Four unprecedented achievements of the U.S. Founding Fathers

The U.S. Founding Fathers: Achievements and Failures Joseph Ellis - Britannica Blog February 20th, 2007

At the most general level, they created the first modern nation-state based on liberal principles. These include

• the democratic principle that political sovereignty in any government resides in the citizenry rather than in a divinely sanctioned monarchy,
• the capitalistic principle that economic productivity depends upon the release of individual energies in the marketplace rather than state-sponsored policies,
• the moral principle that the individual, not the society or the state, is the sovereign unit in the political equation, and
• the judicial principle that all citizens, regardless of class or gender, are equal before the law.

Moreover, this liberal formula has become the preferred political recipe for success in the modern world, vanquishing the European monarchies in the 19th century and the totalitarian regimes of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the 20th century. More specifically, the Founding Fathers managed to defy conventional wisdom in four unprecedented achievements:

• first, they won a war for colonial independence against the most powerful military and economic power in the world;
• second, they established the first large-scale republic in the modern world;
• third, they invented political parties that institutionalized the concept of a legitimate opposition;
• fourth, they established the principle of the legal separation of church and state, though it took several decades for that principle to be implemented in all the states.

Finally, all these achievements were won without recourse to the guillotine or the firing-squad wall, which is to say without the violent purges that accompanied subsequent revolutions in France, Russia, and China. This was the overarching accomplishment that the British philosopher Alfred Lord North Whitehead had in mind when he observed that there were only two instances in the history of Western Civilization when the political elite of an emerging empire behaved as well as one could reasonably expect: the first was Rome under Caesar Augustus, and the second was the United States under the Founding Fathers.

What about their failures? Slavery was incompatible with the values of the American Revolution, and all the prominent members of the revolutionary generation acknowledged that fact...Indeed, by insisting that slavery was a matter of state rather than federal jurisdiction, they implicitly removed the slavery question from the national agenda. This decision had catastrophic consequences...Please jump in and add your own thoughts.