A Republic, If You Can Keep It
Advice from the Founding Fathers on keeping us together is more relevant today than ever
Here’s what the founders had to say about partisan divides and how they overcame them to create the United States. This election year, consider the importance of compromise to save American democracy and build a better union.
BEMUS POINT, NY — The Constitutional Convention convened during the hot summer of 1787 at the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia. It was a meeting of 55 delegates—all white men—from 12 states (Rhode Island refused to send delegates) to revise or replace the Articles of Confederation.
William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut kept a diary during the Convention, frequently recording the weather. On 33 of the 80 days, he noted it as “hot” or “very hot.” William Paterson of nearby New Jersey called Philadelphia “the warmest place I have ever been in.” And South Carolina’s Pierce Butler’s wife left the city because she “could not support the excessive heat of the climate.”
The hot weather in Philadelphia was only eclipsed by the heated debates inside. Delegates locked horns over the details of Congressional representation, presidential powers, how to elect the president, the slave trade, and a bill of rights, eventually compromising on contentious issues. The historian H. W. Brands, in his book Founding Partisans, contends that the founders were willing to make compromises on the points they hated because of a shared singular goal: uniting the weak and disparate states into a single, strong nation that could compete on the world stage.
The compromises they agreed to that summer were imperfect, and the debates that started in Philadelphia continue today. However, the founders paved the way for an ever-evolving and fragile democratic experiment that has lasted nearly 250 years. Yet, it has been tested from time to time, including today.
As Ben Franklin, the oldest delegate at 81 (the same age as President Biden), was leaving Independence Hall, Elizabeth Powel, a socialite and close friend of George and Martha Washington, asked him, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
A Fragile Unity
America’s divides have always existed, yet somehow, we’ve kept the republic together while expanding civil rights by focusing on its foundational ideas.
By the time the Constitutional Convention concluded, the fissures of that hot summer in Philadelphia had begun to take shape in the form of partisan divides. The Convention temporarily papered over those differences, but cracks would recur and sometimes widen into chasms in the coming years. These chasms would, at times, turn violent.
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism,” George Washington warned in his 1796 presidential farewell address, advocating for a political culture that prioritized the common good over partisan interests. He believed that constructive political discourse and cooperation among different viewpoints were crucial for the health and longevity of the nation.
Yet, ideological rifts and personal animosities persisted and were as intense, if not more so, in those early days than they are today. On July 11, 1804, just 15 years after the Constitution became the law of the land, feuding Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr met on the dueling grounds at Weehawken, New Jersey, to fight the last of a long-lived political and personal battle. Hamilton would die in this duel, and Burr would be indicted for murder.
According to Ron Chernow's biography of Hamilton, Burr apparently eventually recognized that he shouldn't have been so bothered by Hamilton. Upon reading a scene in Laurence Sterne's novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in which Shandy’s Uncle Toby catches a fly and then releases it, Chernow notes that Burr is said to have remarked: "Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me."
But America’s divides didn’t stop there, nor did its violence. America went to war with itself over slavery in 1861 when the Confederate States seceded from the Union and attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina, which led to the bloodiest war on this soil, killing as many as a million people. It lurched through the violent racial divisions of Reconstruction and Jim Crow following the Civil War, too.
In the 20th and 21st Centuries, the U.S. contentiously expanded the rights originally reserved for those 55 white male founders and their ilk to women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community. Some of these fundamental rights are still being debated in the legislatures and the courts, like the right of women to have an abortion, for Blacks to vote, and for gays and lesbians to marry.
Today, the nation is confronted with the epidemics of gun violence, opioid use, and loneliness. It’s contending with income inequality and growing misinformation and disinformation. It’s further challenged by growing distrust in institutions, including everything from the military to the media, and deep partisan divides.
An Uncertain Future
It’s no secret that the last couple of decades have been tough on American unity. By seemingly all accounts, the country appears more divided than ever. It’s fair to feel like the wheels are coming off the proverbial bus.
“Over the past two decades, partisan gaps on all of the issues … have either remained roughly the same or expanded,” Frank Newport wrote for Gallup last year. “This reinforces the fundamental (albeit not surprising) conclusion that when Americans are divided into two groups based on their political identity, they are also predictably divided into two groups on a wide range of politically and socially important issues.”
However, the handwringing over the perilous state of the American republic may be overstated, thanks partly to the federalism established by the Founding Fathers.
“For American democracy to have died after the Midterm elections, or for it to die in 2024, an unlikely confluence of several unlikely events would need to happen in a particular order and within a fairly narrow timeframe," wrote Shadi Hamid, now a columnist and member of the Editorial Board at The Washington Post and author of The Problem of Democracy, for UnHerd in 2022. “In a country as large and unwieldy as ours, as evenly divided as ours, with as much separation of powers as ours, with enough federalism as ours, and with a media as vigorous as ours (against Republican overreach), the notion that democracy would die or even that it could was a nightmare. The good thing about nightmares is that you wake up from them.”
Regardless, on this Independence Day and as the 2024 election cycle heats up, Americans shouldn’t sleep on the fundamental principles of our democratic experiment or eschew the hard work needed to keep it by finding common ground with fellow citizens. “People make better electoral decisions when they directly confront those on the other side of issues — even people they find disreputable and abhorrent,” David Brooks wrote for The New York Times this week.
Dialogue, debate, and compromise are what makes democracies work, and it might help to start with those things that unite us in our now hyper-pluralistic society. “Americans can appreciate that most people want the same things, and nearly all can agree that the division in the country has gotten worse in the past decade,” IPSOS found in April. “Despite this, centering shared American experiences and values may create the stepping stones for bridging that seemingly vast divide.”
And it doesn’t hurt for all of us to take a cue from Ben Franklin, who believed that compromise is an essential ingredient to America’s success. “When a broad table is to be made, and the edges of planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both, and makes a good joint,” he said. “In like manner here both sides must part with some of their demands, in order that they may join in some accommodating proposition.”
E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one.