Ideals of our Founding Fathers

Thank you Mr. President for this interview. We’re both lawyers and students of history. I look forward to your comments on the “ideals of our Founding Fathers” you referenced in your Inaugural Address.

Yes, of course, we must exclude that slavery matter. Both Washington and Jefferson, until they died, held slaves.

Did you know that one of your four men founded a secret society that anonymously published a pamphlet by Thomas Paine favoring abolition?

Yes, it was Franklin. If he’d come out in public and said that, would he ever again hold high public office?

Right. You can’t get too far ahead of your times. What would we have lost, without Franklin’s services?

Yes, wed have lost the American Revolution without Franklin’s treaty with the French. That gave us the French fleet and marines at Yorktown. But there’s another huge loss.

Give up? We would have lost the Constitution, as well. Franklin’s advice for wise compromise was essential. Plus he was the only Founder who really understood “intellectual property rights.”

When you referred to “markets that have unmatched power to generate wealth and expand freedom” did you think of the Copyright and Patent Clause?

I thought so, but did you know that Franklin created that clause? Did you realize that Clause led directly to Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Alfred Hitchcock, Count Basie, Patsy Cline, and Oprah Winfrey, among many, many others?

No, you’re right. Most people don’t consider the consequences of the ideals of the Founders.

Thank you for using a Tom Paine quote. Please tell the listeners more about that event.

Yes, they no longer teach students, in high school or college, that George Washington’s troops were about to end their enlistments, which were only for six months. So, Washington made an all-or-nothing gamble on Christmas in 1776 and took his remaining 3,000 able-bodied troops across the Delaware, at night, in a snowstorm, to attack the Hessians at Trenton.

Did you deliberately avoid the opening quote from Paine’s American Crisis, because it’s been overused? “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his nation. But he that serves it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

Jefferson for his intellect? Madison for the Constitution? Yet, all things considered, you choose George Washington for his leadership in all ways?

Let’s pursue an event in General Washington’s leadership of the American Revolution. Do you recall the fate of British Major John Andre?

Right. He was the British agent for Benedict Arnold’s intended betrayal of the garrison at West Point. Andre was captured behind American lines, in civilian clothes, with incriminating documents in his boot.

Yes, he was a spy. But American generals cannot go around the world, point at any civilian, say “He’s a spy,” and have him killed, can they?

Yes, there does have to be “some kind of trial.” Andre got a “drumhead” trial before General Washington. We call those military tribunals today.

They were conducted under the Law of War, which is centuries older than the United States, and was adopted into US military law in 1789.

That process was approved by a unanimous Supreme Court in the 1942 Quirin case. Did you know that?

Do you have your Blackberry handy? I’ll bet you have Internet access on that thing, don’t you?

So, by shutting down the military tribunals at Guantanamo, aren’t you attacking, rather than defending, both the ideals of the Founders and the Constitution that they wrote?

I finally have my book, “Jefferson the Virginian” by Dumas Malone. You could probably find these books in your local library.

There are a number of pages that deal with his early efforts against slavery, but the one from page 187 reads as follows: “Jefferson erred on the side of optimism when he asserted in his “Summary View” that the abolition of domestic slavery was the greatest object of desire in the colonies. Speaking for Virginia, he was correct in saying that previous attempts to prevent importations of slaves from Africa had been defeated by the royal negative...”

The “Summary View” is available on the Internet. It is fairly long, but the portion about slavery is about half way through it and reads as follows: “The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa; yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative: Thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice. Nay, the single interposition of an interested individual against a law was scarcely ever known to fail of success, though in the opposite scale were placed the interests of a whole country. That this is so shameful an abuse of a power trusted with his majesty for other purposes, as if not reformed, would call for some legal restrictions. “

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