It used to be that Americans jammed the streets to watch a parade.
Today there are more performers than spectators, especially on the calendar days
sacred to an immigrant hero like General Pulaski or Admiral Columbus.
Once a year, however, on the 4th of July,
they celebrate not the old country, but the new nation,
created not by hoarse crowds in the hurly-burly of the streets,
but by 55 chosen men
exercising the idealism, practicality and sense of order of the late 18th century.
Washington has been called, among other things,
"a city of Greek wedding cakes".
They celebrate the conviction of the Founding Fathers, but what they were building
was the first modern republic worthy of Ancient Greece.
What they could not anticipate was the flood of democracy
that would rough up the symmetry of their new institutions.
This is the kind of contrast that constantly arises
between what the 18th century hoped to make out of American life
and what life turned out to be.
For example, nearly all the visual records we have of the wars of the 18th century
show men fighting and dying in an almost dignified and stately way.
Clearly, these scenes were not photographed by network correspondents this morning
to show to us tonight,
yet the 18th-century wars and not least the American War of Independence
were bloodier than most,
if only because they were man-to-man, horse-to-horse, hand-to-hand affairs.
But since this was the century of reason and elegance,
these wars were brought to an end in reasonable treaties concluded in elegant rooms.
But even with reasonable people, it takes time for the bad blood to simmer
and it took two years from the British surrender at Yorktown to the peace of Paris
which ended the War of Independence.
The treaty was signed at this desk and it was commemorated in that sketch painting
by Benjamin West.
There you see the American delegation, led by Benjamin Franklin in black.
You don't see the British delegation because they were so used to winning
that they didn't know how to look like losers and refused to show up at the artist's studio.
However, in those intervening two years, they had won great naval victories in the West Indies
and they still occupied New York, so they came to this desk with some bargaining strength.
Obviously, they had to grant the total independence of the new nation
called the United States of America
and they had to give up these huge lands from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico,
won only 20 years before from the French.
That's to say, all the way from the Mississippi to the Allegheny Mountains.
They did retain navigation rights on the Mississippi
and a share of the Newfoundland fisheries.
Well, so much for the parties of the first part,
but now came the nasty stage in every peace treaty,
where the allies of the winner demand their pound of flesh.
The French were quite content to see Britain stripped of her American Empire
and to leave a small nation on a huge continent
which, no doubt, at some later date, would require French protection.
That left the Spanish, and they wanted rewards far beyond their prowess.
In fact, they wanted Gibraltar way back then
and were persuaded by the French to settle for Florida.
But now there was great anxiety over a word that haunts the defeated in every civil war,
and the word is "reprisal".
What was going to happen to the Loyalists,
to the one third of the Colonists who had fought on the British side or at least supported them?
Well, the treaty put in some humane promises
about compensation for houses, lands, possessions,
but the Congress was an infant and it couldn't keep these promises.
And I'm sorry to say that in the result,
the Loyalists were treated with alarming variations throughout the states.
The Pennsylvania Quakers were so compassionate
that a disgusted New Yorker wished instead they had followed the example of his state.
"There was nothing," he said, "like a vigorous, manly execution."
But in most places, the Loyalists had a brutal time.
In many towns, the favourite torture was tarring and feathering,
and this cartoon suggests that the fate of a woman collaborator
is much the same in all wars.
The Loyalists lost their houses and businesses.
They had no legal redress from assault and slander.
They even had to pay for robberies and the ruin caused by rioting mobs.
And at last, they were forced into exile in great numbers,
to Canada, to the West Indies or back to England.
The day the British evacuated Charleston,
one hundred ships sailed down the bay, jammed with Loyalists.
And in New York, the British commander was so fearful of mass reprisals
that he refused to give up the port until the last refugee was aboard.
And one of them made the forlorn note in his diary,
"There will scarcely be a village in England without some American dust in it
"by the time we are all at rest."
The welcome home given to starving exiles was seldom as elaborate
as this symbolic reception by Britannia.
But this forced exodus was, I suppose, prudent, if not inevitable.
The war had ended in a blaze of patriotism and the people were so peacock-proud
that, sooner or later, they might have menaced the lives of a population of renegades.
So for a time they revelled in the popular fiction
of a brave and indissoluble alliance of new states
and they celebrated it in the naive symbols of the time -
the eagle, the warhorse and Columbia with her flag.
Even so level-headed a man as John Adams wrote,
"This day of July 1776 will be the memorable epoch
"in the history of America.
"It ought to be solemnised with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns,
"bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other,
"from this time forward for ever more."
# God bless America
# My home...
# Sweet home #
The conquering heroes had come home all right, drunk on the pride of sovereignty,
but not as Americans, rather as Virginians, Marylanders, New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians,
but on the morning after, this indissoluble union soon dissolved into separate states,
slapping tariffs on each other, coining their own money, going their own ways,
shucking off the huge national war debt as somebody else's business.
We are here in Philadelphia because this is where 55 men came
to try and repair the chaos of what had become the "Disunited States of America",
just about held together by some loose agreements called the Articles of Confederation,
a sort of League of Nations which, like some others,
kept boasting about an overriding authority which, in fact, it never possessed.
So, in time,
influential men in the new states came to recognise with much reluctance
that they were not a nation
and they came here in 1787 to Philadelphia
frankly to see if they could make the government work.
It was natural for them to come here.
Philadelphia was the great metropolis of colonial America.
It was the central city.
It was here in its state house, now called Independence Hall,
that the Declaration of Independence had been passed in 1776
and it was here that George Washington had received the command of the Continental Army.
This is the chamber in which they met, and it looks very much as it did then.
There was no argument about who their presiding officer was to be.
George Washington sat and occasionally slept here.
The other delegates sat around these tables, one table to one state.
I said just now that they were reluctant to come together here.
They were big men in their own country
and I suppose they hated to lose the sweet smell of success
that they'd enjoyed in their own bailiwicks.
Anyway, it took ten days to get a quorum and Rhode Island never did show up.
Rhode Island is in the Union, though.
But when seven states were represented...
...they closed the doors and they began.
But who were THEY?
The Declaration of Independence had started its catalogue of royal crimes
with the grand phrase, "We, the people".
But by any definition of "the people" that we'd accept, they were not here.
You know, looking back on it now, it's awfully hard for us to realise
that the men who created the United States were not creating OUR society.
They would have shuddered at some of our deepest beliefs. Democracy, for instance.
For though the king had gone and the governors were appointed by men of property
and the legislatures were elected,
I think that most of the men who came here would have agreed with old John Winthrop
that "democracy, amongst civil nations,
"is accounted the meanest and worst form of government".
Also they had no intention of sanctioning political parties.
They agreed with their chairman, George Washington,
that political parties provoke the mischief of associations and combinations.
Now, it's natural to ask how about the people's people,
the demagogues,
the bloodshot orators who had rabble-roused the country into revolution?
Patrick Henry, Tom Paine?
They weren't here.
For it often happens that men who love the bonfire...
...find the rebuilding something of a bore.
Patrick Henry refused to come.
He said, "I smell a rat in Philadelphia."
Tom Paine was a man so exhilarated by agitation that he adopted it as a profession.
The very month the Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia, he sailed away
to pull England into revolutionary shape.
He was arrested in London for treason,
he escaped to France to play first trumpet to the French Revolution,
but they had their own trumpeters and he missed the guillotine by a hair's breadth.
It should be a lesson to all columnists and writers of indignant books.
So who, then, were the men
who were to be known ever afterwards as the Founding Fathers?
Jefferson called them "an assembly of demigods".
Not quite, but they were a superior lot, possibly the most enlightened,
certainly the most civilised revolutionaries the world has seen in the last 200 years.
These 55 men were the elite of business, the professions and government in their own states.
The shippers and manufacturers of the north, the planters and scholars of the south.
More than half of them were lawyers.
29 of them were graduates of colleges of either Britain or America.
Average age, 42, which in the 18th century was just a little beyond the span of normal life.
Well, they were here for just under 17 weeks
and the first thing they did was to flout their instructions.
They decided the Articles of Confederation were hopeless,
they abolished them and started from scratch.
And they sat down here to invent a nation.
They spent the first two months looking through all the ancient and modern forms of government
and found, Franklin said, "only the seeds of their dissolution".
So they began by deciding what they wouldn't have.
A parliamentary system, for instance - out!
They had 150 years' tradition of separate governments for the states
and they meant to keep them.
And since they had overthrown what they had come to look on as the tyranny of monarchy,
they wouldn't have a king or a standing army.
Kings could command standing armies and manipulate parliaments.
A professional army was anathema to them.
Indeed, the Continental Army was disbanded within six months of the end of the war
and the navy and the marine corps ceased to exist.
When, by the way, the suggestion came from an old army man who idolised his chief
that George Washington should be made king,
Washington himself was the first to snuff it out.
"As an idea, I must view with abhorrence
"and reprehend with severity."
Oh, at the start they took a decision
that today would certainly produce the most frightful hullabaloo among the newspapers
and the networks, not to mention the people.
Should they publish their debates as they went along?
It's a problem that has pestered diplomats ever since,
whether, as Woodrow Wilson believed,
such conferences should seek "open covenants, openly arrived at".
Or, as Dag Hammarskjöld believed,
they should seek open covenants SECRETLY arrived at.
Well, they agreed with Dag Hammarskjöld
and Washington said that even if they didn't publish their debates
and their resolutions dribbled out,
they would get into the newspapers and, he said,
"disturb the public repose with premature speculations".
Imagine.
So what was recorded here and what went on behind these closed doors
was unknown to anybody on the outside for 60 years.
When the Convention was all over
and Benjamin Franklin was going through these doors for the last time,
an old lady stopped him and said, "Well, Doctor, what have we got?
"A republic or a monarchy?"
And he replied, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."
Well, the republic has been kept for 200 years,
but not without considerable disturbance to the public repose.
George Washington, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
# Sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me... #
This is not a rock rally, but a 1970 political campaign,
one man's way of trying to get elected to the United States Senate.
(ALL) Senator Sesler, Senator Sesler!
Nice to see you. How are you? Glad you could come out.
How are you?
How are you, sir? Very nice to meet you.
Only one way to be lucky. I need your help, sir.
This, too, is going on in the Founders' town of Philadelphia.
That is probably the 15th ice-cream cone that he's had to take a lick at in one day.
(INAUDIBLE CONVERSATION)
We run for the Senate of the United States with the conviction and the knowledge
that we serve no one except the people.
I've made public my expenditure...
But back in Independence Hall in 1787,
the great debate turned on a crucial question -
the balance of power between the central government and the states.
There was one brilliant advocate of a strong central government - Alexander Hamilton.
Like most fervent nationalists, like Napoleon, like Hitler,
Hamilton was born elsewhere.
He was a British subject born in the West Indies.
At the age of 12, he was running a mercantile business in St Croix
and doing it expertly in two languages.
At 16, he entered what is now Columbia University
and he wrote some of the most persuasive of the revolutionary pamphlets.
He fought bravely in the war
and, at the end of it, was a military aide to George Washington.
He was the supreme spokesman of the aristocratic principle.
He wanted a lifetime president,
a lifetime Senate recruited exclusively from men of property,
an all-powerful central government that could absolutely veto the laws of the states.
At the opposite pole was a Virginian, George Mason,
who argued to the end for strong individual rights, a weak central government
and equal powers for the states.
In between Hamilton and Mason
sat a most undramatic figure,
32 years old, a theologian of great learning,
more patience and a sceptical view of human nature,
James Madison.
"If men were virtuous," he once reminded the Convention,
"there would be no need of governments at all."
This was our man in the middle, James Madison.
His great learning, these tomes,
remind me of a story about a very practical British prime minister
who was asked how Harold Laski, another great scholar of politics,
how he'd made out when he was given his first political job.
And Mr Attlee said, "Rum thing about Harold - never got the hang of it."
Well, the truly marvellous thing about Madison was the way he got the hang of it,
was the way his learning and his experience reinforced each other.
He came to Philadelphia with this vast pile of books
and he lectured the delegates on the history of confederacies, ancient and modern.
And from it, he hammered home a warning
that no confederacy had ever succeeded which set up a conflict
between the national and the provincial government,
so bluntly you could say he thought both Hamilton and Mason were wrong.
His idea, which really became the central principle of the American system,
was that the national government does not exist to coerce the states or be their rival.
They both exist for the protection of the American citizen.
And happily, the men of Philadelphia hearkened to him.
So they boosted the pride of the little states
by giving them equal representation in an upper house
and giving every locality the widest representation in a lower house.
And - this was the vital compromise -
they agreed to recognise and respect the variety of life and tradition in the states.
And to give them and leave them to this day great independent powers.
This is not any building in Washington.
It is the entrance to a state capitol,
the headquarters of government by and for that state alone.
And there's some such building in each of the 50 states.
Each has its governor, its executive branch
and its own congress with an upper house and a lower house.
In 50 state capitols, men are busy exercising all the powers
which the Constitution did not give to the federal government.
The states control their own highways,
education, banking, divorce,
taxation,
even their own civil and criminal codes.
It was a daring thing to give these powers to the states,
but it greatly diffused the opportunity for self-government
and, we ought to say, for corruption.
It sounds like a shattering defeat for Alexander Hamilton, and so it was.
When the Constitutional Convention was over, he said...
"No man's ideas are more remote from the plan than my own are known to be."
Now, I said that he was a Roman
and he had some of the Roman vices - arrogance, centralism,
but he had a great Roman virtue - magnanimity.
He never complained or recriminated because he'd lost.
And to me, Alexander Hamilton, not a very fashionable figure now,
represents the politician at his very best,
showing an absence of malice,
a steady willingness to believe that your opponent is as honourable a man as you are
and may be right.
He swallowed his most passionate convictions and wrote more than 40 brilliant essays,
urging the states to ratify the Constitution,
which was a very close thing in some places.
In Virginia, for instance, they voted 89 for, 79 against.
George Mason and Patrick Henry voted against.
But in the end, it was done
and I think thanks mainly to these three men, to Hamilton, Mason and Madison.
They together achieved the triumph
of three principles which, I believe, have sustained this federal republic
on a continent for so long.
They're undramatic principles, but they're very precious.
They are compromise, compromise, compromise.
(CROWD SHOUTING, GUNFIRE)
But an awful lot of things in life cannot or will not be compromised,
the most familiar case being the perennial conflict between workers and employers.
In the mid-1930s when American labour was asserting its right to organise,
there were literal battles in which over 20 people were killed
and 600 wounded.
In one crucial strike, 25,000 steel workers quit
because the company ignored a new law that allowed them to join the union of their choice.
Who, in such an issue, is to have the final say?
It was settled in the end not by the company or the union or the president or the Congress,
but by a body of men created in 1787 in Philadelphia,
the one absolutely new thing in government,
invented by the Founding Fathers.
The Constitution set up the president to keep an eye on the Congress
and the Congress to keep an eye on the president,
and to keep an eye on both of them was something else -
a Supreme Court of judges appointed for life above the political battle.
And yet, and this is vital, they are able to decide the outcome of all the battles,
political and social, of American life
that engage the best and the worst passions of the people.
And this is the place where, over the longest stretch of time,
the United States Supreme Court has sat.
It is the watchdog of the ordinary American citizen and there is nothing like it.
Now, you'll suspect, rightly, that the Court is a hobbyhorse of mine.
Let me tell you why.
I've been a working correspondent in this country for over 35 years
and I only now realise how often I've looked at some dangerous crisis that was happening
and said, "Thank God for the Supreme Court!"
For these nine men who guard the rights of the ordinary citizen.
And the ordinary citizen can be the president or a pimp, a banker or a bum,
and the judges' brief and their bible is the Constitution of the United States.
They... Not presidents, the Constitution.
They sit most days of the year and they look into the Constitution
and they decide if something that somebody had done, anybody, is legal.
Whether you can, for instance, run an undertaker's
and also own stock in an insurance company.
You cannot.
Or whether a stage play of naked men and women,
running around shouting four-letter words, is constitutional.
I'm not sure, but at the moment, I think it is.
The nine judges are never bound by precedents, not even their own.
They have defended the right - some right! -
of children to work in factories throughout the night
and then absolutely forbidden them to do just that.
They have proclaimed the right to keep blacks and whites apart on trains,
then 60, 70 years later, proclaimed the right to put whites and blacks together
on trains, in schoolrooms, theatres, everywhere.
So you see, the Constitution, like the Old Testament,
can be cited to forgive one's enemies or gouge an eye for an eye.
But make no mistake, this chamber is haunted by memorable faces and single sentences
that have transformed the life of the American people.
Chief Justice Marshall.
"It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department and nobody else
"to say what the law is."
Mr Justice Sutherland.
"The liberty of the individual to do as he pleases, even in innocent matters,
"is not absolute."
Mr Justice Harlan said 80 years ago against all eight of his colleagues...
"The Constitution is colour-blind."
Mr Justice Holmes.
"A constitution is made for people of fundamentally differing views."
Chief Justice Hughes.
"The Constitution is what the judges say it is."
So it is.
And since a majority of the nine decides everything,
the Constitution is what five judges say it is.
Now, this sounds very alarming, but these nine men are human and of various character
and there's nothing rigid about the authority of the Constitution.
It bends to the moral winds of the time.
But if the judges are behind the times
and if ever their integrity as honourable men is seriously questioned,
then the Court and the country are in trouble.
But I've noticed that an odd and impressive thing happens, can happen,
when a man is appointed to the Court.
The president may think he has installed a ventriloquist's doll,
but suddenly the man is paid for life and can become himself,
a quite different character from the one the president ordered up.
And so remarkably often the Court has kept the country on an even keel
in the stormiest times.
Believe me, it will be a bad day for Americans
if ever the mass of them come to lose faith in this Court as their fair and final protector.
There might have been no all-powerful court and no workable constitution
if the Founding Fathers had not listened to an American who was not present in Philadelphia.
He is the missing giant of the Convention, Thomas Jefferson.
He was in Paris as Minister to France
and he heard with alarm that George Mason had failed to impress on the Convention
the vital need for a written Bill of Rights.
In France, Jefferson looked around him
and he saw most of the old indignities the Constitution had failed to prohibit.
And he wrote continuously back to Philadelphia,
"You must specify your liberties and put them down on paper."
Within four years, ten amendments came into force as the Bill of Rights.
"One - Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion
"or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press
"or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.
"Two - a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,
"the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
"Three - no soldier shall in time of peace be quartered in any house
"without the consent of the owner.
"Four - the right of the people to be secure
"against unreasonable search and seizures shall not be violated.
"Five - no person shall be tried twice for the same crime,
"nor compelled to be a witness against himself,
"nor be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.
"Eight - excessive bail shall not be required,
"nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
And so on, through ten amendments.
All were adopted within four years as the original Bill of Rights.
Since then, there have been some 15 others,
all incorporated in the body of the Constitution
and serving as the only brief and bible of the Supreme Court.
As Hamilton had guaranteed the central structure of the United States
and Madison the large powers of the individual states,
so it was Jefferson who thought most steadily of the chief beneficiary of these labours -
the people.
You might think of such a man who disliked cities, idolised farmers,
as a simple rural crank.
He was not. He was a very remarkable American 18th-century type,
upper class, classless,
inventive, ingenious, scholarly,
eccentric country squire.
This is his house and he was the architect of it.
He got up always with the sun, but like a lot of us who travel between hotels,
he didn't like to look at his bed all day.
So he devised a series of pulleys
and an enclosure in the ceiling into which he could pull the bed soon after he got up.
In this way, he created a walk-through that connected that sitting room with this study.
This house is full of novelties of his invention which today we take for granted.
A revolving chair in which he could follow the light as he read.
He designed his own spectacles
and medicine chest.
And a four-sided lectern which allowed a chamber music quartet
to play from the same stand.
He was an enthusiastic amateur musician.
In fact, he was an amateur everything.
An amateur of astronomy, of interior decoration. He designed the curtains here.
Of architecture, of gardening. He laid out all the gardens in Monticello.
And here in Albemarle County, he cultivated the famous Albemarle pippin.
The Albemarle pippin, by the way, if anybody cares,
was Queen Victoria's favourite apple.
He was a lifelong note-taker.
He wrote reams of notes about everything,
the Greek and Roman authors, contemporary French philosophers,
geology, Hebrew manuscripts.
Here are his notes on his native state of Virginia.
Here he compiled a list of all the trees, plants and flowers in the state of Virginia.
And an account, with all their locations, of all the known Indian tribes of North America.
He also had a theory of currency which he carried against the bankers.
He carried it with the Congress and anticipated the British government by nearly 200 years
in pointing out the laboriousness of pounds, shillings and pence.
He wrote simply, "The ordinary man has to divide by 12 and carry,
"and then divide by 20 and carry,
"whereas in a decimal system, everything is divided by ten
"to the great ease of the community."
I must say that if there's one notebook I'd give a great deal for,
it's the one he carried around Europe.
He padded around Paris,
jotting down all the detestable things which a republic would not have.
"No public statues,"
a prejudice which the American people have successfully overcome.
"Titles of nobility.
"A very great vanity," he wrote,
"which tends to prolong the artificial aristocracy of birth and wealth,
"as against the natural aristocracy of talent and virtue."
He went to London and visited the courts and he made a note.
"No wigs on judges.
"We must not have men sitting in judgment who look like mice peeping out of oakum."
There's something almost comical about Jefferson's earnestness, and maybe a little prim,
but to me, something very pure and innocent too.
He believed that nothing but good
could come from the total, open, public discussion of every issue,
and when he heard that the Constitutional Convention had adopted its rule of secrecy,
he said, "This is an abominable precedent."
Because he really did believe, and he said it over and over again,
in the essential goodness and wisdom of the common people.
Alexander Hamilton would have groaned to hear him.
A few days before Hamilton died, he wrote,
"Every day proves to me more and more
"that this American world is not for me."
Well, so far as Jefferson could see, it was for him.
Maybe Hamilton could see a little farther into the future than Jefferson,
who foresaw a continuing utopia of chivalrous and learned rulers,
walking hand in hand with good, honest farmers
in, a favourite phrase, perfect harmony.
I don't know. But he used to retreat here as often as he possibly could.
Even when he was president,
he called Washington "that Indian swamp in the wilderness".
And when you think of him sitting here amid his dreams and his books and his gadgets,
it's no wonder that cities and slums and frontier violence never crossed his mind.
But over the mountains in the interior there was another people,
and if it was the ideas of such as Jefferson that invented the new nation,
it was the rude men of what Americans call "the back country"
who changed and secured it.
This was the country of Daniel Boone,
an undefeatable wagoner, blacksmith, hunter, explorer, surveyor,
who tried time and again to beat a trail into a new colony.
Before he made it, he was wounded, he had a brother killed, a son killed.
He himself was nearly drowned, he was drenched by blizzards
and beaten by Indians and he saw families massacred.
At the end he was swindled out of the tracts of land that he'd cleared and laid title to.
But the brutal experience of this hero did not deter over 100,000 people
pouring into the new territories of Kentucky and Tennessee within 15 years.
And within 30 years the population of the United States doubled.
And the overflow, both of young Americans and European arrivals,
went inland through the mountains into the valleys of the Mississippi and the Ohio.
# Rise you up, my dearest dear and present to me your hand
# And we'll all run away to some far and distant land
# Where the ladies knit and sew And the gents, they plough and pull
# And we'll ramble in the canebrake and shoot the buffalo...
# Come, all ye fine young women who have got a mind to go
# You can make us clothing, you can knit and you can sew
# We'll build you fine log cabins by the blessed 0hio
# Through the wild woods we'll wander and we'll chase the buffalo #
They were unlettered mostly,
hunters, trappers, pinching farmers living a tough, classless life,
making with their own hands all the necessities of life.
Like the Puritans 180 years before, their single obsession was survival,
and to survive, they had to bargain with or slaughter the Indians
whose lands they'd encroached on, and then they had to tame the landscape.
# The first white man in Cumberland Gap Was Dr Walker, an English chap
# Cumberland Gap
# Way down yonder in Cumberland Gap
# Cumberland Gap with its cliffs and rocks Home of the panther, the bear and fox
# Cumberland Gap
# Way down yonder in Cumberland Gap
# Me and my wife and my wife's pap
# Made our way through Cumberland Gap
# Cumberland Gap, Cumberland Gap
# Way down yonder in Cumberland Gap #
We are here in a high mountain valley in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.
The first white man to make a clearing and settle here was a man named John Oliver.
And in 1818, he built this cabin.
It's only 400 miles as the crow flies from here to the Atlantic Ocean,
but in those days, the crow had it much easier.
Remember that I said, at the Philadelphia Convention,
nobody made a favourable mention of the word "democracy".
Well, these back country people, they would mention it
because they were the people we can now see
who initiated a very familiar conflict in American life
between the metropolitan man and the outlander,
between the Midwest farmer and Wall Street, between upstate and downstate.
And this conflict still dictates the balance of power and prejudice in the state legislatures.
Now, the people who came through here and literally had to shovel
and fight their way through the mountains,
they were the first Anglo-Saxons who had, as we say, gone west.
And pretty soon, they would be heard from, and when they were,
a new stage direction would be required for the next act of the American drama.
It would say, "Loud noises heard offstage.
"Enter demos."
Democracy would plant a ruder strain
in the character of the Americans and their government.
For the people who lived here had few links, if any, with the writers of the Constitution.
They would transform the republic
beyond the imagining of the learned and graceful men of the 18th century.
(UP-TEMPO COUNTRY MUSIC)
Drop back and swing!
Promenade!
Now, the ladies stand still, the gents move back up to your partner. Move forward.
Swing her high, swing her low.
# 0h, there never could be such a longing
# In the heart of a pure maiden's breast
# That dwells in the heart you are breaking
# As you take the long trail to the west
# Come and sit by my side if you love me
# Do not hasten to bid me adieu
# But remember the Bright Mohawk Valley
# And the girl that has loved you so true... #