Hillsdale’s Bradley J. Birzer joins James Patterson to talk about the Declaration of Independence. They discuss the American colonies’ devout Protestantism, their love of the classics, and their identification with the Anglo-Saxon constitutional tradition. Birzer concludes with a stirring assessment of why the Constitution matters.

The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty by Bradley J. Birzer
Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson by Jane E. Calvert
Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery by Cara Rogers Stevens
Vital Remnants: America’s Founding and the Western Tradition edited by Gary L. Gregg II
The Language of Liberty by J. C. D. Clark

James Patterson (00:06):
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring series commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed 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 as well as Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the Institute of American Civics here at the University of Tennessee. With me today is the one and only Dr. Bradley J. Birzer. The Russell Amos Kirk Chair in history at Hillsdale College and Fellow of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Today we’ll be talking about his recent book from Stonehouse Press, The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty. Dr. Birzer, welcome to the podcast.

Bradley Birzer (01:18):
James, thank you. I’m so glad to meet you and of course the audience doesn’t know this, but we’ve already had 10 minutes of joking around. So it is so great to meet you in person. I have followed your career for quite a while now and you’ve been a great ally.

James Patterson (01:35):
You start the book with American colonists being decidedly English in their patriotism and in their point of view. So how did this self-consciously English perspective lead almost ironically to an independence movement?

Bradley Birzer (01:50):
Yeah, thanks, James. That’s a great question. I don’t know how to say this without sounding cocky and I definitely don’t mean to sound cocky about this, but you know AIER came to me exactly two years ago in a month. So, 25 months ago, they came to me and asked me to write this book. And at first, the way we laid it out was that it would be a synthesis of everything that’s been written on the Declaration of Independence. And that’s why at the beginning of the book I give credit to the Jaffa students and the Straussians and to the Voegelinians because I’m really interested in trying to tie together all the various views. But the one thing, and again, this is where I don’t mean to sound cocky at all, but the one thing that I came across that hit me really hard that nobody has done, and I think there are probably good reasons that nobody has done this.

(02:48):

Nobody has actually explained, I wouldn’t call it the English character, but what I would call the Anglo-Saxon character of the American colonists. You can find some classicists in the ’30s and ’40s who mentioned this and mentioned that Tacitus was a big deal, or Hengist and Horsa, the original Anglo-Saxon Invaders of England. But when I started digging into it, I found that it wasn’t just Jefferson who was totally taken with Tacitus and with Hengist and Horsa, but that all Americans really saw themselves as the original descendants of the Anglo-Saxons. And James, one of the reasons that I think we lost this view is if you look at American history in the 1830s and ’40s, Anglo-Saxon becomes a synonym for white Protestant and it takes on racialist connotations. When I say Anglo-Saxon in my book, I don’t mean race at all. I’m talking specifically about language, culture, and law, and those are the things that the Americans really embraced.

(04:03):

And so again, one of those things that people have known about but no one talks about when the Declaration was printed in book form on July 6, 1776, two days after its passage, it comes with this 20-page introduction to it by somebody who took the name Demophilus. We don’t know who that is. We think it’s a radical Pennsylvanian by the name of George Bryan, but we don’t know that. That’s a guess. But if you look at this introduction, it starts with the history of Hengist and Horsa, the two great Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain, the ones the Celts are fighting. It starts with them, and it ends with the passage of the Declaration of Independence being the most recent act of Anglo-Saxon history. And again, as far as I know, unless I missed something, James, nobody’s written about that. And so again, I never went into this project trying to be unique or original.

(05:07):

That wasn’t what the project was meant to be, but that was the thing that I found that hardly anybody else has talked about. And again, I believe that’s mostly because we associate Anglo-Saxonism with racism. And that’s unfortunate. That’s a corruption. That’s not the original. These guys, Hengist and Horsa, weren’t running around saying, “Yeah, we’re white guys.” That’s not what they were doing at all. So that’s something that I’m very proud of with the book that I think I did make an original contribution.

James Patterson (05:40):
You actually describe at one point the militia at Lexington as assuming show of force, not as a way of intimidating the soldiers, but almost to show a sense of mutual respect, right? This is a form of recognition. Maybe explain that.

Bradley Birzer (05:58):
Yeah, I take that argument from Bruce Frohnen. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Bruce.

James Patterson:
Oh, sure. Yeah.

Bradley Birzer:
Yeah, good. I mean, Bruce is a great scholar, and he had an essay, and it’s not something he’s focused on, but he had an essay in a book called Vital Remnants that Gary Gregg published about 20, 25 years ago. And in that essay, Bruce really talks about the Anglo-Saxon medieval tradition of militias and how in Anglo-Saxon … Now sometimes, and James, I had to be careful with this as well. Much of what the colonists believed about Anglo-Saxon history is probably not true. They believed it, and they believed it was true, but it’s probably more mythological than it is true. But the myth becomes reality because they believe in it. They’re not lying. They actually believe in this. But one of the stories that the Anglo-Saxon Americans told themselves, and I think Bruce Frohnen is amazing on this, they basically told themselves that there are these whole series of ways that a community can show its displeasure with the king.

(07:14):

And the absolute final way of showing your displeasure is by arming yourself and standing there with your arms protecting your community. In the American tradition, once South Carolina did that, it’s secession. And so we in the American tradition tend to think, well, look, if you’re armed, you’re seceding. That is not the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The Anglo-Saxon tradition is, look, we’re at the end of our rope. You guys have pushed us as much as we can. Now we’re arming ourselves. It doesn’t mean you’re not our king. It just means that you have done things that we don’t agree with and we’re going to demonstrate with arms. And that’s exactly … There’s a great … and I’m a Catholic, but there’s a great Protestant minister at Lexington by the name of Jonas Clark, this deep Calvinist minister. And Clark convinces the people of Lexington. Look, we have to stand.

(08:14):

I mean, this is it. If we don’t stand here and show our colors, the British will never respect us at all. And of course, it doesn’t turn out that way. It’s a bloodbath at Lexington, an absolute blood bath. The just horror of horror shows there with a British open fire on the militias as well as into the crowd of civilians. They’re not firing directly into the crowd, but the crowd is right there. And so it’s just a nightmare what happens. But also it’s one of those things, and I think I put this in the book, and I was trying to be dramatic about this, but my argument is essentially once the first Lexingtonian is killed, he’s the first American. That’s the first time we could say: This is an American. Because it changes the whole consciousness to be Voegelinian for a moment or Barfieldian. It changes the whole understanding of who they are and they’re no longer just citizens of Lexington.

(09:14):

They have become Americans. And at that point, there is a kind of secession. But note, and I make a big deal of this in the book. We’re fighting with the British as early as April 19 of 1775. We still don’t declare our independence until July 2 of the next year. So we are openly at arms with the king for 14 months before we secede. Again, I think that’s very hard for us in 2026 to understand. It was not hard for them to understand. It was part of that Anglo-Saxon myth. That’s what you do.

James Patterson (09:52):
How out of step were the American colonists from the culture of the mainland or the motherland, even the British regulars. I’m sure at least some of them, when they saw the formation at Lexington, were like, “What is going on with these people?”

Bradley Birzer (10:06):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are two things I would say about that, James. It’s a great question, but think about this. I mean, just even physically, Americans on average are about five to six inches taller than their British counterparts because of nutrition. And you think about someone like George Washington at 6’2”? That would basically be the equivalent of about 6’6” for us. He’s a giant, and when he’s on horseback, of course, he looks amazing. He looks like a centaur. He’s a mythic figure for the Americans. So even physically, we don’t look like the British, but there’s another real difference. The British are recruiting their soldiers from the lower class. And so when they come to America, and this is something we don’t often think about, but you and I, James, we could go through letter after letter after letter and document of colonial Americans, and we would never find a cuss word or a swear word.

(11:16):

And you know, if a bunch of guys are in a bar or a pub, they may cuss, but it was completely unacceptable to cuss in public, and especially around women. But the British soldiers did this all the time, and they catcalled, and you’re in a place like Puritan New England, where women are treated with almost complete dignity. Man, I mean, it’s no wonder the Boston massacre occurred. I mean, you’ve got these soldiers who are just lower-class dregs walking around a middle-class, very moral society. And so the point I want to make in this second point, James, is there is an immense religious difference between the Americans and the British at this point. I don’t want to exaggerate this too much, but imagine when the Puritans come and settle in New England, they are escaping the Anglicans.

(12:15):

And when the Anglicans come to Virginia and settle, they are escaping the Puritans. When English settlement is going on in North America, it’s at the same time as the English Civil War and the English Reformation. So these are a deeply, deeply reformational people. These aren’t Germans, where they can say, “Yeah, we had that conflict with Luther 200 years ago.” These are people who are coming over in the midst of their reformation. And I always get frustrated with this, James, and feel free to push back on this. Whenever scholars emphasize, well, there’s this great enlightenment project of the Americans, I always kind of laugh at that because yeah, there are four really great enlightenment figures. There’s Thomas Jefferson, there’s Ben Franklin, there’s Benjamin Rush, and there’s Thomas Paine. And then you’ve got the majority of Americans who are so utterly Protestant. As Burke said, they are the most Protestant people in the world.

(13:23):

When you look at the average population in 1775, we are not Enlightenment. We are utterly Protestant. These are deep, serious Protestants. And so that would be the thing I would say, James, to your question. Again, what are the two things that are different? Well, number one, we don’t look like the British because we’ve got this great nutrition. Number two, we don’t act like the British because they’ve kind of lost their Christianity. It’s still there, but it’s not embedded in the very nature of their souls like it is both for the Anglicans in the South and the Puritans in the North. And just good Presbyterians and Quakers! Everywhere you’ve got these intensely religious groups in America. And again, I think that’s very hard for us in 2026 to understand, but it was very hard for the British to understand in 1775, too. And I’m taking this, by the way, I want to give him credit.

(14:26):

I’m taking this argument about the Protestant culture from J. C. D. Clark, his great book, The Language of Liberty, I think, is one of the greatest books written on the Founding. Again, just great stuff. I don’t want to give myself credit. This really is coming from Clark in his argument.

James Patterson (14:43):
Yeah, I know the interest in describing the American Revolution in Enlightenment terms, I think, is a kind of twentieth-century project to maybe open it up to more people because of how Protestant it really was, as well as a consequence of those guys having a lot of writing. Jefferson had the little machine that made copies of every letter he wrote.

Bradley Birzer (15:07):
Absolutely. And those guys matter. I mean, when you’re talking about Franklin, Jefferson, Rush, and Paine, those are serious guys. So I don’t in any way want to downplay their influence. I just want to suggest that they’re unique in what they’re doing.

James Patterson (15:25):
So speaking of the Protestantism here–and this is something you go into in a way that I really appreciate because I’ve talked about it too–is that one of the early causes for the American Revolution was the Quebec Act that the English Parliament passes. Then there’s the line in Common Sense where Paine describes monarchy as akin to popery. So how anti-Catholic, not just Protestant, but how anti-Catholic was all of this and how did it get bound up in the politics of allying with the French?

Bradley Birzer (15:55):
Right, right. No, again, great question, James, and a complicated one. I would say this, the Protestants–and I’m trying to be objective here, even though I’m speaking as a Roman Catholic–the Protestants don’t know what they’re talking about, but they believe very seriously that the Roman Catholic Church is on the verge of worldwide tyranny. The Catholic Church is the force of regression and superstition. It is the force of darkness. It is the opposite of Enlightenment. And so for American Protestants, most of whom who would never in their life have met a Roman Catholic, the Roman Catholic Church is everything they oppose. And so when the British, and of course we in America, we call the Quebec Act one of the Coercive Acts and the Intolerable Acts, that was not what the British saw when they granted rights to the people of Quebec, they basically thought, we’re being good and liberal.

(17:00):

We’re being humane. We’ve controlled these guys militarily since 1759 and by treaties since 1763, now it’s time we give them independent rights. And so the Quebec Act, which is passed in late June of 1774 says two really important things. Number one, it allows Catholics in New France–well, not New France anymore, I’m using that anachronistically, but in Quebec–it allows them to have bishops and that had never been allowed. And one thing we have to keep in mind, and this is part of the extreme Protestantism of America, even among sects in America, when we look at that, even when you have people like the Methodists who have bishops or the Anglicans who have bishops, they never once set them over to North America. Prior to the American Revolution, they would’ve freaked out and it would’ve been legitimate to assassinate a bishop.

(18:09):

It would’ve been culturally acceptable to take a bishop out. And so when the Catholics get bishops for the first time in North America, that is a huge shock to the Protestants. Again, I think the Protestants are dead wrong, but we’ve got to give them credit. They believe this was a horrible, horrible thing to happen. And to imagine now we’ve got French and Indians just north of New England. This was horrible to them. But the second thing the Quebec Act does is that it gives where I’m sitting right now in Southern Michigan, it gives all of the Great Lakes to the Canadians. And this area, what we would call the Ohio country, basically they were already fighting about that in the French and Indian War and the Americans believed that they had already laid claim to the Great Lakes. And now the British are saying, no, we’re going to give that to the Canadians.

(19:09):

So I don’t want to suggest that the Quebec Act is purely anti-Catholic, but it’s at least half anti-Catholic and half worried about territorial expansion. And yeah, I mean the Americans, well, they freak out. It’s no accident that the second, or excuse me, the first Continental Congress meets a month after news has landed in the American colonies that the Quebec Act has been passed. And one of the first things that our Congress, which of course… it’s the root of the House of Representatives. The First Continental Congress is essentially the House of Representatives meeting for the first time institutionally in our constitutional history. But when they meet, the first declaration they make is a horribly anti-Catholic statement about the Quebec Act. As we know, and gosh, this is something in our more modern tolerant age we don’t talk about, but when New England soldiers were on the battlefield, their war cry was no king, no Pope.

(20:17):

I mean, that’s what revolutionary soldiers are saying, and the idea that the Pope would have anything to do with America is ridiculous, but they believed it! And they’re willing to die for that! So that’s a huge part of this. James, sorry, I’m talking too much about this, but that’s a huge part.

James Patterson (20:36):
Yeah. Well, if you’re reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and accounts of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres, it’s not out of control anti-Catholicism in some ways there’s history there. So I just recorded a podcast with Hans Eicholtz and we were talking about your book after we were done and he said a lot of great things about it. He said that what’s different from the book that he wrote 20 years ago, Harmonizing Sentiments, he spends more time on Jefferson. He says that you spent a lot of time on John Adams and the Declaration. So what is it about John Adams that’s so important to understanding the Declaration?

Bradley Birzer (21:20):
Yeah. Well, first of all, I like Adams. I love Jefferson too, but he’s got so much baggage because of the slaveholding, and because of Sally Hemings, which may or may not have happened. We don’t know. There’s just so much racialist baggage that comes along with Jefferson and as great as he is as a statesman, and he’s very good on the slavery issue in a political sense, he’s really terrible on it in a cultural and personal sense. It couldn’t be worse. And so that’s hard. Whereas John Adams, yes, he’s got a lot of brusqueness to him and he’s obnoxious, but there’s none of that baggage with him. We can look back at him and be really proud. He is anti-Catholic, and I’m sorry he was so deeply anti-Catholic, but other than that, there’s no baggage with John Adams. He’s a serious republican, he’s a serious patriot.

(22:16):

I wouldn’t call him a libertarian because that term’s too anachronistic, but he’s a pro-liberty guy and he’s very anti-slavery. And for a long time, for really almost the first 15 years after the passage of the Declaration, very few people in America knew who had actually written the Declaration. There was actually a serious debate. Was it Thomas Jefferson or was it John Adams? And it wasn’t until about 1826 and the 50th anniversary that everybody recognizes it was Thomas Jefferson. But if you go back and look at what the notes actually say, it seems pretty clear that John Adams helped Thomas Jefferson draft, outline the Declaration. Jefferson’s the author. I don’t want to take that away from him. He is the author, but it does seem to be the result of a very serious brainstorming effort between Jefferson and Adams. So the way I would think about it is Jefferson and Adams are the draftsmen.

(23:28):

Thomas Jefferson is the author and I think I’m guessing a little bit. I don’t know that for certain, but I’m guessing. And what we do know from their notes, and of course they’re older when they’re remembering these things and talking about them they may have faulty memories, but the argument that they make at the time is that Jefferson is the better writer, Adams is the better orator. And I think that’s probably true. Adams is a great writer. You go back, he is truly one of the great penmen of the founding era. He and John Dickinson are the true great penmen, but they’re not going to match Jefferson’s rhetorical style. When it comes to Jefferson’s rhetorical style, the writing of the Declaration is a step below poetry. It is truly prose at its absolute finest, and Adams couldn’t have accomplished that. Adams is brilliant. He’s great.

(24:22):

But that’s not Adams. Adams is a blunt Calvinist. There’s not a lot of poetry. I mean, I think it really takes an Anglican. I think it takes someone with a sense of liturgy and a sense of drama to be able to draw out those things. I’m not suggesting a Calvinist couldn’t have written the Declaration, but I do think it makes more sense that someone out of the Anglican tradition would do that just because of the poetry and the language that’s there. And nothing against Calvin. Calvin was a great writer too. And remember his first book was a book on Seneca’s poetry. So I’m not dismissing Calvin, but there’s a hardheadedness in Calvinism. You look at the Institutes, they’re brilliant, but they’re not poetic. Aquinas is poetic, Augustine is poetic and I think that’s just part of the tradition that we’re getting at. So I’m deviating a little bit from your question, James, but I really do think that we have to give John Adams credit for a lot of the Declaration.

(25:26):

And it is true Adams was a great orator. He may have been the best orator of his day. He was also really good at politics. Jefferson was not. And so Jefferson basically said, look, I’ll write the thing. You get it through Congress. And that’s exactly what they did. So I think for us now in 2026, yeah, we’ll give 60 percent of the credit to Thomas Jefferson, but I think that still means that 40 percent of it goes to John Adams. And I think we would be really unfair to give it all to Jefferson. James, there are a couple of team-ups in American history that I think just make America in so many ways. And I think the first great team-up is Jefferson and Adams. I think the next great team up is John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson before they had their falling out. I think there are these elements where these guys–and they end up because they’re so brilliant, they fight each other afterwards–but the moments that they get along, it changes the course of history.

(26:45):

And that to me is what happened with Adams and Jefferson.

James Patterson (26:49):
That’s a great book. The idea of team-ups that become rivals. I like that.

Bradley Birzer (26:54):
Yeah. Right. Well, and again, I mean we hardly think about that, but when Andrew Jackson had his private army running through Florida, it was John C. Calhoun who wanted to send down a counterforce to capture Jackson and to execute him for treason. And John Quincy Adams kept saying,” Are you kidding? This is the greatest Godsend to America. Let the guy run wild.” And then the fact that Quincy Adams and Jackson hate each other in 1824 is such a tragedy because they were the best team up possible earlier, but Jackson didn’t know that. He didn’t know that was going on. He didn’t know that Adams had his back, but he did. So I loved that.

James Patterson (27:41):
Yeah, Jackson was always wheeling around for the next foe, so I just need to stop on that.

Bradley Birzer (27:46):
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And we don’t think about that. I mean, he had a private army.

James Patterson:
He did.

Bradley Birzer:
This was not sanctioned by the US government.

James Patterson (27:56):
He did some pretty terrible stuff.

Bradley Birzer (27:58):
Pretty amazing. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

James Patterson (28:03):
So Jane E. Calvert just won the Storing Prize on her work on Dickinson and Dickinson comes up in your book, too. And I think she worked very hard on explaining that Dickinson is an important counterpoint to Adams. So should we give him his flowers or was he more of just a pain in the neck for Adams?

Bradley Birzer (28:22):
Dickinson?

James Patterson (28:23):
Yeah.

Bradley Birzer (28:23):
Oh, I love Dickinson. I mean, I think Dickinson is … If you look back at his Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, I’m ready to take up arms when I read those. They are so powerful. I mean, when he says in Letter 12 that tyranny is always preceded by sleep, if we could just make Americans realize that over and over again, it’s like, no, be alert. Don’t allow these politicos to get away with this stuff. I think we would be in a much, much better position. And I really, again, it’s Letter 12 for me. I can read that over and over again and I just want to go declare independence after that. So I love Dickinson’s style. He and Charles Carroll are by far the most formally educated of the Founders. These are guys with MAs. These are guys who are figuring out what law decrees are and nobody matches them.

(29:23):

And I love Dickinson in Madison’s notes on the writing of the Constitution and at least the way I teach it, James, and this may have a little bit of hyperbole, but I always tell my students we would never have the Constitution without the radicalism of Madison and the conservatism of Dickinson. I think those are the two great figures of creating the Constitution. And if you go back and look, and I know that the musical 1776 makes fun of Dickinson, but if you go back and look at Dickinson’s arguments for why we shouldn’t pass the Declaration of Independence, they actually make perfect sense. He says, “Look, we need to get a government in place. If you’re just declaring independence, we’re going to go through a period of anarchy.” And it doesn’t happen that way because the revolutionary committees are in charge, but I can understand that.

(30:17):

I can see where Dickinson’s coming from. It’s like, yeah, maybe we should write a Constitution before we declare independence. So I don’t think that Dickinson’s outrageous. I think he actually has a really logical argument right then. He’s wrong, but it’s not an unpatriotic wrong. It’s a patriotic wrong and he’s misguided, but there’s no evil in him at all.

James Patterson (30:45):
So you spend some of the later chapters going through the Declaration structure, I guess just one chapter now. I said multiple chapters. Just one.

Bradley Birzer (30:53):
Right.

James Patterson (30:53):
Both in its final draft and its various edits. Maybe give us a sense of what was the original draft and what was taken out, maybe why.

Bradley Birzer (31:03):
Yeah. There’s only one major change, well, two major changes from the original draft to the one that Congress accepted. So number one, and I think this is really critical. Number one, Jefferson did not include “we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” That was not in Jefferson’s draft. That was something that Congress added at the last minute. And I think again, this just tells us so much about the Protestantism and especially a Calvinistic Protestantism. They are, for all intents and purposes, creating a covenant out of the Declaration, and that was not Jefferson’s intent, but that’s what it becomes. And so I wouldn’t put it at the level of the Abrahamic or the Mosaic Covenants, but I would definitely put it above, say, what we might think of as Catholics as a marriage covenant, because it’s a societal one, it’s a cultural one that deals with the entire people.

(32:10):

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not denigrating marriage. I’m totally in favor of it and I’m in favor of that covenant. But this is something in between the Mosaic covenant and a marriage covenant. And I think it has a higher purpose in so many ways. Again, that was not Jefferson’s intent. And remember, Jefferson, on his good days, he’s a deist, on his bad days, he’s pretty atheistic. So we wouldn’t expect Jefferson to make a covenant, but we would expect the Founders to do so. But the other thing–and this is where, gosh, so many hypotheticals and counterfactuals–Jefferson wrote this absolutely huge, beautiful paragraph condemning the king for allowing slavery in the colonies. And historically, that’s not quite accurate, but mythologically it’s true. And if Congress, which had been debating ending the slave trade, that was a part of the debates of the spring of 1776, they were debating it very seriously: should they end the slave trade? Had Congress actually included that paragraph and said, look, what is slavery?

(33:20):

It’s a result of the king. Once they symbolically beheaded the king, they could have destroyed slavery at that moment. And I’m exaggerating a little bit, but it was a possibility and there were so many other revolutionary changes going on. Why not get rid of slavery at that one moment? But South Carolina and Georgia, as they always do, they said, “Well, you guys can do that, but we’re out then. We’re not a part of this.” And Congress backed down. They said, all right, we need you guys. We need all 13 colonies on this so we’re going to ignore that issue. And they excise that paragraph. But here’s what’s so important about that paragraph, not just what could have been but what was. In that paragraph, Jefferson says that men, and it’s capital M, capital E, capital N, that men from a foreign country had been taken away against their will.

(34:23):

And so what we know textually is that when Jefferson says all men are created equal, he did not mean white men. He meant all men. He was including Africans in that. And so that I think just textually is so important. But again, and James, I’m being Pollyannish, but really can you imagine how different American history would be if we had gotten rid of slavery at that one moment? And slavery was already naturally decreasing. Our best estimates–David Brion Davis talks about this in his books on slavery–slavery may have been decreasing during the founding period by as much as 33 percent. Because you can’t say all men are created equal and then go whip somebody. You just can’t do that. It’s hypocritical. And so there are manumissions going around everywhere in the colonies, not in Georgia and South Carolina, but everywhere else in the colonies.

(35:24):

So when the Founders write the Declaration they are, and I think we can give them credit for this, even though they make a bad decision, an immoral and unethical decision, they are under the impression that God and nature is already destroying that institution. It’s on its way out. It still may be another hundred years, but it’s evolving its way out. So I think that’s important too.

James Patterson (35:48):
Kara Roger Stevens has a great book trying—

Bradley Birzer (35:51):
I love Kara.

James Patterson (35:52):
Yeah.

Bradley Birzer (35:53):
That book is amazing. That was my favorite book of two years ago. That was incredible.

James Patterson (35:58):
It was an incredible book sort of trying to parse out how Jefferson’s behavior and his ideas don’t quite align and really like a tour de force.

Bradley Birzer (36:08):
Yeah, Kara and she’s also the nicest person possible. When I think about what is she, early 30s, when I think about the future of the history profession, she gives me great hope.

James Patterson (36:23):
Oh, wow!

Bradley Birzer (36:23):
Yeah. Oh, she’s amazing. Have you met her, James?

James Patterson (36:27):
I have. She won the 2025 Storing Prize, so we interviewed her at the meeting, a Ciceronian Society meeting.

Bradley Birzer (36:34):
She’s a delight.

James Patterson (36:35):
Yeah. Speaking to the Ciceronian Society, of which I am president, so everyone should know that.

Bradley Birzer (36:39):
Yes, and I’m a member very proudly.

James Patterson (36:41):
Yes. You talk about Cicero. There are these figures that are in the background of the Declaration. We know John Locke. John Locke kind of gets a lot of attention, but Cicero’s there as well as people like Algernon Sydney, who people may not know about. So maybe talk about some of the more unsung heroes or influences on the Declaration.

Bradley Birzer (37:00):
Yeah, thanks, James. I always love talking about Cicero. He and Socrates and  St. Augustine. I’ll leave Jesus out of this because he’s obviously above all of these guys. But when I think of Western Civ, I just never get enough of Socrates or Cicero or Augustine. They are the foundations for me of what Western Civ is. And so anytime I can talk about them, I’m more than happy to. And I’m one of those, I’m sure you’re the same way, James. I mean, I’m a nerdy guy. If I have time and I’ve got On Duties, I pick it up and I read it.

(37:37):

They’re not at the level of scripture, but to read On Duties or to read On the Laws or On the Republic, I mean, these are just edifying works. And so there was this practice, we don’t do this anymore because we’re not as liberal in the best sense as the Founders were. They’re deeply classical and liberally educated. Jefferson had like every college student of his era, they kept what were called commonplace books. And these commonplace books are diaries, but they’re intellectual diaries. And what they would do, and all the Founders did this, the Founders who went to college, all the Founders who went to college, about 50 percent of them, they would keep these commonplace books. And so every time I came across a passage in Homer that I loved, you write it down. And you write it down in Greek. And then I’m reading Cicero and I love it.

(38:33):

I write it down in Latin. And of course these guys, we haven’t talked about this, James, and this isn’t common knowledge, but any school child at all who had had any education, even if you were only say eight, nine, and ten before you started doing serious farm work, all education in the colonies was only learning Greek and Latin. That’s all you did. Even as an eight-year-old, that’s all you did. So this is a deeply classical period. We don’t think about that, but it’s a very classical period. And so it was expected that someone like Jefferson would know Greek and Latin and then hopefully Hebrew and maybe Italian too, but certainly Greek and Latin. And so I’ve had a chance to go through these commonplace books and the person who is more represented than anyone else, and it’s not even a close race, is Cicero. Cicero just predominates Jefferson’s books.

(39:34):

He’s everywhere in them, all over the commonplace books. And it’s just clear that Jefferson loved him. And so in May of 1825, Jefferson’s a very old man. He’s 14 months away from death. He doesn’t know that, of course, but he’s a little over a year away from dying. And he’s asked by Robert E. Lee’s father, what was the inspiration of the Declaration? Jefferson responds brilliantly. Again, he’s an old man. It’s 49 years after the Declaration, so he may not be remembering perfectly, but it’s our best evidence. And what’s he saying? He says, number one, I did not say one original thing in the Declaration, not one thing. Everything I said was an expression of the American mind of that time, everything. So there’s nothing original. And he says, these were the common ideas of Aristotle, Cicero, Sidney, and Locke. And so I thought, okay, well, let’s go back and look.

(40:42):

Let’s figure it out. And so for me, and again, I could be wrong, I’m guessing on a lot of this and I did this in chapter six. Now, I had a blast guessing, but I’m guessing. And so I thought, all right, where do we see Aristotle in the Declaration? Well, it’s in the pursuit of happiness. If you look at Book 10 of the Ethics, Aristotle tells us what is the purpose of our life? It is to do excellent things. It is to be happy with our excellences. And when we are excellent, of course, Aristotle doesn’t talk about God very often. Plato talks about God every other page, but Aristotle doesn’t. God is pretty absent in Aristotelian philosophy, but God shows up. And in Book 10, Aristotle says, “What do we do? ” Well, we are excellent because we praise God for the gifts he’s given us.

(41:38):

And I thought, okay, when we’re thinking about pursuits of happiness, that makes sense. And Jefferson’s probably about as pro-God as Aristotle is. It’s not a going concern for him, but it’s there. He’s not doubting it. He’s just not into it. And so I thought, okay. But then I got to Cicero, and you start reading the opening, when in the course of human events and nature and nature’s God, and suddenly the language sounds exactly like Cicero. What does Cicero tell us? What do you and I have in common, James? Even though we’re distinct individuals, we share in the Logos, we share in reason, and who do we share that with? Not just you and me, we share it with the God, capital G in Cicero, the God. And what does that mean? Well, it means that right now I could walk into an immigrant neighborhood in the Twin Cities in Minnesota, encounter a Muslim Somali woman and what do I have to say?

(42:50):

I’m not a woman, I’m not Muslim, I’m not black, but she bears reason. And that I think is incredible for Cicero. Cicero is cutting to the chase and he’s saying, look, the accidents of birth do not matter. Every good person, every man, every woman, every child, black, white, male, female does not matter. They all share in reason. And so for me, when I read, and again, I’m making connections here that may not have been exactly the connections Jefferson was making, but when I look at the Declaration and it says “all men are created equal,” there’s no asterisk. It doesn’t say except for Africans or except for Missouri Synod Lutherans or except for Jews. There’s no asterisk. All men are created equal. And for me, that’s Cicero. And you go back, it’s also Heraclitus. You go back to the earliest Greek philosophers, Thales, Heraclitus when they’re debating, are we earth?

(43:58):

Are we water? Are we air? Are we fire? They’re asking the question. This is the heart of Western Civilization. We’re not racist. We are deeply universal. The whole Western project has been defined commonalities among human beings. And James, I know you didn’t ask this, but I’ll go off on a tangent for a second. Let’s go back. Let’s look at Horace. Let’s look at Cicero. Let’s look at Virgil. Let’s look at Livy. Let’s look at Homer. Is there ever once in any of the ancient texts a judgment about someone because of the color of their skin? No. The answer is no, you cannot find it. When they talk about the Ethiopians, they say, well, the Ethiopians are hilarious. Everybody wants to hang out with the Ethiopians. Even the gods want to drink with the Ethiopians, they’re a blast. Nobody says, “Oh my gosh, they’re dark-skinned and therefore inferior.” And to me, this is Western Civ.

(45:06):

And when I hear people, and I get really worked up about this, as you can probably tell James, but when someone says to me, Western Civ is racist and sexist and imperialist and colonialist, I think, who are you talking about? Yeah, that’s the modern West, but that’s not in the tradition of the West at all. It’s not rooted in Western Civilization. That’s a corruption of Western Civilization. And so one of the things I say in the book, and I mean this very seriously, though I’m throwing the gauntlet down. There are two truly great moments in humanity where we proclaim human dignity. One is Christianity. Nobody had proclaimed human dignity like Christianity. Think about St. Paul, neither Greek nor Jew, neither female nor male. It is absolutely universal all one in Christ. And then we get to Jefferson. We hold these truths to be self-evident. James, again, feel free to push back on this, but I would argue till I’m blue in the face that outside of Scripture, that sentence, “we hold these truths to be self-evident” is the most important sentence in human history, because I think it says something profound about who we are.

(46:32):

It says something deeply profound about what human nature is. And so you can have a great black man like Martin Luther King who loves Jefferson and loves the Declaration. He doesn’t see a contradiction there. What he says is the Declaration is a promissory note. Not everything’s perfect on July 5, but man, it’s going to be and it’s moving in that direction. And I’m no utopian. We’re all fallen. We love war. We love being discriminatory. It’s just the unfortunate side of who we are. But if you say something like all men are created equal, you can’t back down from that. You can only make it real. So all the direction is towards human progress in the best sense. And again, I’m not utopian. I’m not progressive by no means. I’m as conservative as they come, but that is an optimistic thing I think we can say about The American Project.

James Patterson (47:29):
Dr. Birzer, thank you so much for coming on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Bradley Birzer (47:32):
James, it’s such an honor. And again, I’m so glad we connected with one another. What a treat!

James Patterson (47:37):
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.