Is America the product of a long line of constitutionalism dating back to the Magna Carta, or a radical break with this tradition? Is it liberal or classical? Scholars and statesmen have been debating these questions since the Founding. In his book, Harmonizing Sentiments, Hans Eicholz explains how the American Founding wove together a number of these disparate but reinforcing threads. 

Harmonizing Sentiments: The Declaration of Independence and the Jeffersonian Idea of Self-Government, Second Edition, by Hans Eicholz
“The Jeffersonian Ideal,” a book review on Harmonizing Sentiments by Michael Lucchese

James Patterson (00:06):
Welcome to the   Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture informed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello and welcome to the   Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty and associate professor of public affairs at the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee. Our guest today is Hans Eicholz, a historian and a Liberty Fund senior fellow. He is the author of the book we will be discussing today, Harmonizing Sentiments: The Declaration of Independence in the Jeffersonian Idea of Self-Government published on Peter Lang Press, and now in its second edition, very fitting giving the time of year.

(01:16):

Prior to beginning recording, Hans agreed to do something very important, which is to give a few thoughts on the now late Gordon Wood, who tragically died as of this recording only two days ago. So, Hans, could you please do that for us?

Hans Eicholz (01:33):
Yeah, it’s very appropriate to remember Gordon. Gordon Wood, he is one of the great historians of our day and certainly of the period that is leading into the anniversary of the 250th and it’s just a tragedy that he didn’t make it to this July 4 anniversary. But few people have put that anniversary on the map like Gordon has done through his various works and he was extremely important to a whole generation or generations of historians, my generation as well. I first met him in the late 1980s and he was brought together with a number of other historians to comment on a chapter that I had actually written for my dissertation and he was just very generous with his time and a delight to be with and very insightful, of course, as he always was in his work. But for my generation, very important for stimulating debate over the nature of the American political tradition.

(02:41):

His first book, The Creation of the American Republic, drilled down pretty deeply into the question of republicanism and republican ideas and their roots both in the ancient world and then bringing them forward through Machiavellian and what’s called a classical republican tradition of thought to develop how that framework helped to influence the American political experiment. And so that first book was a wealth of information and raised so many interesting points that scholars like my own advisor were able to engage in a very productive debate over whether the American experiment was fundamentally classical republican and conservative and to what extent more modern liberal ideas of individual freedom and political economy were influential in their outlook. Lockean ideas, which was the previous interpretive school that had predominated before the Republican, what’s often called the “Republican Paradigm,” came to prominence in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Gordon was one of the ones to really bring out the rich source material of that whole way of looking at the American founding and that was with his first book.

(04:00):

But he continued to make that kind of fundamental contribution through really drilling down into the primary sources of American thought and pulling out other strands too. So The Radicalism of the American Revolution, another great milestone really brought out some of the early Democratic ideas and how they challenged that Republican, more deferential political culture that had preceded the time of the Revolution, of the Declaration, and what that meant for the rising generations and how that created a wonderful and fertile mix of debate that informed everything from the ratification through the early Republic. And then he went on to look at how liberal ideas also influenced that. So Empire of Liberty, but also his book on Power and Liberty, a very readable book, but going down into the liberal concepts of order as basically self-propagating and possessing an orderliness that was more spontaneous rather than politically generated, how that influenced and leavened the debates over the American political tradition and understanding.

(05:23):

So in each of these cases, he really was one of the main contributors to really fleshing out all of the different themes that you can find in the debates over the American Revolution and Founding periods. His loss is a tremendous loss and our heart goes out to his family and to all of us who relied so much on his insight.

James Patterson (05:49):
So rest in peace, Gordon Wood. I don’t think there’s a single person in my extended network of scholars that I work with who weren’t touched by his work or even by meeting with him or talking with him. And this account you have of him with your dissertation chapter really does testify that not only was he an excellent scholar, but he was a wonderful teacher and a very good man.

Hans Eicholz (06:14):
Yes, absolutely. And he will be very much missed.

James Patterson (06:19):
Well, on that somber note, we’ll move from discussing the legend to maybe the next legend, Hans Eicholz. Big shoes to fill here, but we’re talking about a book that you published about 20 years ago, Harmonizing Sentiments. And the reissuing of it today is it’s an important thing to do in the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So why don’t we start with a discussion of what you think Jeffersonian self-government means?

Hans Eicholz (06:52):
Yes. No, this is good and it really does follow up from what we just talked about with respect to Gordon’s work. The original edition did come out in 2001, so 25 years ago, quarter century. So if we’re going to keep to that idea of anniversaries, it’s rather appropriate. And we’re now approaching in 2026, the 250th of the anniversary of the Declaration. The first edition really was to try to bring out some of the interesting overlays and various themes that you could say by the 1990s had left people somewhat perplexed as to whether or not there was a coherent American political understanding at the heart of the revolution. I’d spoken just moments ago about Gordon’s contribution to what was called the Republican paradigm at that time or the Republican interpretation. And for many people that had taken on such solidity and such paradigmatic dominance that it invited people to try to find all of the ways in which it was not the only way in which to conceive of the relationship of the individual to the state or of the state to society.

(08:17):

One of the things about Republicanism was supposedly its look to the ancients, the fact that it found a place for ideas of virtue and self-sacrifice as opposed to the earlier Lockean conception that was represented by such writers as Lewis Harts and others who had tried to argue that or didn’t try but seemed to be generally accepted, had argued for a kind of Lockean liberal paradigm before. Finding all of this stuff from ancient political thought really did open up a whole new way of thinking about the American political understanding. And for a long time it seemed then that Republicanism was going to be the overarching paradigm for looking at the American Revolution. And a number of people, including my own doctoral advisor, were very instrumental in pushing back against that saying, well, “What Is Still American in the Thought of Thomas Jefferson?” was one of the best known articles of Joyce Appleby on that question and attempted to pull out some of the still liberal understandings of individualism, of the nature of liberty, of the fact that government was not so much to cultivate virtue but to be focused on the provision of law and also to be restrained as a force so as not to interfere with the entrepreneurial and creative aspects of individual freedom, which were to basically well up from the ground up and not necessarily something that you would see created by government as opposed to individual entrepreneurial action.

(10:07):

So she wrote about those aspects of the American Revolution. Others brought in different themes. So you’ve had people come back with ideas of religious liberty and the importance of the covenantal tradition. You had others coming in talking about the importance of law and the common law specifically, which did not necessarily have a connection to Republicanism in the broader political theoretical framework, but a very sort of nuts and bolts legal approach that looked at the common law’s emphasis on precedent and customary legal understandings and their development. You had others who looked at constitutionalism and what that might have meant. So I think of Trevor Colburn, for example, The Lamp of Experience and he talked about the ancient Saxon myths of a primordial constitutionalism that was popular certainly with Jefferson, but also with Adams and others who talked about liberty as something that went back before Magna Carta.

(11:10):

In fact, one of the interesting things developed there was the idea that Magna Carta was not a grant by the king, but it was an affirmation of rights already existing from time out of mind or time immemorial. And this was a notion that was often associated with the ancient Constitution of England or the old Anglo-Saxon Constitution. So you had all of these different languages then that were being rediscovered, if you will, in the ’90s and a number of people were coming forward and saying, “well, we have to accept that there was just a plethora of languages, a virtual babel of languages, and there was no coherent specific tradition out of which American ideas came, but we just have to accept that there were all these tensions and even contradictions and that’s where things stood.” When I wrote the first edition then, that was the primary state of the historiography.

(12:16):

And what I thought was there are a couple of important ways in which all of those different approaches to understanding America and its formative period from the revolution through the constitutional period could be understood as overlays of a very consistent set of concepts all relating to the notion of self-government, that Americans accepted that self-government could be individual and personal, that both the liberal as well as the ancient Republican notions could actually fit together if you understood that self-government had this personal dimension to it. And if you looked at some of the earliest conceptions of government, what it means to govern, they often began with government of the self and were used that way. It’s very clearly that was what Jefferson meant by it. But if you look at some of the very earliest dictionaries of that time, that notion that government was to be the government of one’s own passions, for example, as a prerequisite for engagement in the political, you can see that there’s a direct line of personal individual liberty and political liberty.

(13:39):

So my effort then was to look at these different overlays as being complimentary concepts that when taken together and related one to another could be shown to comprise a, what would you call it in modern parlance, an ideal typical understanding of the self-governing American or revolutionary. And that linked all of the different strands of constitutionalism, political economy, political theory, law, and faith. All of those things worked together and it gave a new, not a new, but I would say, underscored the importance of Jefferson’s later reflection on what he did as embracing the harmonizing sentiments of the day. And it came together very nicely as a title, but that referred to a letter which he wrote where he specifically said, “My purpose was not to do something original or to create thoughts never before conceived of, but to bring forth what was of the American mind of that time, the harmonizing sentiments of the day as embraced in various books such as Aristotle, Locke, Sydney.” I mean, right there, he brought together all of the various themes that historians were interested in that time period. So that was the first primary reason for the first edition.

James Patterson (15:15):
It’s funny, between Madison and Jefferson, there are so many of those pithy phrases that you can use as titles that will never run out.

Hans Eicholz (15:27):
Right. Yeah. I’ve often thought that, boy, I wonder why somebody hasn’t thought of that as a title before, but I was ecstatic. When it hit me, I think I was commuting to work and sitting in traffic when it suddenly hit me. I said, “That’s actually the title. It is the harmonizing sentiments of the day.”

James Patterson (15:49):
That’s always a good feeling. You don’t flinch from talking about slavery and the discussion of the Declaration of Independence and its reception in England. Samuel Johnson uses the hypocrisy argument and “Taxation no Tyranny.” And you describe how the Patriots insist that slavery was an institution imposed on them. Where did they get this argument and is there any truth to it?

Hans Eicholz (16:17):
So this is really quite fascinating. So of course, this is an important part of the discussion over the nature of the Declaration. And when I took up the question first in the first edition, the Declaration seemed like the most natural place to begin a discussion of the ideas of self-government in part because it had both a philosophical beginning but also a very practical and legal argument in the grievances themselves. And so trying to put all of these different concepts together to explain the American worldview, that document presented itself as the logical beginning point for such an analysis. So the first edition did touch on the question of slavery and did talk about it, not as Jefferson’s very particular way of looking at it, but something that was consonant with the American understanding itself. The second edition I decided because of the great importance that developed subsequently in the historiography about that slavery question really went into it a lot more.

(17:31):

And I’ve added a great deal more in developing the whole question of how slavery fit with the universalizable philosophical parts of the opening, but also why Congress both decided to extract the grievance that Jefferson had originally put in, sometimes counted as the 28th grievance that was not included against the king and why they did that and was it really just Jefferson’s own peculiarity to blame it on the British, as you pointed out? And a number of historians have done that and continue to do that. Was he assuaging his own guilt of the fact that he was a slave owner and yet he made these very universal arguments about how all men are created equal? Was he just trying to placate his own conscience or try to assuage his own conscience about that? The conclusion I came to was that, no, this is actually a very old argument.

(18:38):

You can see it raised first in regard to Adam Smith in the theory of moral sentiments. He charges the Americans with, or I should say with slave owners and those involved in the slave trade with being reprobate morally and backward looking, and how can we allow this to continue? And Arthur Lee sees this and writes a response and says, “Well, look, you can’t let yourself off the hook. This is going back into the 1760s.” And then the other thing is that Benjamin Franklin in 1770 writes and publishes a piece in London, an essay where he takes this up directly. In this case, he takes it up with respect to a piece that was published by Granville Sharp who criticizes again the colonies. Sharp is deeply worried about slavery’s promulgation and its ability to be carried on in the colonies, especially on the North American continent.

(19:44):

But Franklin points out, it says, “This is not just something that we have adopted, but it was actually imposed on us. And the empire is just as culpable in all of this.” And so you see that and you realize, well, Franklin’s actually on the committee to help compose the Declaration. And then here comes Jefferson. I don’t deny that Jefferson probably felt that he needed to explain himself to some degree, but it wasn’t original with him. Americans had taken this criticism before and felt very sensitive about it and understood that what was happening was an evil that they had inherited, but they recognized that this was a moral embarrassment and they were going to address it at some level. I think it’s highly within the probability that Franklin was not only possibly in on the decision to include that, well, I mean, we know that he was because Adams and Jefferson and the other members of the committee had to approve it before it went to Congress.

(20:53):

I rather think that Franklin might well have been one of the reasons why Jefferson took as much care as he did to extrapolate that out into three particular charges against the attack against people that had done no offense to the empire and then criticized the transport and the means of transporting and the inhumane conditions on those ships and so forth. I think Franklin probably had a great deal to say on these questions in affirming Jefferson’s decision to include that as part of the grievances that then went to Congress. So that’s an interesting part that I’ve tried to develop and some of the reasons for that. Franklin was part of the Bray’s Associates, which was a group that Johnson, you’d mentioned Johnson, Samuel Johnson was a member of, but Franklin was actually charged with being one of those to inspect schools that were to serve African-Americans in the colonies and to try to encourage the education of African-American youth in America at that time.

(22:07):

They both served in that association. And I think that Franklin probably, we know he was aware of Johnson’s essay, which came out in 1775, “Taxation No Tyranny” in which he made that famous charge and probably felt some degree of responsibility and duty to respond to it. And I think there’s just a lot there, but I bring that out in the second edition.

James Patterson (22:34):
So there’s a discussion in your book of the terms “abuses and usurpations.” And when I teach the Declaration of Independence to students, those terms just kind of pass them by. To them, it just means bad things. These are bad things that happened, but they have a real specific meaning and it’s operating within a kind of constitutional framework. So could you maybe go into detail about that and I’ll mark this down for when I need to explain it to my students next time.

Hans Eicholz (23:07):
Yeah, this is a fascinating dimension to it and it’s the best way I think to really get something out of an understanding of the grievances. So the empire for much of the time leading up to the Seven Years War, which for Americans ends largely in 1760, up until that time have been basically left to themselves. You’ll recall that Edmund Burke famously coined the term a period of “salutary neglect,” but what that period demonstrated was the capacity for these colonies basically to govern themselves politically. And it also corresponded to their, how would you say, the maturation of their political thought and their reflections about their relationship to the empire. One of the things that Americans were very sensitive to was the fact that and very proud of was the fact that they were Englishmen and part of this larger imperial system. And as such, they felt that they shared in the equal privileges or rights of Englishmen.

(24:18):

In fact, Gordon Wood’s work was very adamant, this goes back to the Creation of the American Republic, his first work, just how important a concept that was to share in the equal rights of other subjects. And what they really didn’t want was to be seen as the subjects of subjects. So when parliament decided it was going to impose a tax upon them and they had no representation in that body, it raised alarm throughout the colonies because as Englishmen, do they not have the right to have representation? Isn’t this one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen? And if it’s not, then this does come to illustrate for them that they are the subjects of subjects rather than being on the same level as other Englishmen elsewhere in the empire. But their view then is that they have this set of equal rights and that their own representative institutions, that is to say their own assemblies constitute smaller parliaments within the overall system and that the king’s relationship is as much through his governor to them in their various assemblies as it is to anything in England.

(25:40):

In other words, these are equivalent systems. Now, one of the interesting questions has been to what extent Englishmen understood that. I don’t really go into it to the extent that my later work has been going into that question in the second edition. I emphasize the American perception of the unfairness of that, the illegality of that. And I do emphasize that distinction, which is made, made first in Summary View, which came out two years before the Revolution, before Independence I should say. And Summary View was the pamphlet most radical until Thomas Payne’s Common Sense in which he lays out the constitutional understanding of Americans. And they don’t deny that the king has a great deal of authority to suspend or even veto acts by colonial legislatures. They don’t deny that he has powers of enforcement, that even give him the authority to deploy ships and troops.

(26:51):

He certainly has the power to send troops to the colonies to protect them. And all of these constitute regular and legal, how would you say, powers of the executive. But when he allows others to start trying to exercise a jurisdiction that’s foreign to them, such as parliament’s attempt attacks, that is a different kind of matter. So when you look at the grievances, what you have are the first twelve open up really with abuses. This is the king who’s always willing to negate or veto or suspend acts of legislation on the part of the colonies, but isn’t doing so anywhere else. He is simply always taking his thumb and pressing down on the colonists, but he’s not utilizing his power in any particular or balanced way. He’s using it in a very biased and unfair way and that constitutes an abuse. The nature of that abuse comes out then very particularly when he conspires with others who have no jurisdiction over us and this is the 13th charge and it’s followed by nine specific subcategories that illustrate that kind of grievance and those are not abuses but actual usurpations.

(28:23):

They don’t have the authority to apply a direct tax to us to raise a revenue. They don’t have the authority really to impose upon us any pieces of legislation that we haven’t had some voice in. And so those nine subcategories constitute usurpations. Now there are two primary pushbacks against the Declaration that come out. One is by Thomas Hutchison who had been the last civilian governor of the colony of Massachusetts, royal governor. And Thomas Hutchison wrote a piece called “Strictures Against the Declaration” or on the Declaration. And he took those charges very personally and recognized to some degree the nuance in the differences. John Lind writes for the empire and it’s very interesting to see that he does very much what you say your students do. It’s just all bad things and he goes through and really doesn’t recognize that there’s any distinction between abuses and usurpations.

(29:33):

He charges the Americans with thinking that everything the king does is just a usurpation and dismisses it. But to my mind, Hutchinson had a bit more of a bead on this because of his very personal and direct relationship to the colony of Massachusetts and therefore took it personally because many of the charges were directed squarely against him. The whole dust up over the Boston Tea Party was really his doing actually when you come to think of the fact that he refused to allow the tea ship to exit Boston Harbor, that was his decision. And so he takes it very seriously and that’s why I used his “Strictures on the Declaration” as the way in which to understand the loyalist position within the American debate.

James Patterson (30:27):
You say something that I really agree with and I can’t quite put into words, but I think is very true. And that’s that you worry that Americans have become less Whig and more Tory and they’ve also become less themselves and more European. So what does this mean and why is this bad?

Hans Eicholz (30:48):
Okay. Well, that’s a good question. And my intention there embraced a number of points, but two in particular. The first thing is we’ve often heard the debate cast among historians between American experience and the ideas which they inherited, often European ideas, in fact, predominantly European ideas. And many of those who’ve argued for a kind of American exceptionalism have often wished to downplay the ideational, the ideological, the philosophical, and have wanted to emphasize the predominance of America’s own traditions of covenanting and forming their own constitutions and basically governing themselves politically as the core thing. And so while all historians will point to the grievances as among if not the most important part of the Declaration, they do so for various reasons. And those who have argued for American exceptionalism have often done so precisely because they wanted to emphasize what was uniquely American and it was that experience on the ground.

(32:05):

But the ideas were very important, extremely important for both launching a defense of American institutions, but also for giving them the means by which to say, “yes, this is what we’re doing and we’re justified in doing so.” So when Locke talks about the original contract and why it is that the state of nature doesn’t require the kind of political force that Hobbes had argued was necessary, the absolutist form of government, what he was doing was calling attention to the fact that many aspects of our lives, he said, this goes on before there was a political association, are voluntary and rely on just the ability of individuals to form agreements with each other, to come into association with each other for reasons other than politics. And one of these is trade. He’s making that state of nature not quite as desperate, not quite as awful as Hobbes had argued.

(33:15):

And that allows him to assert that we retain certain of these rights. In fact, the reason why we set up government is not so that the king or the prince can lord it over all of us and terrorize us into submission, but in fact, so that we can protect those most important rights, which are rights that allow us to engage in important productive and creative associations and relationships for all manner of reasons, both social, philanthropic, also economic, that these are the reasons why we actually have a government in the first place so that we can control those who can’t control themselves. And he calls those the quarrelsome and the contentious, the people who will rob and steal and murder and maim, they do exist, they do have to be controlled, but that doesn’t embrace all of us. And so we do retain rights and that’s the purpose of why government exists.

(34:16):

Now put those things together, the theory and the American experience and right away you see that they reinforce each other. Again, this was part of the harmonizing spirit of the time and the harmonizing sentiments of the time that American experience affirmed what was only a theory in Europe. So in Europe, the existing governments asserted these rights and it was very difficult to say as long as it was just theory that they shouldn’t be absolute. The Americans set a counter example that future reformers and revolutionaries would point to and say, see, they’re capable of self-government. They illustrate what Locke was talking about. They illustrate what the Scottish enlightenment was asserting that there’s an inborn moral sense. They illustrate that commerce is an order unto itself. We shouldn’t forget that 1776 is also the time when the great synthesis of those ideas, because those ideas did exist.

(35:21):

Hume had written about commerce as a self-regulating phenomenon, but Adam Smith synthesized all of this, put it together in the Wealth of Nations, and it came out the same year as the Declaration of Independence. But for European reformers, they were fighting an uphill battle. And so to answer your question, the growth and importance of government was simply a fact of European life and this would only intensify over time. In the American case, that was something we could actually say our experience affirmed not the absolutist nature of government, but the fact that it should be limited in nature and we could say that it should be limited in nature because so much of the order of our life, of our associations, of society exists not as the result of active intervention by government, but simply by governments being limited to very specific functions.

James Patterson (36:26):
The book is Harmonizing Sentiments: The Declaration of Independence, and the Jeffersonian Idea of Self-Government and the author is Hans Eicholtz. Hans, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Hans Eicholz (36:39):
Thank you very much for having me, James. It’s been a real pleasure.

James Patterson (36:43):
Thanks for listening to this episode of   Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.