We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emili Kashinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
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Today we are joined by Michael Barone. Michael Baron is a senior political
analyst for The Washington Examiner and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
He's also the author of the new book Mental Maps of the Founders, How
geographic imagination guided America's revolutionary leadership. Michael, thank you so much for joining
us. Well, it's good to be with you. Thank you for having
me. We assign your work to our young reporters when they go out and
do campaign reporting, so it's a real pleasure to talk to you. Michael.
Oh goodness, that's a big responsibility. But it's important. It's so
important, it's so helpful. But in this book, I'm really curious actually,
just as to how it came to be. I know that you're very
interested in geography. But how did you decide to sort of put this together
and the concept that this book is kind of addressing. Well, my friend,
the great reporter and Reagan biographer Luke Cannon said, if you want to
really learn, they said to me once, if you want to really learn
about a subject, write a book about it. And I wanted to as
I was looking back for a long career of writing about American politics and about
history from time to time, I wanted to learn more about the founding fathers
and abousitive way that they were thinking about what they did, and so I
decided to write a book about them. And I decided to write about a
subject that apparently, according to the great historian of the Revolution and early Republic,
Gordon Wood, nobody else has done, which is their geographic orientation.
I've always been a math bog guy. Grew up on one of those Midwestern
squares that was devolved out of a square township. That design was done by
Thomas Jefferson in the seventeen eighties. Are adapted from that, and I learned
north, southeast and west before I learned right and left. And I've always
been geographically oriented, and so I took a look at the Founders, not
doing original archive of research, but at the wonderful biographies and analyzes that have
been written by great academic historians and great non academic history writers about the Founders.
And I've put together what is, in effect these six essays that make
up by both mental maps of the Founders, taking a look at their at
their geographic orientation, how they envisaged the new Republic, how they envisaged that
the Seaboard colonies would come together in the American Revolution, and what kind of
a republic would they make after the revolution. These were things that were by
no means obvious. If you look at the maps that were drawn in the
colonial period, they were pretty accurate renditions of the Seaboard area. But once
you get inland from the Atlantic coast, they get more and more imaginative or
less descriptive. They were looking at an unknown areas, and they were looking
at an expanse of land, an enormous expanse of land going west from the
Appalachian Mountains, which they didn't really know whether or not it would be part
of the new country. And so I wanted to write about that, and
I think in the course of it. I picked up about three different things
that struck me as very interesting. One is that the success and the shape,
the successful shape of the enterprise of the revolting against British colonialism and then
setting up a new republic was contingent on a lot of things happening. It
wasn't inevitable. It was the product of many very talented and visionary people,
but it wasn't inevitable. Contingency played an important role. The second thing is
that the founders had very much an appreciation of cultural variety. You know,
we've heard it said in recent years that America has just now become a diverse
country, just in the last few years. The fact is that it has
always been a cultural diverse country, as described in the Great Book by the
historian David Hackett Fisher Albion Seat, where he describes the four different cultural folk
ways that brought settlers brought over from different parts of the British Isles to the
North American colonies. The founders knew about that. They couldn't read David Hackett
Fisher, but they knew what he was talking about, and so they set
up a republic that would have room for cultural variety. That had room for
a free exercise of religion in James Mattt, the Young James Madison's felicitous praise.
And the third thing that struck me as I was going through these biographies
reading more about the Founders trying to understand their thinking, is that the American
Revolution really sparked and set in motion the movement against slavery. There hadn't really
been a anti slavery movement in the North American colonies or among really European cultures
that wanted to condemn and outlaws slavery where it existed. Suddenly in the seventeen
eighties, you see the legislatures in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.
You see the courts in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. You see the Independent Republic
of Vermont, ultimately our fourteenth state, declaring that they want to see the
abolition of slavery, the gradual abolition in most of those cases, but nonetheless
moving away from slavery. You see George Washington deciding to free his slaves.
You see Benjamin Franklin, who who had had slaves in Pennsylvania in his earlier
career, turn against slavery. And that's an important part of the American story
that I think is not sufficiently understood, and so I try to bring those
things forward in this book on the geographic orientation of six of the important founding
fathers. What's your sense of how aware these founding fathers, these six founding
fathers, and maybe even more broadly, how aware were they of these kind
of mental maps and these sort of salience of the geographic differences. Well,
I think they were. They were trying to inform their fellow citizens of the
extent of the colonies. You know, if you take Benjamin Franklin, for
example, in the seventeen fifties, well before the American Revolution, when we're
facing a potential colonial war, World War really between Britain and France. Franklin,
in one of his publications runs a political one of the first political cartoons,
showing a snake sliced up into different segments, with different segments labeled by
the abbreviations for the North American colonies and the tagline the line the headline on
the cartoon is join or die. He's making a case that the British colonies,
which were set up by different proprietors, by different enterprises, by Calvinists
and New England Anglicans in Virginia, Catholic and Maryland Quakers in Pennsylvania, and
whose economic ties were primarily with each of them with the British Isles rather than
with each other. He's saying, no, these colonies are a unit.
There should be a unit. They should act as a unit. He puts
forward this all many plan of union at a conference with the Iroquois Indians.
He says, if the Indians can do this, uses the term savages,
which of course with what he used today. If they can have an Iroquois
federation of multiple tribes as they did, we can have a federation of the
different colonies. So he was imagining something that most of the residents, most
of the active people in the colonies in America, and they were politically active
because they had their own legislative bodies, elective legislatures, that that they were
possibly a unit. So, you know, the the colonists were exploring.
When George Washington, as a young man, as a teenager, was sent
west to do surveying work for Lord Fairfax, the proprietor of this vast area
of northern Virginia between Chesapeake Bay and the Appalachian Mountains. One of his guides
was a map that was drawn up by two men named who had gone out
surveying in advance of Washington, named Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson. Peter Jefferson
at that time had an eight year old son named Thomas, who later became
a person of considerable importance. But the the imagination there Peter Jefferson's math as
you get to the Appalachian chains, gets less and less accurate as you go
west. But they in Washington in effect fills in the blanks with his expeditions
for surveying for Lord Fairfax and then going forward for the House of Burgesses at
the command of King George the Second to tell the brit of the French not
to establish forts and trading posts in the forks of the Ohio, the area
where the Mongongahela and Allegheny Rivers come back to form the Ohio River, the
junction that's now at the heart of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So he was filling
in the men of North America, for his fellow colonists, his fellow Virginians,
and ultimately for the British crown at that time. In a way that
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your podcasts. That's so fascinating. I was going to actually specifically ask you
about Virginia, not just because I'm in DC right now, I'm very aware
of Virginia, but because it plays such a huge role in the founding as
you described in the book, What is maybe specific to Virginia or what sort
of lessons or influence did Virginia, particularly on a geographic level, have on
the founding. Well, Virginia was the largest of the colonies in terms of
population of European descendant people. It was probably the largest initially of indigenous population
of Indians, Native Americans, whatever you want to term you want to use,
whose numbers were vastly reduced by diseases to which they had no immunities,
but we don't have accurate figures on that. It was the richest in terms
of the tobacco wealth of the planters and so forth. And it was also
as the move towards an American Revolution came into being. It was a tovital
importance because the initial rebellion against the British colonials was centered in Massachusetts and the
New England colonies that had their own particular cultural folk ways founded by Puritan Calvinists
in seventeenth century without very many other people immigrants of other origins coming there.
Virginia joined them in supporting the American Revolution, and the leading people of Virginia
represented in the House of Burgesses, which was an elective body. He was
supportive, and it symbolized when the Second Continental Congress is meeting in seventeen seventy
five, John Adams, delegate from Massachusetts, gets up and says, we
need to we need to appoint a general to be at the head of our
continental army. They were thinking big continentally at that stage, even though they
were talking about an army that was operating mainly in Massachusetts, and he said,
we really need to have He said to himself, we really need to
have somebody from Virginia because it's this major colony supporting us. But we need
to have it to recognize the importance of Virginia. And he nominated a young
man forty three years old who came in wearing a blue and buff uniform of
the Virginia Militia, a man named George Washington, and it was approved unanimously
by the Continental Congress to be the commander. So that was Virginia becomes a
very important part of the rebellion, and the fact that it supports the revolution
supports the cause of independence. Britain is absolutely pivotal to the character of the
United States as it developed. We one can imagine that the British generally succeeded
in quelling the rebellion, but not in New England, that Massachusetts, Connecticut,
Rhode Island would have become an independent country by itself just in that one
what is now northeast corner of the United States, but that the rest would
remain British colonies. What would the world have looked like, How would that
have developed? We don't know the answers to that, but it would have
been very different from the America that came into being. And so Virginia was
absolutely pivotal and its boundaries were not well recognized. Remember that the Virginia House
of Burgesses since George Washington into the young George Washington up to the forks of
the Ohio and to the north, up towards Lake Erie to warn the French
up to get out of there. He does so unsuccessfully initially, but they
weren't that. That's not in Virginia as we know Virginia today. But there
was an expansive idea Virginia. And you read Thomas Jefferson's book, the one
book that he actually wrote, notes on Virginia, and he's got a very
expansive definition of Virginia as well. Interestingly, he has a different geographical vision
that George Washington does. He omits New England, which George Washington came to
know well from his military exploits there in seventeen seventy five and seventeen seventy six
successful exploits and expelling the British, and as president when he came on his
ceremonial visits to New England in seventeen eighty nine, in seventeen ninety and so
forth, and spoke out, among other things, at the Truro Synagogue in
Newport, Rhode Island, talking about how America, in America, Jews were
to be recognized, not as tolerated as some subordinate people, but in fact
as equal citizens for you to live in peace under their vine and fig tree,
the biblical phrase, and that was But Jefferson's Virginia goes farther west.
He's looking. He goes over the Mississippi River, long before the United States
obtained that territory through the Louisiana purchase in eighteen oh three. He even tells
you how far it is from Santa Fe to Mexico City. He never traveled
much farther west than the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Alleghany Mountain in Virginia himself.
But he had a vision of Virginia and the nation that extended far to
the west. And I actually even want to keep pulling out that thread.
This as they're founding the country. They have this idea of the vast expanse
heading west, that there is all of this land to be settled, and
that's different than you know, a lot of Europe that was obviously already settled
and where their parents, grandparents and some of them had come from. How
does that factor in as they're also kind of designing a new form of government,
as they're actually trying to create a constitutional republic in some completely profoundly new
ways, how does this idea that they also have a vast expanse of land
to work with potentially factor in? Well, they have you know, they
have a variety of tasks facing them. Number one is how do you relate
to the indigenous people, the Indians and so forth. George Washington's initial trips
had guided by Indians who impact behaved and some one instance throughout it dismally he
saw one of his indianatwise take a French ambassador and basically bury an axe in
the man's head and killed the man, which became a cause eleb and sparked
really the French and Indian War North America, the Seven Years War as it
was worldwide. In seventeen fifty four fifty six, you had the questions of
where settlement to go. George Washington had a vision of the Potomac as the
great avenue into the interior the United States. He sponsored the Chesapeake and Ohio
Canal. He had a he had a whole vision following his own path there
in his military exploits and also in his land by He buys his first acreage
in the Shenandoah Valley when he's believed nineteen years old, for money that he's
made doing survey for Lord Fairfax. Jefferson's thinking about the vast west. He
draws up a number of plans. When he was a delegate to the Confederation
Congress of the seventeen eighties, he has plans. He sets up the idea
of the squared townships. You can see that when you fly across country on
a cloud misstay, you can look down and see Jeffersonian squares all over the
landscape of the Midwest, of some of the South, and going out as
far and west as Orange County in Los Angeles County, California. Jefferson had
these ideas of setting up a somewhat deferential society of yeoman farmers farther farther west.
Founders had a different idea Alexander Hamilton, whom we haven't mentioned yet,
who was born and raised in the West Indies in ninety percent slave territories,
and who left Saint Croix at the age of before he was twenty years old,
at the age of about eighteen, and never returned, never wanted to
return, wanted to become a North American. His geographic vision was a vision
of trade roots across the ocean, of the invisible trade routes in which great
amounts of commerce were going by. And he created a financial system that facilitated
the trade by creating the Bank of the United States, by encouraging the creation
of banks, which provided us a source of money in a society that had
very little gold and silver in it, which people basically traded by barter or
to a very considerable extent. Hamilton had this other geographic vision. It's different
from Jefferson's, and they were political adversaries as members of George Washington's cabinet,
and going beyond that into the seventeen nineties and the election of eighteen hundred,
they were bitter adversaries as time went on. But both of those visions turned
out to be part to to be part of what became the United States,
to create features, whether it's the creation of townships, square mile townships with
a square mile made up of square mile things, one of them set aside
for education, which was one of Thomas Jefferson's ideas, or to set up
the situation of encouraging trade and international trade and a commercial economy, as Alexander's
Hamilton successfully did as Secretary of the Treasury, the youngest person ever to hold
that job. And what about the differences between urban areas and rural areas and
how that? I mean, you Boston very different than Philadelphia, very different
than other cities New York, and also of course very different than the rural
areas and places in Virginia. How do those differences shape the way they were
looking at this project at the time. Well, remember, if you're talking
about colonial America, if you're talking about the early Republic, you're talking about
a situation in which the vast majority of people did not live in what we
would call cities. And I think what your question really points up is the
cultural variety. Such cities, as they had were commercial and cultural centers,
but they were quite differently focused. I mean, you know, Boston had
been set up by the Calvinists, by the Puritan religions, and became a
center of that line of thought. Ultimately, it becomes an area that moves
fairly early towards opposition to slavery. The Massachusetts Constitution of seventeen eighty is interpreted
by the courts there for bad slavery in Massachusetts starting in seventeen eighty, So
you're looking at one of the earliest abolitions of slavery in Western society. New
York was very different. New York was a polygot place. It was made.
It was originally New Amsterdam. You had Dutch there, you had in
line with the Dutch tradition of tolerance, you had Jews there. You had
people from different parts of the West Indies, you had people from different parts
of New York. In the Revolution, New York was basically, though New
York historians don't like to put it this way, new York it was a
Tory stronghold. It was an area where there was opposition to the Revolution which
wanted to remain. Hey, New York was a center that tolerated cultural diversity,
that was involved in commerce worldwide. It wasn't too concerned about rules.
It liked the idea that the being in the British Empire and trading on those
terms, and wasn't too interested in this. And George Washington spends much of
his time as Commander in chief Continental Army trying to regain New York, which
he was chased out of by British troops and fortunate to get most of his
army out in the final months of seventeen seventy six. So New York was
very different. Philadelphia, of course, had the Quaker heritage, had the
situation of the who was owned a colonial period by the Penn family, by
the descendants of William Penn, the original proprietor that founded the colony in sixteen
eighty two. Benjamin Franklin, the great Man of Philadelphia, who became very
rich as a journalist and postmaster, very knowledgeable about the other colonies in a
way that most of the colonists were not, who became a world famous scientist,
the person who really discovers and characterizes electricity and how it works, his
experiments with the kite and other things. He describes the Gulf Stream. Nobody
had really understand good the ocean currents before Franklin, just by making observations on
his transatlantic voyages, figures it out. He's the great man. He's opposed
to both the penn proprietors and to the Quakers on the grounds that the Quakers
are not protecting the frontier and the pens aren't paying local taxes. And he
becomes, you know, the agent for the Pennsylvania colony over in London.
But those of each of those cultural each of those cities was the center of
a sort of culture that was quite different. And Franklin is the one guy
in the colonial period who figures out how to appeal to all the different cultures.
He was starting in circus seventeen thirty. He's putting out the Poor Richard's
Almanac, which has circulation and colonies up and down the coast and even into
the West Indies. He's founding a series of printers in people that he licenses
in the other colonies. He's sponsoring the touring of the evangelist preacher for Britain,
George Whitefield. Becomes a friend of Whitefield, even though it wasn't particularly
religious himself. Up and down the colonies and what's called the First Great Awakening
of the seventeen forties. Franklin understands that the colonies have different cultural varieties,
and he's creating in many ways a common culture between them. Even before he's
thinking, or anyone is thinking about an American revolution, about creating a United
States, he's creating a colony, and he's thinking of the colonies as a
unit that is geographical and orientation anticipates the founding of this country in a way
that's really uncanny. Hey, y'all, this is Sarah from the Sarah Carter
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book and thinking about how it might relate to certain things that are swirling challenges
that are swirling around the United States today, are there any particular lessons you
think stand out? As you know, especially this question of geography, rural,
urban, all of that continues to really be central to some of the
problems people will observe in the United States today. Are there any lessons that
stood out for you as you're writing this book. Well, one lesson is
the US and about cultural variety. Diversity is that the fashionable term has been
in recent years and people say, we're suddenly diverse for the first time.
Well, we've been diverse even before we were a wee. And that's something
that the founders realized. And one of the things the genius that emerges from
the Constitutional Convention, from the revolution itself, from the political struggle severely in
the public is the idea that you can have a limited government with guaranteed freedoms
and that this is the kind of government that and you have also local government,
state governments that have responsibilities as well. You have a certain amount of
decentralization of republic. You're pitting different regions against different regions and an attempt to
protect the liberties of all and at the same time to have a coherent and
competent federal government. And Madison deals with this, and I have a chapter
on James Madison, in particular in his contributions to the Federalist Papers. It
is something that he's a profound thinker about. You have Alexander Hamilton thinking about
the same issues taking a somewhat different approach. I talk about that in my
chapter on Hamilton. So dealing with cultural variety is something that, of course,
you know, with something that the founders give us some guidance, guidance
that I think sometimes we tend to forget when we talk about trying to suppress
cultural variety and have one guiding culture. For some people, it's the culture
of the universities, which has been showing itself to be pretty rotten completely to
govern the whole country. There's a reason that federalism was a good idea for
a culturally various, culturally diverse country. The other thing I think about is
contingency and how the founders were not inevitable. You know, there's some Americans
today when you talk about American exceptionalism, when you say that this country has
a special heritage, they think, well, you're just bragging. It's just
because it's your own place and you're thoughtlessly going on. I don't think that's
true at all. I think that, in fact, when we reflect on
American history and think of our own small place in it, we are the
lucky beneficiary of American exceptionalism, of the way that this republic was created,
governed in which there was space for people of all different of many many different
kinds, which has had enormous successes and everything from the economy to civil liberties
and a whole variety of areas. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
We are the beneficiaries. When we boast about our country or about its positive
aspects, we're not boasting, for the most part, about things that we
created ourselves. We're boasting about things for which we are the lucky beneficiaries and
in which we are at the current trustees. And perhaps we have not done
as good a job as nurturing and furthering the positive things in our country as
we might have been doing. So, you know, I think about these
things are unusual. I mean, I think about the character George Washington.
I mean, one of the things that's amazing about George Washington is that he's
a military commander. He relinquishes power, he resigns his commission and Christmas even
at seventeen eighty three in Annapolis, Maryland, and turns it back over to
the Congress which was meeting there. He's almost moved to tears. Everybody in
the crowd has almost moved to tears. He's going back to his farm,
as he called it, his estate, which was actually a pretty big one,
and he's going back to private life, relinquishing military power. And he
had, through many frustrating years to observe the primacy of civilian control and the
control of the Congress, which wasn't very helpful, but paying the troops and
so forth. Of course, he relinquishes power again when he does not seek
a third term as president the seventeen ninety six but he issues his farewell address
and the other legacy, of course he gives us. And I think it
was a deliberate attempt to try to influence the society in a way that he
would not have even thought of doing as a young man, and that's by
freeing his slaves and his wife's slaves in his will, of providing for their
sustenance and income for the rest of their lives. And I think he was
sending a message to the future of America there of what he wanted this country
to be. We were lucky to have such an individual who had that steally
resolved not to take great power, but to observe of legality and to observe
in limited power, and to exercise it as best he could within those limits.
It wasn't inevitable he got his military committee. You know, he was
appointed the head of the Military Army in seventeen seventy five, nominated by John
Adams, in large part because he was one of the few colonials that had
had genuine military experience. Where does that come from, Well, it comes
from the fact that the House of Burgesses, when it's looking for somebody to
send a message to the French in seventeen fifty to fifty three fifty four,
says, who's been out on the frontier, And they have this young man
who's related to some important people and was an older brother, that's a prominent
person of the Potomac River Valley who's been doing surveying for Lauren Fairfax, who
is not scar He does not start out as a rich man. He starts
off as an accomplished horseman and trained surveyor who undertakes this surveying for Lord Fairfax
and puts his earnings into buying land in the Chandoah Valley. You know,
Lord Fairfax's hold on this community was pretty He was based on a grant of
land by King Charles the Second in sixteen forty nine, which, in fact,
King Charles was then an exile. His father had been executed. He
was granting powers that he had no practical effect over. He was just trying
to raise money by signing documents to some people. Lord Fairfax litigates this for
eleven years in the Privy Council in seventeen thirties and early forties. If he
hadn't won that case, he wouldn't have hired George Washington to do the surveying.
Washington wouldn't have gone out to the wilderness, they wouldn't have hired him
as the commander in chief. We were lucky. America was lucky. I
think the world was lucky to have this individual created there. I say at
the end of my book that there are those who think that you know that
a beneficent deity has been on the lookout for the United States. I don't
share that view. My own personal religious views do not encompass that. But
wait, I think there's some strong evidence for in the contingencies that give us
the founding fathers. And so I think that from the fact that you have
a genius like Benjamin Franklin, world famous, helping to create the America,
that you have a personal, personal character and endurance of George Washington as the
commander of the Continental Army. And then it's the first president of the United
States that you have the coincidence that the second and third Presidents, John Adams
and Thomas Jefferson, who had been on the committee writing drafting the Declaration of
Independence, Adams deferring to Jefferson as the better writer, both die on the
fiftieth anniversary of the fourth of July seventeen seventy six that was taken in the
nineteenth century as design that God was looking out for America. And I think
it's easy to understand when you reflect on those things, why a religious people
might have believed that, that's for sure. Well, Michael Baron, before
I let you run, I just want to ask what it is about maps,
you know, where your interest in maps comes from, and what you
love about studying them. Well, you know, some people love maps and
have a good geographic sense of where they are. Now other people don't.
And I think our map orientation is perhaps deteriorating because of the GPS, and
you know, these little gizmos that we have to tell us to turn left
on take exit fifty four of nine three ninety five or whatever it is,
and we don't really know very much about the terrain or anything else, as
earlier people did. As animals have maps in their heads that we only beginning
to fully understand. You know, Salmon go back to the the river in
which they respawn. Birds fly thousands of miles to very specific locations. There's
something about knowing where you are that's important. And one of the things that
you know in American history is that we have this republic that exists across the
geographic expanse of North America and out into the northeast and the northwest corner of
the continent, also the Pacific Ocean. You know, if you look at
the mass of the world and the welter the historian Walter MacDougall said in sixteen
hundred, and then look at it in twenty twenty twenty three, four hundred
years later, you know, in sixteen hundred you already have great masses of
people in China, probably thirty forty percent of the world's population, large population
in South Asia, in India. You have people in Western Europe who are
sort of at the cutting edge of navigation and creating military forces and exploring around
the world. You have people living in less economic advanced circumstances in Africa and
so forth, and you have large numbers of people living in in articulate societies
centered in Mexico, centered and what is now Peru. And so for one
thing you don't have. You only have scattered indigenous peoples, not in very
large numbers in what is now North America. The big difference in four hundred
years is the creation of the United States, of the emergence of English speaking
North America as a major center of economy, major center culture, major center
of military power and competence in the world. Those of us who are the
beneficiaries, the heirs, perhaps the trustees of this today, I think it's
always helpful to learn more about this and to take a look at how this
not inevitable march English speaking people across North America took place, and so forth.
So these are things that I've been trying to understand that are all my
life. I'm still working on it. And this book, Mental Maps of
the Founders, is an attempt to shedow light on some of the extraordinary people
who, operating from maps that were by no means complete or entirely accurate,
helped to create a republic that became the greatest country in the world so fascinating.
The book again is called Mental Maps Founders How geographic imagination guided America's revolutionary
leadership. It is out on November twenty eighth. Michael Baron, thank you
so very much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. You've
been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jashinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until
then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray, heard the fame
by Serison, and then it faded away