A country with no kings

As subjects of the British king, the very idea of criticizing monarchy -- or King George III himself -- was a dangerous one. So how did we become a country where "no kings" is a guiding principle? Something we take for granted? Holly Brewer is our guide to the resistance, risk and eventual revolution that transformed a British colony into a democratic country that would have no king. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:26Speaker 03

  I was gonna start in a strange place.

• 1:32Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Holly Brewer.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Holly Brewer. I'm a professor of history at the University of Maryland College Park, and I work on early modern debates about justice and power.

• 1:45Hannah McCarthy?

  I called Holly up a couple of weeks ago because I've been thinking a lot about this principle that we have tended to agree on here in the United States.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  We're a republic. We have no kings.

• 1:57Hannah McCarthy?

  We have no kings. And I wanted to know how that started. I mean, I know we had a Declaration of Independence. I know we fought a long and brutal revolutionary war to secure that independence, those blessings of liberty. And I know that we wrote and then rewrote a constitution that cemented that principle. But when and how did that become something that we ostensibly agreed on? All right? So let's start in a strange place.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  It's with an image that we think was written by Benjamin Franklin's grandmother. So sometime in the middle of the 17th century, which includes the words, "No church, no kings," and connecting the hierarchies of the Church of England to the power of monarchy, and a pretty radical thing. But it's scribbled in a letter, an unpublished letter. It's not published. And I began with that to illustrate the problems of trying to measure anti-monarchical sentiment in early America.

• 3:13Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 3:15Nick Capodice?

  I'm Nick Capodice.

• 3:16Hannah McCarthy?

  And today, how we became the land of no kings. Because, remember, we used to have one.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  It was seditious to even criticize a royal policy, but it was literally treason to criticize monarchy or the king directly. I mean, it depended on what you said, and he said it too, but you wouldn't want to put anything in print. It was bad enough to try to criticize the prime minister, or great lords, or anybody else. And even then, you would want to-- if you look at colonial newspapers from the mid to late 18th century, for example, there'll be criticism during the Stamp Act crisis of, say, Lord North. But they will write it L-dash-dash-D, N-dash-dash-dash-H. So you have to guess,

• 4:11Speaker 03

  right? So there's a little bit of plausible deniability.

• 4:15Hannah McCarthy?

  Nick, I actually told Holly that more than once during the conversation I had with her, I had butterflies in my stomach. Because she does the kind of work that, at least for me, makes the past a little less hazy. She finds the humanity in the thousands of documents that are clues to our history. And when it comes to understanding how colonists felt about monarchy, that takes a lot of effort.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  You certainly wouldn't want to criticize the king directly, because it could get you in all kinds of trouble. And usually, it would just be in the form of a fine or something like that. They weren't trotting out the full punishment for treason for these things, but you did have to be incredibly careful. And so when we find things, it's evidence like this that's written into a letter or on it, you know, scribbled in a manuscript. It's not usually in the published press because it's just stupid and dangerous to say something like that directly.

• 5:13Nick Capodice?

  So for Holly to really understand how some people in the colonies felt about having a king while we still very much had a king, she has to hunt for clues to read between the lines.

• 5:26Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, when you're a subject of the king, even if you don't like what he's doing, you still don't want to be caught giving him a bad review. You have to be a little sneaky.

• 5:39Nick Capodice?

  Wait, Hannah, that letter Holly mentioned, the one probably from Benjamin Franklin's grandmother, that was from the 1600s? Isn't that a little bit early for being anti-monarchy, even if you're being sneaky?

• 5:53Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, there was a little something called the English Civil War.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  In England in the 17th century, in the first century of the colonies, there were two revolutions, both of which involved displacing a king. In the first case, King Charles I, after seven years of civil war, he was put on trial by Parliament and tried and executed. And he kept repeating during his trial, if he's to defend himself, except by saying that they had no right to try him, that he was above the law, that God only could sit in judgment on him, and that he was appointed by God, and that therefore they had no capacity to judge him. And that's probably when that manuscript drawing from Franklin's grandmother

• 6:41Speaker 03

  originated.

• 6:42Nick Capodice?

  Oh, so there were colonists observing this thing from afar and quietly supporting it?

• 6:49Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, it's complicated. The colonies were pretty new, many of them loyal to the crown, specifically the king's son, Charles II, who was in exile. But some were less than thrilled with their deposed king.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  You know, you can find all kinds of other evidence from around then, too, especially in New England, where they were less sympathetic to monarchy. Partly because, especially Charles I, partly because of their perceptions that he was intolerant of their Puritan religious beliefs.

• 7:18Hannah McCarthy?

  Holly told me about this guy, Samuel Maverick. He lived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and he wrote this letter when the Restoration happened.

• 7:27Nick Capodice?

  The Restoration, that is when Charles II was basically invited to just come on back and be king again. He was restored to the throne.

• 7:36Hannah McCarthy?

  Right, so Samuel Maverick, who did not get along so well with the Puritan leadership in Massachusetts, is describing the colony in this letter.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  And he wrote this letter and reported on just how terrible they were in Massachusetts and how much they didn't like monarchy. And he says, "There's a tavern right at the main wharf coming into Boston, and it used to be called the King's Arms."

• 8:01Hannah McCarthy?

  The King's Arms, by the way, refers to the royal coat of arms, the one with the unicorn and the lion. It symbolizes divine right and power. It also was and is a pretty common name for inns and taverns.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  In Massachusetts, in Boston, they renamed the tavern from the King's Arms to the King's Head. And the reason that this was so dramatic is, of course, the King's Head, after the execution of Charles I, would have been a bloody head, right? This was an incredibly radical thing to do for them to rename the King's Arms, which celebrated monarchy, to the King's Head.

• 8:39Nick Capodice?

  Wow, so this tavern was saying something without saying something, essentially. It's that plausible deniability thing again.

• 8:48Hannah McCarthy?

  Right, and clearly Samuel Maverick knew what they meant. He's saying, "Look at these terrible British subjects." Now, of course, you cannot prove that they are opposed to the king, it's just a name. So here's the thing. The English monarchy is restored in 1660. There are still over 100 years until the Declaration of Independence. And there was a lot going on in North America. British colonies trying to establish themselves amidst resistance from tribal nations and threats from pirates and competing foreign nations. There were also, Nick, rebellions.

• 9:22Nick Capodice?

  Oh, yeah, I know about this. Colonists rebelling against royal governors and also against English law, right?

• 9:31Hannah McCarthy?

  Right. There were these English laws that basically said the colonists could only send trade goods on English ships. Some of them could only be shipped to England. And some of the stuff going to the colonies had to go through England first, so it could be taxed. And even if these policies did not mean a huge financial cost for the colonies, they were politically unpopular. In North Carolina, Nick, in part because of the trade laws, colonists even seized control of the government, arrested officials, and created their own government for two years.

• 10:04Nick Capodice?

  This smacks of self-governance, Hannah.

• 10:06Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, it sure does. By the way, the guy who led that rebellion, John Culpepper, had to go to England. He was tried for treason. And then he was acquitted.

• 10:15Nick Capodice?

  Wait, seriously?

• 10:16Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, because the English lords feared what would happen in the colonies if he were convicted. He came home a hero. But the reason I'm telling you all of this is to say that things were tumultuous in the 100 years before the revolution. The colonists were resistant to taxation without representation, to governance being imposed on them in ways that felt unfair. America, in short, was developing a vibe.

• 10:41Nick Capodice?

  Right. What about the term that we hear a lot in this era, salutary neglect? That was going on too, right?

• 10:48Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, we talked about this in our episode on the Declaration of Independence. There was this unofficial policy of not enforcing English laws, specifically trade laws in the American colonies, which helped the colonies to thrive. But part of the reason England was a little lax on laws is the fact that they were distracted.

• 11:07Nick Capodice?

  Well, there was essentially a world war going on.

• 11:10Hannah McCarthy?

  There was the Seven Years' War, a massive global conflict that came to the North American theater in the form of the French and Indian War.

• 11:18Nick Capodice?

  Which Britain won?

• 11:20Hannah McCarthy?

  Indeed, it did. It all wrapped up in 1763. But you see, even if you win a war, you still have to pay the piper. England was in a ton of debt. And now it had all this time on its hands. And hey, they protected the colonies. So the colonies need to foot part of the bill.

• 11:37Nick Capodice?

  Yes, taxes.

• 11:42Hannah McCarthy?

  Taxes, and not just taxes. England knew that tribal nations were not going to take defeat sitting down, so they kept troops in North America. They also wanted to manage their newly acquired territories to the west. That's the stuff they took from France. So colonists were forbidden from settling west of the Alleghenies. People like George Washington, for example, had fought in the French and Indian War. They'd been promised land in return, or they'd been planning for decades to grab that land whenever they could.

• 12:12Nick Capodice?

  So westward expansion was an American obsession from very early on.

• 12:17Hannah McCarthy?

  And English interference with this plan was not welcome. So we have England telling us we cannot have the land we want, English troops roaming around, who, by the way, the colonists were required to house and give supplies to.

• 12:32Nick Capodice?

  Wait, wait, hold on a sec. Is this why we have the Third Amendment, our most neglected amendment?

• 12:38Hannah McCarthy?

  Yes.

• 12:39Nick Capodice?

  This story keeps getting better and better.

• 12:41Hannah McCarthy?

  And of course, as you mentioned, we have taxes. Oh, the taxes. And we're going to get to that after a quick break.

• 12:48Nick Capodice?

  But before that break, if you want to learn more about what went into cementing a country without kings, we have a whole series on our foundational documents. You can check out the whole shebang at our website, civics101podcast.org, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 13:13Nick Capodice?

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• 15:24Hannah McCarthy?

  We're back. We're asking how we agreed to be a country without kings. And before the break, the French and Indian War had just ended and England was really starting to grind colonial gears. Courting soldiers, forbidding expansion and taxes.

• 15:39Nick Capodice?

  And Hannah, I know we got to have a gentle touch on the historical details on this one. Because otherwise, we're going to be here all night.

• 15:45Hannah McCarthy?

  All week.

• 15:46Nick Capodice?

  All week. But I think basically what people need to know here is that the colonies had developed a sense of independence. They had their own methods, their own plans. And now, now, the mother country was yanking them back in certain ways.

• 16:02Hannah McCarthy?

  Right. And all of this without representation in British Parliament. Still, this didn't yet mean we were anti-monarchy, at least not out loud. Early on in this episode, our guest Holly Brewer explained the danger of critiquing the Crown itself. It was treason in the early days of the colonies and remained treason in the years before the Revolutionary War.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  One of the things that really fascinates me is there's been some scholarship that has said people didn't really criticize the monarchy and therefore people approved of the monarchy in colonial America. But when you realize that it's dangerous to do so, and you can find examples of people being thrown in jail for saying "God damn the king" in a tavern, for example, in North Carolina in the 1750s, or something like that, you realize that people learn to be careful. Not that you might not think things, but you're not going to put it in print. So you have to be suspicious of just looking at what's in the newspapers and assuming that represents what people really thought about

• 17:05Speaker 03

  monarchy. And so it was normal in the lead up to the revolution to blame the king's ministers for the policies and the problems and not the king himself, because that was a safer thing to do. But people might really be realizing, or probably were really realizing, this is the king's bad choices about prime ministers because he chose the prime ministers. And so that was creating all kinds of problems.

• 17:37Nick Capodice?

  So even though the safest way to critique your government was to avoid the guy at the top, people were aware of the fact that the guy at the top was ultimately responsible for the things they didn't like.

• 17:49Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, it makes me think about the fact that Americans today often blame the president before they'll blame whatever cabinet member made whatever decision. We go straight to the top. But back to the colonies, tensions are building amidst taxes and policies and conflict with British troops. Real quick, Nick, do you know who Oliver Cromwell is?

• 18:10Nick Capodice?

  So Cromwell was the guy who took over way back when Charles I was executed. He was the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England. Controversial guy. Some people say he was a military dictator. Some people say he was a hero.

• 18:27Hannah McCarthy?

  And any true loyalist to the Crown would be anti Cromwell. He helped to overthrow the English monarchy. So in 1765, the very unpopular Stamp Act imposed a direct tax on the American colonies. That same year, a clandestine resistance group launched in Boston, Massachusetts to protest taxation without representation.

• 18:55Nick Capodice?

  I was hoping we'd get to these guys, the Sons of Liberty.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  The Sons of Liberty were meeting at a place called the Green Dragon Inn. What they did to make sure that only people that agreed with them could come in is they took, they had a painting, like a sign of the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, who was the one who defeated Charles I and was in charge of the Commonwealth earlier. And they put it halfway down the door. So imagine like a doorway and they take the sign and they put it halfway down so that to walk through the doorway, you have to bow low and then walk underneath this picture. And so their logic was if someone is willing to bow to the Lord Protector, they can come in and be part of the Sons of Liberty meeting.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  But if they're not, this is a good way of making people choose their allegiance.

• 19:52Nick Capodice?

  So Hannah, look, I know this is all leading towards a long deadly war, but this kind of thing is just funny. It's clever, you know? It's good marketing. It is both serious and tongue in cheek. If you bow before the guy who helped to overthrow the king over 100 years ago, you're one of us. And if you can't bring yourself to do that, we got your number.

• 20:16Hannah McCarthy?

  Right. And the Sons of Liberty were not the first resistance effort in the years after the French and Indian War, but their riots, boycotts, and propaganda fueled the sentiment of liberty, all building up to the shot heard round the world. April 19th, 1775, at the Battle of Lexington and Concord between British troops and the American Colonial Resistance.

• 20:40Hannah McCarthy?

  And still, still, the battle against monarchy itself, the war against a king, that took a little common sense.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  Well, what most historians say, and I think this is right, is the first example of directly criticizing the king is Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Paine was actually from England, was from a Quaker family. Benjamin Franklin met him in London in 1773 or 1774 and said, you should come. He liked his ideas and you should come and helped him anonymously publish this pamphlet called Common Sense, which we all know, there were thousands of copies, probably one for every 10 people in early America. And given that many people couldn't read and we know it was at taverns and people

• 21:34Speaker 03

  were reading it out loud, this was incredibly widely distributed. And it appeared in January of 1776.

• 21:41Nick Capodice?

  As in six months before we declared independence.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  And not only did it directly criticize the king, that king, George III, but it also criticized monarchy in general, the idea of hereditary power. Given the way that you're supposed to talk about monarchy as divine, in a world where the king is the head of the church and called God's anointed servant, which is part of the routine church services that people are supposed to be attending, this is pretty radical talk.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Talk that people laughed at, people listened to. And as he pointed out in great detail, choosing your king on the basis of whoever happens to be born to the king before, he might be a good person, but will the child be good? Especially because princes are likely to be spoiled and not grow up among the common people. They really won't understand things. So it's a really deliberate and sustained attack on monarchy, for which he knew he was potentially in great trouble because it was a really dangerous thing to write. And of course, all the early editions were published without his name on it.

• 22:57Hannah McCarthy?

  Now, Holly told me this was a major moment in the colonies. This barrier that had prevented so many people from criticizing the king out loud had cracked. And King George III, of course, played a role in that as well, in more ways than one. We're going to get to that after a quick break.

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• 25:25Hannah McCarthy?

  We're back. We're talking about the long and winding road that led to our country being without a king. And a big part of that was being able to criticize the king and the idea of monarchy itself out loud. Before the break, our guest Holly Brewer told us about Thomas Paine's Common Sense, a pamphlet that was published in the colonies in January of 1776. It targeted both King George III and the problem of monarchy itself. And it got the colonists talking. But Nick, it was still immensely controversial.

• 26:00Nick Capodice?

  Wait, but at this point, we were already fighting, weren't we? The Battle of Lexington and Concord had happened. The revolution had begun. So if that's the case, why was Thomas Paine's Common Sense so controversial?

• 26:16Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, this might be familiar to anyone who has seen the musical Hamilton or studied this period in history closely. Yes, the fighting had already begun. And yes, we talk about the shot heard round the world as the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Changed the world as we know it. Except, Nick, the Continental Congress tried to end the fighting after just a few months.

• 26:41Nick Capodice?

  Oh, yes, that's right. This is the olive branch petition.

• 26:44Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, Congress signed this thing on July 5th, 1775. That's a year minus a day before the Dunlop broadside of the Declaration was printed in Philadelphia. But do you know what the olive branch petition actually says?

• 27:01Nick Capodice?

  No uncle, truce, no backsies?

• 27:06Hannah McCarthy?

  It begins, quote, "To the King's most excellent Majesty, most gracious Sovereign, we, Your Majesty's faithful subjects of the colonies."

• 27:17Nick Capodice?

  Wow, that is some serious grovelling, Hannah.

• 27:19Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, yeah. It goes on to say essentially, "Hey, Your Majesty, we love you, we're loyal to you. Great Britain is amazing, but we have had some issues with your ministers, and yes, things got out of hand. Please, please, please stop the fighting and let's just work something out together."

• 27:37Nick Capodice?

  And what did George think of that?

• 27:38Hannah McCarthy?

  He refused to read it. He gave a speech to Parliament, said the colonies were rebelling and Britain was going to squash it, and then eventually denounced the colonies. Unfortunately for him, common sense was about to hit the shelves.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  It was also a timing issue, so, and I think this probably arrived in the colonies in about January, about the same month, and was reported in the newspapers, where the King got so angry about what had happened in terms of the battle at Lexington and Concord and the emerging war, that he declared that the colonists were outside of his protection, that they were no longer subjects, that they were, he rejected them. And so, it made it arguably safer, because he said they were outside of his protection, then all of a sudden, he had said, "I'm not your king anymore," right? So, they felt like there was a certain space there. But it was still something they were scared about.

• 28:45Nick Capodice?

  Something I can't stop thinking about. It is amazing to me, Hannah, how long and how much it took for us to say publicly, "All right, George, you're the problem."

• 28:57Hannah McCarthy?

  Which, of course, we finally did.

• 29:06Hannah McCarthy?

  The Declaration of Independence, which included a laundry list of grievances against the king, was approved on July 2nd and signed by many of the framers two months later. Holly told me about this letter that one of the framers, Benjamin Rush, sent to John Adams. And now, he sent this about 35 years after the Declaration was signed.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  And do you recollect your memorable speech upon the day on which the vote was taken? Do you recollect the pensive and awful silence which pervaded the House when we were called up, one after another, to the table of the President of Congress to subscribe what was believed by many at that time to be our own death warrants? The silence and the gloom of the morning were interrupted, and I well recollect, only for a moment, by Colonel Harrison of Virginia. He said to Mr. Jerry at the table, quote, "I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Jerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body, I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body, you will dance in the air for an hour or two before you are dead," end quote.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  This speech procured a transient smile, but it was soon succeeded by the solemnity with which the whole business was conducted.

• 30:18Nick Capodice?

  It is a literal gallows humor joke.

• 30:22Hannah McCarthy?

  I know. I appreciate this letter so much, like, the way it gives this deep sense of dread. You know, you hear your name called, you walk up to the table, you put your signature on a document that could condemn you to death. And then some guy tells a joke, right? But it, like, barely lightens the mood.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  But it does give you a sense of just how terrified they're all were. And some of those who wrote the Declaration, Livingston, who was one of the five, the committee of five who helped to draft the Declaration, he didn't sign it in the end. And there's others who were there originally who weren't there for the signature phase. So some did chicken out. And for the most of them, it turned out okay, but it was scary. And I think understanding that is really important, that it's hard to measure popular sentiment against monarchy when it was so dangerous to speak up openly.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  Now, of course, after the Declaration is signed and people are openly at war, it's a much more complicated...

• 31:30Speaker 03

  Business, right?

• 31:40Nick Capodice?

  So is this it, Hannah? Like, is this when it really and truly started? The era of an America that was against kings?

• 31:49Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, plenty of people were still loyalists and plenty more claimed to be loyalists when they had a red coat staring them down. The Declaration of Independence self-proclaims unanimity of the 13 states, but not everybody wanted out of the monarchy. The gloves were off, though, for those who did. Holly talked about a moment when she was going through all of these revolutionary era summonses from the king.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  In the fall of 1776, in Frederick County, Virginia, when I was going through those files, one of those summons, somebody had, clearly the sheriff or some official who was delivering it, had crossed out, they'd kept the part about George III, but they crossed out Defender of the Faith and King by the grace of God, and they put in just two words, "the devil."

• 32:43Speaker 03

  So, so there really was a sense in which the revolution was deliberately against the king and really angry about him.

• 32:54Nick Capodice?

  And is this around about the time when the former colonies started to write their own constitutions?

• 32:59Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, and they certainly looked to the monarchy for inspiration for what not to do.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  So you have throughout these new constitutions, processes of electing everybody in every position, making sure that people had their jobs, usually during good behavior and not at the pleasure of the governor. And you had efforts to make sure that everybody in all positions were accountable if they did things wrong. So processes of impeachment and removal, frequent elections, language that people who serve in such positions are the servants of the people and not vice versa. So there was a real effort to subvert,

• 33:48Speaker 03

  even though they kept some of the same structures of power, the authority structure, from being something that was top-down towards something that was more bottom-up.

• 34:02Hannah McCarthy?

  And then, of course, Nick, we know how this particular story ends. The United States won the war against this ancient, powerful monarchy, against monarchy itself. And the framers had to decide what the new nation would look like and who would be the leader at the top. Would it be one person? Would it be three? How would they be elected? How long would they serve? And even the most extreme proposals were a far, far cry from monarchy. And then, they had to convince the rest of the new country.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  One of the things that's really striking about that is there's nobody at those ratifying conventions or in the newspapers who's saying the president is too weak. Nobody. I mean, in a highly fractured ideological landscape, you would have expected somebody to say something like that, even in a newspaper, if they really thought it. And maybe the ones who really thought something like that, I mean, of course, they'd left the country. They'd stayed loyalists, or they weren't speaking up at that point. But at least, you don't see things like that in the newspapers at all. What you see are worries that there might be a way for the president to become a dictator,

• 35:21Speaker 03

  even with all these restraints that are put on him. And you see a lot of emphasis in the discussions on, oh, no, no, he's going to be responsible before the law. He's going to be accountable. He can be impeached without any punishment than removal, and then he can be tried by the courts of common law if he does something seriously wrong. So there is constant reassurances in these debates that, yes, this person is not a king.

• 35:55Nick Capodice?

  You know Hannah, over the course of this whole conversation, I just kept thinking about that one line from the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Right? The framers thought monarchy was unnatural. That absolute power over others, power that does not answer to anybody, was a violation of our innate human rights. Even if that power was used for good, it is inherently wrong. And they knew what they were talking about. They lived it. It was their system. They were born into it. They suffered under it. And they broke free. It wasn't about taxes.

• 36:39Nick Capodice?

  It was about humanity versus inhumanity.

• 36:44Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, you know, there's one thing that Holly said that I keep turning over in my mind. Because the framers created a country where people have come to take democracy for granted. And you know, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it's because democracy is truth, is human, is based on what is self-evident. Or maybe we take it for granted, or even grow to dislike it, because we've stopped thinking about why we made it in the first place.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  And we are in a very, very difficult time right now. Because so many norms are being ignored and overturned. But it's all the more important, I would suggest, that we do think about fundamental principles and how the world should work, and raise our voices about that. There's a line in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and I'll read it to you, "That no free government or the blessings of liberty can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."

• 37:55Speaker 03

  And there's something about that recurrence of fundamental principles that I think is so important, that it gives us a grounding. We should be thinking about what we want our fundamental principles to be, and that we should adhere to them. Because frankly, a chaotic world where the rules are always changing is not good for anyone, not even oligarchs, not even big business. People need rules that they can follow, norms. I have my own ideas about what those should be, which look like some sort of real democracy, right? But regardless, people should always be thinking about what those fundamental principles are.

• 38:42Hannah McCarthy?

  Last thing, Nick. Holly told me that in the early days of the United States, there was this concerted effort to figure out what our laws would be. We had federal and state constitutions and legislatures, but they weren't starting from scratch.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  In early America, before the revolution, a lot of the laws, a lot of how justice functioned was not based on laws passed in the colonies. It was based on these common law guidebooks that the local justices of the peace would use, or justices even on the high court to understand how the law worked. But after the revolution, a lot of it changed. And so there was a considered effort to understand how the law was changing in a republic. If you're going to have these principles about government based on the consent of the governed, what parts of the common law had to be adapted.

• 39:32Hannah McCarthy?

  We kept a lot of the English common laws, definitions of crimes, contracts, property, but some we used as examples of what the United States absolutely could not and would not be. A country where one person held all of the power. An unnatural country.

• 39:53Hannah McCarthy?

  A country with a king.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  One of the most important legal justices and legal commentators of the New Republic was a man named St. George Tucker, who was a judge in Virginia. And he published commentaries on William Blackson's Guide to the Common Law from earlier in the century that was English. And when he got to the section about the king's prerogatives, he kept them. So, as he put it, so people could see the evils of monarchy, that, you know, this is what we don't want. But he has all these fit notes. He says, "None of this applies here. We're a republic. We have no kings. Our executive have no prerogatives. They are subject to the law, just like any other."

• 41:06Hannah McCarthy?

  That does it for this episode. It was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy, with Nick Cappadicei. Christina Phillips is our senior producer, Marina Henke is our producer, and Rebecca Lavoy is our executive producer. You can check out Holly Brewer's book, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority, for more on her work on the origins of democratic ideas across the British Empire. And stay tuned for her upcoming book that will examine the origins of American slavery in larger political and ideological debates. Music in this episode by Luba Hillman, Hannah Ekstrom, Anna Dager, Joe Andreeni, Loving Caliber, Beigel, Lennon Hutton, Laura Metcalf, Autohacker, Timothy Infinite, Mindservr Unlimited, Alex Lane, and Chris Sabriski.

• 41:49Hannah McCarthy?

  There's a lot more to the story of American democracy, and we have made hundreds of episodes trying to tell it. You can find them all at our website, civics101podcast.org. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 42:16Speaker 07

  Did you know that if your spouse goes missing and you don't tell anyone, that's not necessarily a crime? That surprising fact is at the heart of the brand new season of Bear Brook, the critically acclaimed true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio. I'm your host, Jason Moon. In this season, Bear Brook investigates another New Hampshire mystery. A Christmas tree farmer with dementia vanishes. His wife never reports him missing. Can he still be found? Don't miss it. Follow Bear Brook wherever you get your podcasts.

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