An Open Letter to George Washington (and Happy President's Day)

www.michaeladelberg.com

Dear George,

I wish you a belated happy birthday.

As a boy, I thought the world of you. Your birthday meant a day off school. You looked cool in that general’s uniform.

To most Americans today, you’re cartoon character: you sell cars, you’re a comic prop on Family Guy. You’ve slipped to the second tier of American luminaries: Kennedy was cute, FDR was compassionate, Lincoln was quotable. You’re the unsmiling guy with wide hips.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve read hundreds of pages of your Revolutionary War correspondence and Presidential papers. So I think I know you pretty well. You were not ideological—you handled problems pragmatically. You spoke directly and respected others, good traits, but also ordinary—hardly the stuff of heroes.

Despite this and your modestly, I hope you’ll indulge me as I argue why you are probably the greatest of all American heroes and one of the great heroes of world history.

Twice, as the victorious general of the Revolutionary War and again as the first President of a new republic, the only effective checks on your power were those you imposed upon yourself. When the Continental Congress could not pay, arm, or clothe your men—you didn’t go home or march on Philadelphia. You maintained discipline in the ranks and waited for the day when civil government might do better. At the end of the war, when subordinates dangled schemes of using the Army as a springboard to extra-constitutional power, you quickly dismissed all overtures. As President, you established precedents for limited executive power, neutrality in foreign affairs, and an orderly transition of power. When you retired, you avoided Monday morning quarterbacking, even when baited.

You certainly were not perfect. As a general, you lost more battles than you won. Your drive to instill European drills into the Continental Army probably exacerbated some of the early defeats. As President, you gave your ambitious Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, too much rope (i.e., letting him raise an army to crush the so-called Whiskey Rebels).

But the circumstances under which you operated were incredibly difficult. Today, we lampoon bureaucracy and complain of the checks that create gridlock in government. But you operated in a normless world in which your decisions were frequently high-risk and unprecedented. And you navigated this dangerous world without a bureaucracy or well established to checks to prevent abuses of power. Yet you were so honest and decent that you never trumped the fragile constitution or feathered your nest. How many of us would be so pure?

The new American Republic was made of tissue paper: saddled with massive debts, disputed and insecure borders, and terrible inter-state conflicts. The Founding Fathers championed republican government, but also thought republics were inherently short-lived. Jefferson believed that all governments inevitably became tyrannical; he suggested that a Revolution every couple of generations was necessary. Against this backdrop, you calmly argued that a republic could last as long as its leaders respected their constitution—and then governed accordingly.

There is a long list of leaders--Napoleon, Mao, Tito, Castro, Mugabe, and many others—who accomplished remarkable things at the head revolutionary armies and then throttled their nations with absolutism and abuses of power. Sadly, it is the norm in world history.

We should all take this simple test: list the Revolutionary leaders who successfully toppled the previous government and then took power: put a check next to those leaders who ruled without personal aggrandizement, put a second check next to those who willingly walked away from power without setting up a son or crony. The leaders who get two checks next to their names are the true heroes. How many can you name?

It takes a great leader to lead a revolutionary army to victory. It takes a greater person to subjugate himself (or herself) to civil authority. Ceding power gracefully and voluntarily may be the rarest (and perhaps greatest) human trait.

So many times you could have taken advantage of your celebrity and the weak institutions around you—and you never did. The stability and success of the American experiment owes more to your example than anyone else.

Thanks George.

An Open Letter to 2nd Amendment Absolutists

www.michaeladelberg.com

I don’t know much about gun control as a public policy issue, so I will avoid stepping into that bucket. But it drives me crazy, especially in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, to hear gun-advocates portray the Founders of the Republic as fans of unrestricted gun ownership. Such statements are not well grounded in historical fact.  

When charged with governing, the Founders showed showed no sanctity to gun ownership . From its first days as a proto-national government, the 2nd Continental Congress advised States to disarm individuals suspected (but not convicted) of disloyalty and to impress the arms of those living in areas where arms might fall into British hands. George Washington’s first action of 1776 was a campaign to confiscate the private arms of the citizens in Queens Co., New York. Different local militias in New Jersey confiscated arms from African-Americans and inhabitants of the vulnerable shoreline.  These were not actions taken against a handful of traitors, but against large groups of people. The public's need to wage a war repeatedly trumped an individual's private property right to own a gun.

A decade later, as the Federalists attempted to make the Constitution more attractive to a skeptical public, they added a Bill of Rights (ten amendments to the Constitution) to lessen fears that the Constitution would become "an engine of tyranny". The Founders wrote the 2nd Amendment so that "a well regulated militia" (the key phrase in the 2nd Amendment), properly armed and governed by officers, would exist to resist potential federal encroachment. The 2^nd Amendment spoke to the Colonial experience of British soldiers forcing tax collection on localities that had no voice in the creation of the tax.

The Federalist Papers, written by the Founders to explain the benefits of the Constitution, discuss basic rights of American citizens: fair treatment before the law, the right to vote, freedom of religion and the press, etc. To the degree firearms are addressed, the Federalists speak to the right of Americans to organize into militias to resist federal encroachment. Federalist #29 declares “it is a matter of the utmost importance that a well-digested plan should be adopted for the proper establishment of the militia” and Federalist #46 discusses the strength of a militia "with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties." However, The Federalist Papers—85 essays and 200,000 words long—never speak to an individual’s right to own firearms.

Based on actions taken during their presidencies, Washington and Adams had no qualms with seizing private property for a perceived public good. Washington's confiscations of arms and property from the "Whiskey rebels" of Pennsylvania and Adams's impressments under the Alien and Sedition Acts demonstrate this. Even Jefferson, who counseled “the government is best that governs least,” opted to limit the 1^st Amendment when he championed "salutary coercion" of a press he believed overly partisan and irresponsible.

Though deeply suspicious of Federal over-reach, the Founders were not libertarians in any modern sense of the term, certainly not when governing. They supported a well regulated militia, but were ambivalent to private gun ownership when gun ownership ran up against a reasonable "public good" argument. Individual families often owned a rifle or two (the muzzle-loaded rifles of the day fired only one bullet and took two minutes to re-load) but it was the responsibility of local government to keep the really dangerous stuff—casks of gun powder, artillery, etc.—under guard in public magazines.

Even the most powerful men of the day did not keep private stores of dangerous weapons (with the exception of privateers battling foreign enemies at sea). Washington’s estate at Mt. Vernon, for example, had nothing more dangerous than a small number hunting rifles. People like John Hancock and Robert Morris purchased huge quantities of war materials, and then immediately turned them over to state and local governments.

When it comes to gun control, argue whatever position you want, but it is inconsistent with the historical record to believe that the Founders supported the private ownership of firearms capable of killing dozens of people.