 Good afternoon, and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and I'm pleased you could join us for this afternoon's program, whether you're here in the theater with us or joining us on YouTube or Facebook. Before we hear from Richard Buchhauer and his new book, Give Me Liberty, I'd like to tell you about two other programs coming up here in the McGowan Theater next week. On Thursday, November 14th at 7.30, we'll host a Veterans Day tribute World War II soldier photographers from the U.S. Army Signal Corps photo collection here at the National Archives. The authors of a new book entitled Aftershock, The Human Toll of War will join historians for a discussion of these less well-known images of the war's end. On Thursday, November 21st at 6.30, we'll mark the 15th anniversary of the premiere of the movie National Treasure, which has a special significance for those of us here at the National Archives, with a special screening here in the McGowan Theater with some fun activities related to the film and the declaration, and come as your favorite National Treasure character, and you might win a prize. So to stay informed about these events throughout the year, check out our website, archives.gov. You can sign up at the table outside to receive email updates also. And another way to get more involved in the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports all of our education and outreach activities. You can learn more about the Foundation at archivesfoundation.org. In his introduction to Give Me Liberty, Richard Brookhizer declares this book focuses on 13 documents from 1619 to 1987 that represent snapshots from the album of Our Long Marriage to Liberty. Documents that define America as a country, the country that it is different from all others. Of the 13 documents, I'm pleased to note the National Archives and its presidential libraries have five. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Monroe Doctrine, Franklin Roosevelt's Arsenal of Democracy, a fireside chat, and Ronald Reagan's tear down this wall speech in Berlin. Whenever I walk through our museum, I'm struck by the respect and even awe with which so many of our visitors approach the cases that contain the original decoration and Constitution. When visitors stop to examine documents in other parts of the museum, they often do more than glance at the display. They feel a connection to our shared past. The National Archives motto, literal script manate, the written word endures appears on a bronze medallion in the front of the Rubenstein Gallery, one floor below us. The written word endures one floor above us. Sorry, there isn't another floor below us. The written word endures not just because the National Archives keeps the documents in protective containers and secure storage spaces. The words endure because they tell us who we are as a nation today as well as centuries ago. So let's now turn to Richard Brookhizer to hear about his selection of enduring documents. Richard went to work for the National Review after graduating from Yale and has been there ever since. For 20 years, he wrote a column for the New York Observer and has also written for a number of magazines including New Yorker, Cosmo Pollatin, Commentary, and Vanity Fair. After writing about modern politicians, he turned to past political figures and became a historian of the founding period. He curated Alexander Hamilton, the man who made modern America at an exhibition at the New York Historical Society, wrote and hosted two films that aired on PBS, rediscovering George Washington and rediscovering Alexander Hamilton, and is the author of John Marshall, the man who made the Supreme Court. He's a columnist for American History and has been awarded the National Medal of Humanities and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Please welcome Richard Brookhizer. Why stand we here idle? What do gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take. But as for me, give me liberty or give me death. Patrick Henry, March 1775. He was addressing the former House of Burgesses, which had been sent home by the Royal Governor of Virginia, but continued to meet illegally as the Virginia Convention. In March, they were discussing unrest in the sister colony of Massachusetts, which would soon break out into open warfare at the battles of Lexington and Concord. So Henry, his audience on the 13 colonies were concerned with liberty. They were willing to fight for it. And soon many of them would begin dying for it. But this was not a unique moment. Americans had been concerned with liberty already for centuries. And they would continue to be concerned with it for centuries more. It defines us as a nation. It makes us different from all others. It is our exceptional American idea. And in this book, I look at 13 episodes, each of which produced a document. Some of them you've all read. One of them I bet you've never heard of. Some of them are long. Others are quite short. One is a 14-line poem. The signers and authors of some of them are famous. Three of them are on Mount Rushmore. Others are ordinary men and women that we've never heard of apart from the fact that they were there at the moment that these documents were signed. So let me just go through the list of the 13 that I picked. The first is 400 years ago, the minutes of the first meeting of the General Assembly of Jamestown, 1619. Number two, 1657, the flushing remonstrance. Number three, 1735, the record of the trial of John Peter Zanger. Number four, 1776, Declaration of Independence. Number five, 1787, the Constitution ratified the following year. Number six, excuse me, number six, the minutes of the New York Manumission Society. Number seven, the Monroe Doctrine, 1823. Number eight, the Declaration of Sentiments at the Seneca Falls Convention. Number nine, 1863, the Gettysburg Address. Number 10, 1883, the new Colossus poem put on the base of the Statue of Liberty which was dedicated in 1886. Number 11, the Cross of Gold Speech, 1896. Number 12, Franklin Roosevelt's Arsenal of Democracy, fireside chat, 1940. And number 13, 1987, Ronald Reagan's tear down this wall speech. Now today I want to focus on three of them. And then I'll end with another story like that of Patrick Henry about a famous American and his discussion of liberty. So the most important of these documents are probably those which lay out principles, explain principles often for the first time. And of these, the most important and the most famous are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address. But I want to start with an earlier one and this was the flushing remonstrance in 1657 which lays out the principle of liberty, of conscience and liberty of religious worship. And this takes us back not to British North America but to New Netherland which is what New York was when the Dutch owned it. The Dutch had bought Manhattan Island from the Indians in 1624 and then they moved up the Hudson and Mohawk rivers down as far south as Delaware, up as far north as western Connecticut. But the center of their domain was Manhattan which they called New Amsterdam. And in the 1640s, the Dutch West India Company which owned the colony, owned it as a business venture, they sent a new governor. Now to be the last one. He was a new governor named Peter Stuyvesant. And where I live in Manhattan is just across the street from a park called Stuyvesant Park. It's on land that he once owned and there's a wonderful statue of him in the park. It's bronze. He's got his hand on a walking stick that's almost as tall as he is. He has a peg leg because his leg was taken off by a pinball in colonial warfare. And when you look at the statue of him, he's obviously energetic. He looks very sharp and he looks as if you would not want to cross him. He was a very effective director general of the colony. He was also a little bit crazy. He was not unlike Rudy Giuliani. And the problem with Stuyvesant was that he was a tyrant and a bigot. Everything had to be his way. And one of the things that had to be his way was the religion of his subjects. His father was a Dutch reformed minister and from Stuyvesant's point of view, the Calvinist branch of Christianity was the only true faith. He tried to harass Jews and Lutherans in New Amsterdam until he was yanked on his chain by his employers in the Dutch West India Company because they had investors and directors who were Jews and Lutherans. So they told him to cut that out. But then a new sect appears in New Amsterdam and these are Quakers. This is a brand new religion which has arisen in the English Civil War and in the 17th century it's extremely counter cultural. Quakers do not recognize social ranks. They will not use different pronouns to recognize people of different rank. They won't doff their hats in the presence of superiors. They allow men and women to preach equally because they believe all believers have equal access to the inner light. And there are no Quaker investors or directors in the Dutch West India Company. So Stuyvesant has a free hand. When the first ship load of Quakers appears in New Amsterdam, he sends them the next day, the very next day tells them to sail on to Rhode Island. They leave behind two women who begin preaching in the street saying that the end is nigh and everyone should heed their message. He has them arrested and also expelled from the colony. Then a third Quaker appears in New Netherlands and he begins preaching. Stuyvesant arrests him and whips him. He whips him in private and he whips him in public. He almost whips this man to death. He stops only because he gets an anonymous letter from one of his subjects saying, can't you cut this out? What good is he going to do on a work gang if you beat him to death? So Stuyvesant lets this Quaker go also. And then he decides on a new policy. No Quakers here at all. Any ship that brings them in will be any inhabitant who harbors them in their houses. That is a criminal offense. Then in 1657 he gets a letter from 30 of his subjects. 30 men who live in Flushing, which was a village then in western Long Island. Now it's part of the Bureau of Queens. Still has the same name. But these 30 men of Flushing send Stuyvesant a remonstrance. This is an official objection or complaint. And they say that they cannot obey his directive. And their reason is that their religion teaches them that this is wrong. They say we would do unto others as we would have all men do unto us. This is the true law of church and state for our Savior sayeth this is the law and the prophets. So they are standing up, not for their own beliefs, but they are standing up for the liberty of Quakers to worship as they will. And they are telling Stuyvesant that their reason for doing this is their own religious belief. This is decades before John Locke. We tend to think we are taught that freedom of religion in America is a philosophical idea developed by Locke and others and then adopted from them by men like Thomas Jefferson. And that's certainly an important strain in American thinking. But it begins with a conviction of religious believers in this country that their own freedom of worship depends on the freedom of worship of others. Now Stuyvesant's reaction to this remonstrance was harsh. He immediately cracked down. He arrested the man who wrote the document. He was the town clerk of Flushing, a man named Edward Hart. And he had him brought to Manhattan where he grilled him. And because the Dutch kept very good records, we have the record of Hart's inquisition. And it's a very thorough one. You know Stuyvesant says, who told you to write this remonstrance? Hart says, no one told me. I gathered the sentiments of the townspeople. Well, where did you do that? It was a meeting at So-and-So's house. Who called the meeting? I don't know. Who told you to write the remonstrance? I don't know. Did you show it to your fellow town officials? I showed it to them, but I didn't know what their opinion of it was. I mean, he's trying to duck away from these questions. Stuyvesant is unrelenting. He keeps him in jail. He arrests the three other officials of the town, the local lawyer and the two Merrill equivalents. And he makes them all back off. They all crack under his pressure, which is something we don't like to read about, but not everyone is heroic. I mean, people can do the right thing and then maybe they don't have the power or the stamina to follow through, especially against someone like Peter Stuyvesant. But the story doesn't end there because another Quaker appears in his domain some years later, a man named John Bone. And this man, after Stuyvesant throws him in jail for five months, he decides I will send him to Holland to be tried. I won't do it here. I'll send him back to my bosses at the Dutch West India Company, let them decide what to do with him. And their decision that comes back to him plays both sides of the street. They say we don't like Quakers any more than you do, but we want to encourage immigration into New Netherland. We need settlers. So why don't you let them alone so long as they worship privately in their houses? And this is what Peter Stuyvesant is forced ultimately to do. Now, Peter Stuyvesant's reign ends in 1664 when the British arrive in Armada in New York Harbor and demand the surrender of New Amsterdam to them, which Stuyvesant is forced to do. He spends the rest of his life at his farm called the Bowery. The road to his farm is still the name of the street in Manhattan called the Bowery. And the importance, I think, of the flushing remonstrance and of the experience of Quakers in New York is the impress that it set on the culture of this city, which became the largest city in America and still is. So even though the flushing remonstrance has faded from the map of our minds, because the English story of colonies in North America subsumed the story of the Dutch presence here, but its effect on New York has had a lasting one on American culture and on our beliefs about religious liberty. Now, the second document I want to talk about is one of those which plug a gap because our engagement with liberty has not been consistent. There have been shortfalls. There have been tremendous shortfalls. I would say we have worked to amend them and to recover them. And sometimes the work has been very long and sometimes it was terribly bloody. The worst shortfall, of course, was human chattel slavery and this begins in 1619 in Jamestown as early as the experiment of self-rule in the Jamestown General Assembly. But another great shortfall was women and the right to vote. Now, women actually did vote in New Jersey from 1776 to 1807. If women passed the property qualification, they could vote in the state of New Jersey. Now, the trick there was that under the legal doctrine of the day, in a marriage all property is owned by the husband. So no married women could take advantage of this. But if you were single or if you were a widow and you met the property qualification, you could. Now, the reason this happened in New Jersey is that the first post-independence Constitution of the state, it was being rushed together in the face of a British invasion in the summer of 1776. And instead of using the word freemen, which was used in many other state constitutions, the New Jerseyans used the word inhabitants. Now, were they thinking of empowering women then? Almost certainly not. But women noticed it and they took the opportunity to vote. And in subsequent years, electoral laws, which were setting the rules for how to vote and where, would use language like voters will put his or her ballot in the box at such and such a place. So for 31 years, the single or widowed women who had enough money could vote. And there were enough of them that they had a name. They were called the petticoat vote. It was a recognized voting block that politicians had to consider. They lost the vote in 1807 because New Jersey had held a spectacularly corrupt election. Afterwards, there was some remorse at how bad they had all been. And so they scapegoated women and free black voters and took the vote away from them. That will purify us, they thought. So that was the end of this brief experiment in women's voting. Now, how did it then become a recognized right? The story starts in upstate New York, in Johnstown, New York, where a woman named Elizabeth Cady is born in 1805. She is the daughter of a judge who has served a term in Congress. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Cady, they had 10 children, five of them died, including all their sons. And as Elizabeth grew up, her father would often shake his head and say, oh, it's a pity you weren't born a boy. And that was a very mixed message. It showed some degree of her father's respect for her. She was an intelligent girl and young woman. She served, in effect, as his law clerk. She was given an excellent education. She was given a piano, which was not a common thing then in the early 19th century. But there was always this barrier, the fact that she had been born a girl rather than a boy. And she chafed at it. She married another politician, a man named Henry Stanton, who was involved in the politics of abolition. Because in the 1840s, there began to be small political parties which were dedicated to ending slavery and freeing slaves in America. And Stanton was part of this effort. In 1840, the young couple went to an international anti-slavery convention in London. And there, both of them impressed the Brits. Henry Stanton, because he was handsome and eloquent. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, because she was also attractive, but earnest and eloquent herself. But there was a problem at the London convention. Could the women in attendance vote on its resolutions? And this became an issue. This became a contested issue. The American women didn't like the fact that it was an issue because they had been taking prominent roles in the anti-slavery struggle in this country. Britain was a somewhat more conservative place. So there was a bit of a culture clash going on. And the final vote in London was that the women attending this convention could not, in fact, vote. And afterwards, Elizabeth Cady Stanton told a friend of hers, why can't we have a women's rights convention in the United States? Well, she held on to this thought. She and her husband moved to a town called Seneca Falls, which is a little further west than Johnstown, New York and upstate New York. And in the summer of 1848, she is having tea with some women friends of hers and the husband of one of them in whose house it is. And as she recalled years later, she was complaining about women's lot. Now, at this point, she has three boys, age six, four, and three. Her husband is often on the road because 1848 is going to be an election year and he's involved in abolition party politics. The responsibilities of the household fall on her and she's unburdening herself to her women friends who have similar experiences. Then Richard Hunt, who is the husband of one of them, says, why don't you do something about it? And so the women resolved to have a convention in Seneca Falls. One of their motives was that an abolitionist woman orator Lucretia Mott, who was related to people in upstate New York, was visiting them and she had to go back to Philadelphia soon. So to take advantage of her eloquence, they had to schedule a meeting as fast as possible. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her friends have another private meeting to set the agenda for the convention and it's here that the Declaration of Sentiments is written and it is modeled on the Declaration of Independence. She wrote years later that we tried to think of some way to begin our expression of our ideas when someone picked up the Declaration of Independence and began reading it in a loud and clear voice and this gave us the inspiration. So the beginning of their Declaration of Sentiments tracks the language of Thomas Jefferson very closely adding women at relevant points that all men and women are created equal instead of all men are created equal and so on. Now when they get to the Bill of Endowment, they can't copy the Declaration of Independence anymore because that was all things that George III and Parliament had done. So they had, they listed the complaints that they had that women were kept out of good jobs. They could be teachers at low levels, they could be governesses but they could not be faculty in any college. They could only attend one college in the United States at that time, Oberlin. They also had complaints about women and property owning that when a woman is married the property belongs to the husband. That was another one of their bills of indictment. But Elizabeth Cady Stanton pushed to include the lack of a right to vote and she got some resistance from her women fellows. The reason for this is that many of them were Quakers and Quakers had an attitude that politics was a worldly thing. Politics was what non-Quakers did. There was no good to be found in it. It was a corrupt process. We had to speak out for things that we believe in. We have to agitate for causes that we support but to participate in elections to support candidates to serve in government, that's corrupting. You shouldn't even bother. But Elizabeth Cady Stanton has a different background. She's not a Quaker. Her father is a judge who was a congressman. Her husband is a politician. She's grown up observing this world and understanding it and she understands the importance of having your own right to vote. If you lack the right to vote no one else is going to speak up for your interests as determinately as you will. So she insists on putting this in the Declaration of Sentiments it's put to a vote at the convention. It's the only controversial plank in the whole document. She speaks in favor of it. Another person who speaks in favor of it is Frederick Douglass who is one of the men who attends the convention. The document is eventually signed by 100 people 68 women and 32 men. Douglass was then already famous as an abolitionist orator. He came down from Rochester, New York and he wrote up the proceedings in his newspaper The North Star. And he said that he said ironically that some people who had made the discovery that Negroes were entitled to rights had yet to make the discovery that women were also entitled to them. But he hoped people would catch up to both equally. Well, it takes a much longer time for women to get the right to vote than it does for black men. And this is because obviously the struggle against slavery mutates into the Civil War. It becomes the great black hole that sucks all intellectual and political energy in America into it. And then reconstruction for years afterwards has a similar effect. But women do begin to get the vote piecemeal. The Wyoming territory in 1869 is the first place after New Jersey which gives women the right to vote. Some other western territories follow. Then as they become states in the west they also follow. New York state follows in 1917 and then the 19th amendment is passed in 1920. Finally making women's suffrage a national fact. Now Elizabeth Cady Stanton was long dead by that time but there was one signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments who lived to see New York give women the vote. Her name was Rhoda Palmer. She lived all her life in Geneva, New York. She lived in only two houses in her life. She and her father had driven to Seneca Falls and she had signed the Declaration of Sentiments. She said years later that on the drive back their carriage broke down and they had to spend an extra night on the road. But in 1918 she's 102 years old and she's driven to the polls to vote for the first time. Now the third document I want to talk about I want to end with this morning has to do with foreign affairs. And three of my 13 documents consider foreign affairs and that might seem puzzling because why is that in a book about American liberty? It's in here because the world is always close by. America has never been by itself. We talk about the two oceans isolating us from the rest of the world but people were crossing those centuries ago. So we started off as an imperial colony. We lived next door to other rival empires. We've been involved in world politics since the beginning. So in my book I take up the Monroe Doctrine which says not just that we will resist the efforts of European nations to recolonize parts of the western hemisphere. It's not just geopolitical. It says we will resist the importation of their system into the new world. It's not just saying country X and country Y stay away. It's saying no more kings. No more kings in the western hemisphere. Spain's empire has fallen. It's broken up into independent republics and we do not want to see those turning into kingdoms sponsored by European countries. That's 1823. The arsenal of democracy fireside chat in 1940. This is after World War II has begun. We are not yet in it. Roosevelt is very reluctant to even hint that we might get in it. But he realizes that this is a storm that will suck the world into it. We have to be prepared to defend ourselves. And as part of that we must make sure that Britain does not fall to the Nazis. In 1940 Britain is being bombed by the Luftwaffe. Its ships are being sunk in the Atlantic by U-boats. Roosevelt has gotten a letter from Churchill saying that we can only last for a few months if we don't have serious American help. And so he tells the American people in this fireside chat that we will be the arsenal of democracy. The third episode I picked was the speech that Reagan gave in 1987 in his second term. Now he gives it in Berlin because Berlin is a kind of frozen point of the Cold War. The Cold War is called cold in comparison to World War I and II. But of course it was hot in many places. And many, many, many people died in these hot spots even if they were fewer than the hecatones of World War I and II. But Berlin was a kind of ongoing, slow-motion point of tension. The victorious powers in World War II had agreed to divide Germany into occupied zones. What became West Germany was the American, the British, and the French zone. What became East Germany started off as the Soviet zone. And this same split was applied to Berlin, the capital of the whole nation. And West Berlin was the American, British, and French zone. East Berlin was the Soviet zone which then became part of East Germany. And I remember being in Berlin when it was still divided. I've gone through the Berlin Wall. I was on a NATO tour of Europe. So the journalists were all put into an American Army bus. We drove to checkpoint Charlie, which was one of the guarded passages through the wall. And there was unfolded some Cold War ballet. The bus stopped, even though it did not have to stop. According to post-war treaties, the militaries of the occupying countries could send their personnel into each other's zones freely. But the bus nevertheless stopped. East German soldiers walked around it. They were not allowed to enter it. American military personnel took their name tags off because the East Germans were not entitled to know who they were. They could peek through the windows and see their faces and photograph them, but they were not allowed to see their name tags. And then after this ritualized inspection process ended, then the bus went on. So this was the stasis of life in Berlin. What was also happening was that anyone who tried to cross this wall from east to west was killed. By 1987, 137 people had been shot or died in falls or drowned trying to swim across water courses. 137 of course is a piddling total for a death camp run by the Nazis or by the Soviets. But because this was happening in the heart of a city and it was happening to people who were only trying to move a few blocks, it seemed peculiarly revolting. Reagan is coming to Berlin in 1987. It's his second trip. And he decides to make a speech in the wall because there's a new leader of the Soviet Union. He's not just a new person. He seems like he might be a new kind of person. This is Mikhail Gorbachev. He's much younger than his predecessors. And he has announced that there's a need for openness and for restructuring. Glasnost and Perestroika were the Russian words for these concepts. And Reagan was willing to negotiate with him about arms reduction. But he also wanted to press him on what openness and restructuring would mean. Now his speech writing team then was headed by a man named Tony Dolan. They were young. Dolan was 38 years old. The man who was assigned to write the Berlin speech was a man named Peter Robinson. He was only 30. I know both of them. I've known them both for years. And Robinson was sent ahead of time to scout out the site and to get ideas for what should be in Reagan's speech. And he wrote years later that he had a dinner with some Berliners. And he recorded what they said. One man said, he lives 20 miles away across the wall. And I haven't seen her in 25 years. Another man said, I go to work every day and I pass the wall and there's a guard tower with an East German soldier in it. And one of us is the zookeeper and one of us is the animal. And the most vehement Berliner was a woman who said if Gorbachev means what he's saying he can come here and tear this wall down. So that was the line that struck in Robinson's head. And he worked it and reworked it in different drafts. He said tear down this wall, take down this wall. At one point he did it in German. He said, and his boss Tony Dolan said, what did you do that for? And he said, well, the president is addressing Germans. I thought I'd give him the line in German. Dolan said, bring a line to the president of the United States. Give it to him in English. So he translated it back into English. And there was controversy over this line. The National Security Council and the State Department didn't want Reagan to use it. They thought it was too confrontational. They were hoping to have and having negotiations with Gorbachev at the same time. They didn't want to be provocative. But Reagan always insisted on keeping that line in there. Their last effort to get it out was the day, the morning, that he gave the speech. When he's in a car going to the Berlin Wall, they make their last push and Reagan's comment was, the boys at state are going to kill me, but I'm going to say it anyway. This is what I want to say. So the speech is, it's not very long, but it's 10 or 15 minutes and the line comes in the middle of it. And Reagan says to Gorbachev if reform is real and restructuring is real, Mr. Gorbachev, come here and tear down this wall. And this line was rebroadcast by Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and made it across the wall to people who had access to radios and to people who could repeat it to their friends. Now the wall is not ultimately torn down literally by Gorbachev. It is torn down in 1989 by Berliners themselves. Gorbachev is allowed to happen, though. He has announced earlier in the year that for nations to interfere in the affairs of other nations in Europe, whether allied or hostile, is unacceptable. So that is the signal to the people of Eastern Europe that the Soviet Union will not send tags into countries trying to be free as they had done so many times before during the Cold War. And so cracks appear all along this continent-wide border and in the fall of 1989 the Berlin Wall is torn down. And people dispute how much role Reagan's speech had to do with it because that was two years earlier. But I think it showed people living in Eastern Europe that although we had our own interests at heart we were negotiating with the Soviet Union for arms reductions for our own purposes, we had not forgotten them. And one of our purposes was to make sure that their freedom would be restored. Even as our freedom depended on Britons in 1940, so the security of our freedom would be bolstered by their freedom in 1987, 1989. So those are three of the episodes, three of the documents that I cover and I just want to end with one more. It's a conversation and it happened in 1878 when Ulysses Grant was taking a tour of the world. He'd been President of the United States for two terms and he decided to spend his retirement or a portion of it by going around the world. And a reporter from the New York Herald accompanied him and wrote up accounts of everything that he did which were published in a book. When Grant went through Berlin he met Bismarck. Bismarck was the Chancellor of United Germany at that point. A United Germany which he had done so much to create. So here you had a meeting between two of the great modern nationalists of our age. Grant had defeated a rebellion in the world's largest republic. Bismarck had put together a nation from the many smaller countries which had composed the German Empire previously, the Holy Roman Empire. Grant didn't speak German, Bismarck did speak English although the Herald reporter said when he's looking for a word he falls back on French. So they had a conversation and as most such things between two men who don't really know each other at all are, trivialities about the news, they talk about people that they know in common. Then it gets interesting when Bismarck says to Grant one of the great tragedies of your recent war was that you were fighting your own people. That's always so much harder. And Grant said yes but it had to be done. Bismarck said of course to save the union. And Grant said to save the union and to destroy slavery. And then Bismarck says but certainly saving the union was the most important idea, the leading idea. And Grant says it was at first but when the flag was fired on we had to understand that slavery had to be destroyed. We no longer wanted men to be bought and sold like cattle. So here you can see modern nationalism it's like tracks in a train yard they're going off in two directions. And Bismarck's direction is the unity of the nation overall. That's the most important thing it's the only important thing. Grant is saying yes the unity of the nation but it matters very much what kind of a nation that is. And we had reached the point where we realized that slavery was not only contrary to our ideals but it was destructive of them and had to be destroyed. So I want to leave you with that conversation I want to leave you with that conversation. And I want to leave you with the thought that I think we have a pretty good record over 400 years a net positive record nothing is guaranteed. Liberty is not a perpetual motion machine it has to be maintained it has to be understood and it has to be upheld. And I hope the stories of these men and women some of them famous and inspiring to everyone who reads the book. Thank you very much. Now we have there's a microphone in the aisle there this isn't a huge room I could probably hear you if you speak out with a lusty voice but I guess you're being encouraged to use the microphone oh sure because we're recording it. So thank you kind of a comment and then a question the comment is I also went through Checkpoint Charlie in December of 1969 just as an individual American in Berlin without a lot of hassle but I think we had to give them a certain amount of money because they wanted American currency so just sort of nominal fee but it was not a big hassle but not that it wasn't for you but I also remember Jack Kennedy giving a speech where he did speak in German but he apparently botched the pronunciation of the pronunciation he used was I am a bagel or whatever that's still a controversial point I see people going back and forth about that I think if that interpretation is the correct one I think no one in the audience misunderstood what he was saying that he was a breakfast they knew what he was saying thanks so on the documents I wonder if you could say a little bit about and maybe where you would place the Plymouth Compact if that's the correct term for it and the Connecticut Charter if that's also the correct term for it both important early documents in terms of Democratic power if you will and also interestingly the documents that maybe would express where we didn't do so well in relation to Indigenous people if there's a document or a document that would kind of embody where we went wrong as a colonizing European you know growing community in relation to people who are already here right well the Mayflower Compact which you mentioned and the Connecticut documents sure bring them on I picked 13 there could be another 13 there could be several 13s I think it's one characteristic of a country that's concerned with liberty that it generates a number of such documents there was a historian named Clinton Rosseter who wrote a wonderful book about the Constitutional Convention the Great Convention and at the end of it he does a thought experiment could you have had an equal number of delegates who could have written a Constitution as good could there have been a B team and he actually comes up with a B team and he sets himself the limit that he has to pick the same number of men from each state so if one sends only three people he's got to find three people from that state and he's satisfied that he's got a B team who could have done the job equally well now he admits that George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were sui generis and so similarly my B team of documents you'd have to have the declaration in the Gettysburg address keep reappearing but yes there are more documents there are others there's Frederick Douglass's oration what is the fourth of July to a slave there's Martin Luther King's speech on the National Mall there are a number of them as far as our treatment of Native Americans I just look back to my John Marshall book and cite his opinion in Worcester v. Georgia where he said that relations to Indian nations are the province of the federal government not of the states and by that he was saying not of states that were greedy for their land as Georgia was in that case and Georgia ultimately prevailed unfortunately despite his opinion or other earlier thinkers such as Hobbes Montesquieu and de Tocqueville for instance influential with not only the rights to be invested I guess later for all peoples in the United States the women movement do they take any particular doctrines from them with their liberty ideas besides Montesquieu is very popular in the late 18th century in this country I mean if you are just reading the notes of the Constitutional Convention you think that Montesquieu's first two names were the celebrated because that's how he's always referred to the celebrated Montesquieu says this we had to get over a problem caused or encouraged by Montesquieu because he argues that republics have to be small and he's thinking of city states in Greece that did have republican forms of government but if he's right then how can the Constitution work because we're proposing to have a more tight-knit government for a country that's already from Maine to Georgia and already as far west as the Mississippi River so this is way beyond the city state and so James Madison flips the whole discussion by arguing that no republics are better off when they are large it is precisely the small republics which are most prone to dissension to uproars and rebellions because it's easier in a republic the size of a city for a faction to take over in other words a group of people who are interested in some unjust project of their own it's easier for them to take power in a small place if you have a big country harder to do it harder to coordinate over a larger space and a larger population anyway that's his argument two Frenchmen who appear in my book it's in the chapter on Emma Lazarus and her poem the new Colossus on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and I think it's a very eloquent poem it's an eloquent poem about the immigration experience into this country primarily about our response to it and our obligations but it takes an essential part of its meaning from where it is she calls the statue the mother of exiles there's nothing more than that it is the Statue of Liberty and it's very important particularly to the people who came to this country that they were coming to a country of liberty there were lots of exiles who went to other countries in the new world which were not countries of liberty and which have had more unfortunate histories over the last 100 years so this statue was a gift to the United States but it was the inspiration of a certain kind of Frenchman French politics has covered a huge spectrum since the French Revolution there's a right that's much further right than anything we have here on a left that's been much farther left but there always been liberal republicans, liberal in the classical liberal sense who were sincere friends of the United States admirers of its independence and of its experiment and hopeful that France could join with it as a fellow republican country and one of those in the mid 19th century was a man named Edward Rene de la Boullée he was an opponent of the second empire he expressed his opposition not directly but by writing a political history of the United States after the Civil War ends he proposes that France give the gift of a gigantic statue to the United States which would celebrate the liberation of its slaves one of the people who's at this luncheon party at his house where he floats this suggestion is Frederick Bartholby who becomes the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty the date keeps getting pushed back they hope to hit 1876 the centennial of the declaration they miss that but it does finally get erected and dedicated in 1886 and Emma Lazarus wrote her poem as part of a money raising project help raise money for the pedestal and her poem gets put on it in 1903 20 years after she wrote it but so those Frenchmen and their interest in what we were doing and their contribution to it you see it every time you go to New York there it is you can see it from the airplane when it makes its approach to LaGuardia it's big enough you can just look out the window and there it is yes anyone else okay well then thank you very much for finding one level up at the archives bookstore you'll find the books at the cash register ask the cashiers for the books