Yet asking what the Revolutionary leaders would think of America now has long been a spur to critical thinking. The interrogation of how well or badly the present condition of the nation matches the founding intentions is one of the vital forces behind the American political project. It kindles the fire that blazes in Frederick Douglass’s Fourth of July speech of 1852, during which he said of the Founders that their “solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times.” It is the test Abraham Lincoln presents in the Gettysburg Address: whether the form of republican government created “four score and seven years ago” by “our fathers” might be about to “perish from the earth.” It underpins Martin Luther King Jr.’s resplendent rebuke at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”
We do not have to sanitize the Founders into secular sainthood to ask what their republic has done with that legacy. We can use their magnificent words to reproach many of America’s contemporary follies even while recognizing that some of their actions prefigure those follies. It is quite possible, for example, that many of the Founders might be enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump’s unilateral imposition of swinging tariffs on foreign trade—albeit not of the bellicose rhetoric that accompanies them. In 1807, Congress, with Jefferson as president and James Madison as secretary of state, prohibited cargo-bearing American vessels from sailing to foreign ports and forbade the export of all goods out of the country by sea; imports also declined, largely because it was impractical for ships from abroad to make the trip if they had to return empty.
Jefferson thought of this as the invention of an experiment in “peaceful coercion” that might do away with war and make possible an enlightened era of universal peace. He persisted with this foolishness for 14 months while agricultural prices fell sharply and thousands were thrown out of work. In his book Empire of Liberty, about the early republic, Gordon Wood notes, “Perhaps never in history has a trading nation of America’s size engaged in such an act of self-immolation with so little reward.” If he were to update the book, he might wish to add “until now.”
Conversely, most of the leading revolutionaries would likely be dismayed to discover that their republic now allows women not only to vote but to hold public office. The vile misogyny of Trump’s invective against Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election would have repelled them, but they would have been more astonished that one of the main contenders for the office was female than that she was a person of color.