, the building of railroads, the knitting together of the nation as a national economy looked like smooth sailing ahead. But one thing, one speck on the horizon to come back to where we began, that unresolved question of slavery. When the state of Missouri, which was acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, applied for admission to the Union, it was a big problem because up to that time, the nation had managed an informal balance between slave states, states that permitted slavery and the northern states that had abolished it. So the question of slavery and slavery's future in the country was kept at bay by this rough parity of states. To admit Missouri, which had been settled by slaveholding pioneers, would reopen. The question In general. You will see this when we talk about the Mexican War in a lecture or two. The westward expansion always opened up the question of slavery. It always put it back on the table, because there was the question of whether slavery would be allowed to expand into the territories. And this Missouri episode led to a huge national debate over the problem that had not been resolved at Philadelphia at 1787, and it would not resolve the debate in this occasion either. A way of carving a state, the state of Maine, out of Massachusetts and admitting it to the Union in parity with Missouri was how the problem was solved. But it concluded with Jefferson having a deep foreboding that the Missouri Compromise, as it was called of 1820, was more of a harbinger of a very dark future than it was a solution to the problem, he wrote to a friend. This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed, for the moment, but this is a reprieve only not a final sentence. He never spoke more darkly than this, and more prophetically, and he went on to express his sense of things in a memorable final sentence, which I will close with. We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. He had identified the principal danger to the American experiment, and we'll see how that danger manifested itself in our next lecture. Thank you.

00:44:19
Juan Davalos: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. If you want to continue learning, please visit hillsdale.edu slash. There you will find over 40 free online courses, including Ancient Christianity, the Genesis story, classic children's literature, and many more. The courses include additional readings, study guides, fully produced videos, and you can chat with your fellow students on a dedicated forum. Upon completing a course, you will also get a certificate. All our courses are free because we believe that what you'll learn will enrich your life, and that a virtuous citizen is the best defense for liberty. So pursue the education necessary for freedom and happiness at hillsdale.edu/today. That's hillsdale.edu. Thanks for listening.