April 10, 2026 • 18 mins
Scholar, author, Thomas Jefferson fanatic (and VP for Legal Affairs The Goldwater Institute), "Tim the Lawyer" Sandefur joins Joe Getty to talk about his new book, Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Longtime friend of the show.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Tim Sanderfer Tim the lawyer who is a big wheel
these days at the Goldwater Institute.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
We'll talk about that in a minute.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Also an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute, among other things,
in the author of a number of fine books which
I recommend heartily, one in all, including a brand new
book Proclaiming Liberty, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration
of Independence. Can't wait to read it, Tim sander Ford
joins us. Now, Tim, how are you.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
I'm just great? Been too long?
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah, it really has been.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I hope you and your beautiful, brilliant brider both doing well.
I'm looking at what you wrote about your new book,
Proclaiming Liberty, and you describe it as a biography of
the Declaration of Independence.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
What do you mean, well, I tried to tell the
story of the Declaration of Independence in order to cover
the legal and philosophical background of the Declaration, but to
tell it in sort of a story format about the
friendship between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and the issues
that they were facing in seventeen seventy six. So I
(01:05):
wanted to make it not just a boring recitation of
philosophical or legal issues, but to try and tell it
in the context of all the controversies that were going
on at the time, which I think a lot of
people don't know about. I mean, I think today people
read the Declaration of Independence and they get to that
long list of complaints about what Britain was doing, and
they don't really know what those things are all referring to.
(01:26):
And so I wanted to go clause by clause through
the Declaration and say exactly what it was that Parliament
was doing that bothered the Americans and how that connected
to the lives of the people who wrote the declaration.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Yeah, two points number one.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
I have always been inspired by, for instance, Adams and Jefferson.
There are plenty of other examples of guys who disagreed
with each other vehemently, I mean, like red faced spit flying,
but they stuck together and they said, we will work
this out, we will figure out a compromise, which I
think is a lesson all of us. Follow And the
(02:01):
second thing is I love the idea of going through
the various clauses and helping people understand what they mean
and why they were so serious they merried in launching
a new country, because I'm certain people will say, wait
a minute, I can relate to that in my business,
my family, my town.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Oh definitely.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
And you know, one of the reasons I wrote the
book is because it annoys me so much when you
hear people say, well, the American Revolution was just about
a little three penny tax on tea, and you know,
people were saying that back in seventeen seventy six two,
and it really annoyed people like Jefferson and Adams when
people would make that claim, because it just was not true.
The issue was how much power, if any, does Parliament
(02:40):
have over the colonies of North America, And the answer
was no, zero. It was the king who governed them,
but the laws were made by their own local legislatures
and Parliament would not accept that. So really the rebellion
was a rebellion against Parliament at first, not against the king.
It was only when King George made clear that he
was not going to do anything about it and that
(03:02):
he sided with Parliament that the Americans said, well, then
we can't even be loyal to the king either, And
that's why the declaration is aimed at the King and
doesn't even mention Parliament by name. They couldn't even bring
themselves to mention the name Parliament in the Declaration because
they were just that angry. Wow, but you're right about
You're right about compromise and negotiation with people who disagree
(03:22):
with each other, because you know, we have this idea
that all the Patriots were united, but they really weren't.
They had a lot of internal disagreements and it took
a lot of patient negotiation and argument, and sometimes they
got very angry at each other. My favorite example is
Thomas Jefferson. Later in life, Thomas Jefferson said about Patrick Henry,
we must devoutly pray for his death.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
I've always wondered whether that was cool or not in
the eyes of whatever concept of the almighty. So why
did you go with Jefferson and Adams in particular, since
there are many fine founding papas that you could have
focused on.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Well, I've always been a big Jefferson fanatic ever since
I was a kid. But you can't really write about
the Declaration and just about Jefferson. He was very young.
He was one of the youngest members of the Continental Congress.
He's thirty three years old at the time that he
wrote the declaration, and he showed up at the Continental
Congress pretty late in the day. John Adams had been
there the entire time, and he was really the champion
(04:21):
of independence from an early day. And their friendship, you know,
everybody knows that they ended up having a lot of
very serious disagreements, but that wasn't until later on in
seventeen seventy six. They were both very radical and they
were really good friends at the time, and so it
became It started out as a book about Jefferson, and
then as I wrote it, it turned into a buddy picture,
(04:42):
you know, And from that point I had to tell
the story about what happened to the century before that,
because people don't know much about the English Civil Wars
of the seventeenth century, one hundred years before the Revolution,
that the Americans were already demanding a certain degree of
autumn me at that time, and it was those wars
(05:02):
that set the background for the American Revolution. This isn't
something that just you know, already woke up in seventeen
seventy five and were like, hey, we're tired of being British,
you know. This was something that had been simmering for
one hundred and fifty years before the declaration.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
I was going to say steeping in honor of the
Tea Party, but yes, well that's and that's one thing
that I don't want to get off on the tangent
about Jeffersonian democracies in Middle Eastern countries. But we were
steeped in the principles that gave birth to this country.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
For a hell of a long time. I mean, it
was truly in our DNA.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yes, And that was a point that John Adams particularly
was very emphatic about. You know, when the French Revolution
broke out, you know, more than a decade after in
the American Independence Adams was very cynical about the possibilities
of the French Revolution because he said, you need this
long cultural development of the ideas of freedom before you
can have political freedom. And he thought the French were
(05:57):
acting too quickly because they didn't have that trade. And
there's a funny thing. He Adams is one of these
guys who like to write in the margins of his
books like I do, and so he has had a
copy of a book about the French Revolution, and he
wrote all these angry comments in the margins, and there's
one part where he says, how could anybody expect for
(06:18):
millions of Frenchmen who had known nothing but absolute tyranny
and absolute monarchy for centuries to go overnight into a
modern democracy is totally insane, And I mean it's amazing
how that lesson is something we could still learn a
lot about today.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, it's half a cliche, but man, I spend a
lot of time thinking about the fact that everything is
downstream of culture. Everything and people, whether they're attractive half
wits serving in Congress who declare there's no such thing
as Western culture, or just people who failed to even
notice that it exists. It makes me insane. But that's
part of the reason I get up and do this job.
(06:56):
So when you, I'm sure you occasionally run into somebody
who clearly has either no understanding of the Declaration of
Independence or tends to think it's like not one of
the important founding documents. It's the constitutions are a founding documents.
What do you lead with? What's the most what's your
lead pitch that who you need to wake up and
understand this?
Speaker 1 (07:16):
You are absolutely right.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
I have encountered this for decades, since I was a teenager.
This issue has bothered me, especially there's a lot of
conservatives who like to downplay the importance of the declarations.
Oh no, the war was really about the traditional rights
of Englishmen and all that stuff about equality and liberty
that was just put in there to interest the French. Really,
the Americans didn't really care about those abstract principles, and
(07:40):
that's total nonsense. The Declaration of Independence.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Is the.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Cement of our union. In fact, even Jefferson said when
he was an old man, he said that the Declaration
was the fundamental act of the union of these states.
And Jefferson was a states rights guy and he still
said that. So that the Declaration is part of our
constitution and that Actually, that's another reason I wrote the
book is I was really bothered. When Justice Barrett was
(08:08):
going through her confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court, one
of the senators asked her, is the Declaration part of
our law? And she said no, And that's completely wrong.
Of course, it's part of our law. It was passed
by what was the legislature of the country at the time.
It had legal consequences by separating us from Great Britain.
It still has legal consequences it's in the statute books.
(08:30):
If you pull down volume one, page one of the
Statutes at Large of the United States or the United
States Code. There it is what else is necessary to
make it a law. It is the basic law. It's
the frame in which the Constitution exists.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
See.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
I didn't even know that last part about it actually
being in the Code. It's bizarre and troubling to me
that she would say that, I don't think I fully
appreciated it the over the time.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
She's not the only one to either. Justice Schoolia said
the same thing. In fact, when he was on the
Supreme Court, Scolia would frequently refuse to join opinions that
cited the Declaration of Independence because he says it wasn't law.
Of course, it's law. And the reason that it's important
that its law is because you know, it's like the
ninth and tenth Amendments. If those are law, then the
Declaration is law. And the role of the ninth and
(09:17):
tenth Amendments of the Constitution play is they teach us
how to read the Constitution, and that's what the Declaration does.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Also, we're talking to Tim Sanderfer of the Goldwater Institute.
His new book is Proclaiming Liberty, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson
and the Declaration of Independence. I meant to ask you
when we were talking about this, Jefferson Young showed up
late to the party.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
How do you get the gig.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Of being the head of the writing the Declaration committee.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Well, he had written two documents that really impressed people
at the time. He wrote a response to Lord North's
Conciliatory Proposal. So what that was was Lord North was
the Prime Minister and he had sent what he claimed
was an offer of compromise to the American colonies, which
you actually read it, it turns out it was an illusion.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
There was no.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Actual offer to compromise at all. And so Jefferson in
Virginia he was given the opportunity to write a response
to that, and did such a good job of it
that he later went to Philadelphia and they asked him
to write a second response to Lord North. And then
the second thing was he had written a pamphlet called
the Summary View of the Rights of British America, and
that also was so impressive to people, so well written.
(10:22):
Jefferson was a really gifted writer, and they liked it
so much that in fact Jefferson used whole phrases from
that pamphlet in the Declaration of Independence itself. So he
was a young, gifted scholar. And that was the other
thing was he was really knowledgeable about the history of law.
He was really good at looking up old law and
(10:42):
explaining what the old laws meant, because he was a
very scholarly guy. I mean, there are these legends about
him as a college student staying up late in the
night reading to the point where his friends got annoyed,
and at one point they wanted to go out and
have fun, and they came and they overturned the desk
he was trying he was working on in order to
get to go out and have a good time with them.
And you know, it's funny to read stories like that
(11:03):
and be like, Jefferson was a guy like everybody else.
He you know, he he flirted with the girls when
he was in college and he went out with his
friends and had a good time. But he also wrote
the Declaration of Independence. That's just incredible.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah, yeah, Tim sanderfer, Tim, can you hang around for
a little bit at short break and then continue the conversation.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Would absolutely love to do that.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
I want to talk about Adams and how he was
such a wonderful balance to Jefferson. What a pleasure as
we near the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of our
founding to be talking about Tim Sander for his brand
new book Proclaiming Liberty, John Adams, Tom Jefferson in the
Declaration of Independence with the author Tim, thanks for hanging around.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
So, I think a lot of people who are at
least history nuts, are familiar with John Adams is a
balancing guy against Thomas Pain's and Thomas jeffersons I believe
more in federal power as opposed to you know, pure
states rights blah blah blah. But what was Adam's effect
on the drafting the declar.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Well, So Adams tells this story when he's an old man,
he told this story about how he had chosen Jefferson
to write the declaration because he was so busy, and
because he says he says, I was very much disliked
at the time, and I was afraid that everybody would
pick on it if I tried to write it. So
I gave it to Jefferson to write and said, and
that probably is not true because at the time actually
(12:22):
Adams was not disliked. John Adams was very much admired
and respected at the time. It was only later that
he became unpopular, and so that's why he had that
misre misremembered what had happened. But he was the older
and much and more experienced guy, and he was really
a trial lawyer. I think, you know, for since I'm
(12:43):
a lawyer, this is how I think of it. John
Adams was a trial lawyer, and Jefferson was an appellate lawyer,
meaning that John Adams loved to get in there and
argue with people, and he gave the speeches and he
persuaded people. And Jefferson liked to get behind the books
and start looking into the history and writing stuff.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
But he didn't like to talk, and he.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Hated public speaking. Jeffson, all his.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Life hated public speaking.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
So he wrote and then let John Adams go and
defend the thing. And as for the contents, most of
it was stuff that Jefferson already knew or that had
already been circulating for many years. But there were some
things that Adams added to the declaration, and particularly there's
a complaint in there that says that the king has
moved our legislatures around and made it difficult for our
(13:25):
legislatures to meet. And that happens to Adams specifically. The
governor of Massachusetts had gotten annoyed at the Patriots, and
so he ordered the Massachusetts legislature to meet in Cambridge
instead of in Boston, which was a real hassle. But
most of all, it was upset the patriots because it
was like, well, the king can just ignore the legislature
and boss us around, tell us what to do. Violate
(13:47):
separation of powers, and that's not right. And so Adams
got Jefferson to include that in the Declaration of Independence.
And then once the thing was finished, Adams stood up
and defended it against its critics after line after line,
and it took two days for them to finally decide
on the final wording of the declaration, after Jefferson had
written the first round.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
Were there any real sticking points, serious points of contention
between say, Adams and Jefferson or other folks, I mean,
real bare knuckle brawls over what the declaration should say.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
Not between Adams and Jefferson, but definitely between them and
the other delegates. And the most obvious example is the
one about slavery. So Jefferson had included this long, impassioned
attack on slavery at the end of the declaration. It
was the longest passage in the Declaration, and it was
the most emphatic. Jefferson was using all caps and underlining
(14:40):
words and things because it was so angry about slavery.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
I want to stop you. I want to stop you
right there.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Did you hear that, products of America's beleaguered, perverted public schools.
Jefferson hated the institution of slavery anyway, back to you, tim.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
All his life he hated the institution of slavery. And
the idea that Jefferson somehow pro slavery or something like
that is just a ludicrous lie that has been foisted
on a lot of America's school kids. I'm afraid Jefferson
had written this long denunciation of the king so that
when you read his version of the Declaration, it sort
of like rose to this rhetorical climax where it starts
(15:18):
out with, well, he did this, and he did that,
and then he did these worse things, and then these
even worse things, and then these even worse things, and
then worst of all is he prohibited the colonies from
limiting the importation of slaves and slavery is this horrible thing,
And that's how it ended. And Adams loved it, and
years later he said, I loved every word, especially the
attack on slavery. But the other delegates at the Congress
(15:41):
would not allow that in there. And Jefferson later said
that it was South Carolina and Georgia in particular that
were such heavy employers of slaves, but also the Northern states,
which were heavy transporters of slaves, also had qualms with it,
and so they ended up taking that entire paragraph out.
And Jefferson was so upset about that that he went
back to his apartment and wrote out his version of
(16:03):
the declaration and sent it to a bunch of friends
and said, don't you think my version is better? And
then fifty years later in his memoirs, he did the
same thing, copied out his version of the declaration in
order to make sure that everybody knew that he had
tried to do this thing. Jefferson was very much against slavery.
The problem was later in life he just gave up
on the issue when he really shouldn't have. And I
(16:26):
think he does deserve blame for that, But in seventeen
seventy six he was an emphatic enemy of slavery.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
You know, Tim, someday we'll have to impose on your
time a little more and bring you back and talk
about the founding fathers and slavery and the truth about that.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Now.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
I have, to my credit, I have not read the
whole thing, but I have a copy of the book
Arguing About Slavery, which is wonderful. But are there any
other books on the topic you'd recommend. We've barely got
a minute.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
By the way.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Oh yeah, I do love Arguing about Slavery by William
Lee Miller. Absolutely marvelous book. There are some really good
books by oh gosh, what's his name. I'm forgetting the name.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
You know. Drop me a note.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
We'll post it at the website at Armstrong Geddy dot com.
Tim Sanderfer the Goldwater Institute. The new book is Proclaiming
Liberty John Adams Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence. I
truly can't wait to read it. Tim, always enjoy it
so much. Great to talk to you.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Thanks, Joe.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
All right, Thanks, We will talk again soon next hour.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
If you are privileged, if you are if you have
fourth hour privilege. We've got a great conversation coming up
with Gordon Chang about China, not only in the way
of the conflict in the Gulf, but just what they
are up to, because everybody's kind of been looking a way,
including the shocking fact that the Trump administration seems to
have gone a little soft on China and why that
(17:45):
might be.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
So that's our for.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
If you don't get our for, you got to go somewhere,
that's fine. Just grab it via podcast Later, subscribe to
Armstrong and Getty on demand. It downloads automatically and you
get the One More Thing podcast as well. Thanks for
being here, more to come, Armstrong and Getty
Longtime friend of the show.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Tim Sanderfer Tim the lawyer who is a big wheel
these days at the Goldwater Institute.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
We'll talk about that in a minute.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Also an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute, among other things,
in the author of a number of fine books which
I recommend heartily, one in all, including a brand new
book Proclaiming Liberty, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration
of Independence. Can't wait to read it, Tim sander Ford
joins us. Now, Tim, how are you.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
I'm just great? Been too long?
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah, it really has been.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I hope you and your beautiful, brilliant brider both doing well.
I'm looking at what you wrote about your new book,
Proclaiming Liberty, and you describe it as a biography of
the Declaration of Independence.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
What do you mean, well, I tried to tell the
story of the Declaration of Independence in order to cover
the legal and philosophical background of the Declaration, but to
tell it in sort of a story format about the
friendship between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and the issues
that they were facing in seventeen seventy six. So I
(01:05):
wanted to make it not just a boring recitation of
philosophical or legal issues, but to try and tell it
in the context of all the controversies that were going
on at the time, which I think a lot of
people don't know about. I mean, I think today people
read the Declaration of Independence and they get to that
long list of complaints about what Britain was doing, and
they don't really know what those things are all referring to.
(01:26):
And so I wanted to go clause by clause through
the Declaration and say exactly what it was that Parliament
was doing that bothered the Americans and how that connected
to the lives of the people who wrote the declaration.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Yeah, two points number one.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
I have always been inspired by, for instance, Adams and Jefferson.
There are plenty of other examples of guys who disagreed
with each other vehemently, I mean, like red faced spit flying,
but they stuck together and they said, we will work
this out, we will figure out a compromise, which I
think is a lesson all of us. Follow And the
(02:01):
second thing is I love the idea of going through
the various clauses and helping people understand what they mean
and why they were so serious they merried in launching
a new country, because I'm certain people will say, wait
a minute, I can relate to that in my business,
my family, my town.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Oh definitely.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
And you know, one of the reasons I wrote the
book is because it annoys me so much when you
hear people say, well, the American Revolution was just about
a little three penny tax on tea, and you know,
people were saying that back in seventeen seventy six two,
and it really annoyed people like Jefferson and Adams when
people would make that claim, because it just was not true.
The issue was how much power, if any, does Parliament
(02:40):
have over the colonies of North America, And the answer
was no, zero. It was the king who governed them,
but the laws were made by their own local legislatures
and Parliament would not accept that. So really the rebellion
was a rebellion against Parliament at first, not against the king.
It was only when King George made clear that he
was not going to do anything about it and that
(03:02):
he sided with Parliament that the Americans said, well, then
we can't even be loyal to the king either, And
that's why the declaration is aimed at the King and
doesn't even mention Parliament by name. They couldn't even bring
themselves to mention the name Parliament in the Declaration because
they were just that angry. Wow, but you're right about
You're right about compromise and negotiation with people who disagree
(03:22):
with each other, because you know, we have this idea
that all the Patriots were united, but they really weren't.
They had a lot of internal disagreements and it took
a lot of patient negotiation and argument, and sometimes they
got very angry at each other. My favorite example is
Thomas Jefferson. Later in life, Thomas Jefferson said about Patrick Henry,
we must devoutly pray for his death.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
I've always wondered whether that was cool or not in
the eyes of whatever concept of the almighty. So why
did you go with Jefferson and Adams in particular, since
there are many fine founding papas that you could have
focused on.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Well, I've always been a big Jefferson fanatic ever since
I was a kid. But you can't really write about
the Declaration and just about Jefferson. He was very young.
He was one of the youngest members of the Continental Congress.
He's thirty three years old at the time that he
wrote the declaration, and he showed up at the Continental
Congress pretty late in the day. John Adams had been
there the entire time, and he was really the champion
(04:21):
of independence from an early day. And their friendship, you know,
everybody knows that they ended up having a lot of
very serious disagreements, but that wasn't until later on in
seventeen seventy six. They were both very radical and they
were really good friends at the time, and so it
became It started out as a book about Jefferson, and
then as I wrote it, it turned into a buddy picture,
(04:42):
you know, And from that point I had to tell
the story about what happened to the century before that,
because people don't know much about the English Civil Wars
of the seventeenth century, one hundred years before the Revolution,
that the Americans were already demanding a certain degree of
autumn me at that time, and it was those wars
(05:02):
that set the background for the American Revolution. This isn't
something that just you know, already woke up in seventeen
seventy five and were like, hey, we're tired of being British,
you know. This was something that had been simmering for
one hundred and fifty years before the declaration.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
I was going to say steeping in honor of the
Tea Party, but yes, well that's and that's one thing
that I don't want to get off on the tangent
about Jeffersonian democracies in Middle Eastern countries. But we were
steeped in the principles that gave birth to this country.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
For a hell of a long time. I mean, it
was truly in our DNA.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yes, And that was a point that John Adams particularly
was very emphatic about. You know, when the French Revolution
broke out, you know, more than a decade after in
the American Independence Adams was very cynical about the possibilities
of the French Revolution because he said, you need this
long cultural development of the ideas of freedom before you
can have political freedom. And he thought the French were
(05:57):
acting too quickly because they didn't have that trade. And
there's a funny thing. He Adams is one of these
guys who like to write in the margins of his
books like I do, and so he has had a
copy of a book about the French Revolution, and he
wrote all these angry comments in the margins, and there's
one part where he says, how could anybody expect for
(06:18):
millions of Frenchmen who had known nothing but absolute tyranny
and absolute monarchy for centuries to go overnight into a
modern democracy is totally insane, And I mean it's amazing
how that lesson is something we could still learn a
lot about today.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, it's half a cliche, but man, I spend a
lot of time thinking about the fact that everything is
downstream of culture. Everything and people, whether they're attractive half
wits serving in Congress who declare there's no such thing
as Western culture, or just people who failed to even
notice that it exists. It makes me insane. But that's
part of the reason I get up and do this job.
(06:56):
So when you, I'm sure you occasionally run into somebody
who clearly has either no understanding of the Declaration of
Independence or tends to think it's like not one of
the important founding documents. It's the constitutions are a founding documents.
What do you lead with? What's the most what's your
lead pitch that who you need to wake up and
understand this?
Speaker 1 (07:16):
You are absolutely right.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
I have encountered this for decades, since I was a teenager.
This issue has bothered me, especially there's a lot of
conservatives who like to downplay the importance of the declarations.
Oh no, the war was really about the traditional rights
of Englishmen and all that stuff about equality and liberty
that was just put in there to interest the French. Really,
the Americans didn't really care about those abstract principles, and
(07:40):
that's total nonsense. The Declaration of Independence.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Is the.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Cement of our union. In fact, even Jefferson said when
he was an old man, he said that the Declaration
was the fundamental act of the union of these states.
And Jefferson was a states rights guy and he still
said that. So that the Declaration is part of our
constitution and that Actually, that's another reason I wrote the
book is I was really bothered. When Justice Barrett was
(08:08):
going through her confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court, one
of the senators asked her, is the Declaration part of
our law? And she said no, And that's completely wrong.
Of course, it's part of our law. It was passed
by what was the legislature of the country at the time.
It had legal consequences by separating us from Great Britain.
It still has legal consequences it's in the statute books.
(08:30):
If you pull down volume one, page one of the
Statutes at Large of the United States or the United
States Code. There it is what else is necessary to
make it a law. It is the basic law. It's
the frame in which the Constitution exists.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
See.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
I didn't even know that last part about it actually
being in the Code. It's bizarre and troubling to me
that she would say that, I don't think I fully
appreciated it the over the time.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
She's not the only one to either. Justice Schoolia said
the same thing. In fact, when he was on the
Supreme Court, Scolia would frequently refuse to join opinions that
cited the Declaration of Independence because he says it wasn't law.
Of course, it's law. And the reason that it's important
that its law is because you know, it's like the
ninth and tenth Amendments. If those are law, then the
Declaration is law. And the role of the ninth and
(09:17):
tenth Amendments of the Constitution play is they teach us
how to read the Constitution, and that's what the Declaration does.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Also, we're talking to Tim Sanderfer of the Goldwater Institute.
His new book is Proclaiming Liberty, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson
and the Declaration of Independence. I meant to ask you
when we were talking about this, Jefferson Young showed up
late to the party.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
How do you get the gig.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Of being the head of the writing the Declaration committee.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Well, he had written two documents that really impressed people
at the time. He wrote a response to Lord North's
Conciliatory Proposal. So what that was was Lord North was
the Prime Minister and he had sent what he claimed
was an offer of compromise to the American colonies, which
you actually read it, it turns out it was an illusion.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
There was no.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Actual offer to compromise at all. And so Jefferson in
Virginia he was given the opportunity to write a response
to that, and did such a good job of it
that he later went to Philadelphia and they asked him
to write a second response to Lord North. And then
the second thing was he had written a pamphlet called
the Summary View of the Rights of British America, and
that also was so impressive to people, so well written.
(10:22):
Jefferson was a really gifted writer, and they liked it
so much that in fact Jefferson used whole phrases from
that pamphlet in the Declaration of Independence itself. So he
was a young, gifted scholar. And that was the other
thing was he was really knowledgeable about the history of law.
He was really good at looking up old law and
(10:42):
explaining what the old laws meant, because he was a
very scholarly guy. I mean, there are these legends about
him as a college student staying up late in the
night reading to the point where his friends got annoyed,
and at one point they wanted to go out and
have fun, and they came and they overturned the desk
he was trying he was working on in order to
get to go out and have a good time with them.
And you know, it's funny to read stories like that
(11:03):
and be like, Jefferson was a guy like everybody else.
He you know, he he flirted with the girls when
he was in college and he went out with his
friends and had a good time. But he also wrote
the Declaration of Independence. That's just incredible.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah, yeah, Tim sanderfer, Tim, can you hang around for
a little bit at short break and then continue the conversation.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Would absolutely love to do that.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
I want to talk about Adams and how he was
such a wonderful balance to Jefferson. What a pleasure as
we near the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of our
founding to be talking about Tim Sander for his brand
new book Proclaiming Liberty, John Adams, Tom Jefferson in the
Declaration of Independence with the author Tim, thanks for hanging around.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
So, I think a lot of people who are at
least history nuts, are familiar with John Adams is a
balancing guy against Thomas Pain's and Thomas jeffersons I believe
more in federal power as opposed to you know, pure
states rights blah blah blah. But what was Adam's effect
on the drafting the declar.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Well, So Adams tells this story when he's an old man,
he told this story about how he had chosen Jefferson
to write the declaration because he was so busy, and
because he says he says, I was very much disliked
at the time, and I was afraid that everybody would
pick on it if I tried to write it. So
I gave it to Jefferson to write and said, and
that probably is not true because at the time actually
(12:22):
Adams was not disliked. John Adams was very much admired
and respected at the time. It was only later that
he became unpopular, and so that's why he had that
misre misremembered what had happened. But he was the older
and much and more experienced guy, and he was really
a trial lawyer. I think, you know, for since I'm
(12:43):
a lawyer, this is how I think of it. John
Adams was a trial lawyer, and Jefferson was an appellate lawyer,
meaning that John Adams loved to get in there and
argue with people, and he gave the speeches and he
persuaded people. And Jefferson liked to get behind the books
and start looking into the history and writing stuff.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
But he didn't like to talk, and he.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Hated public speaking. Jeffson, all his.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Life hated public speaking.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
So he wrote and then let John Adams go and
defend the thing. And as for the contents, most of
it was stuff that Jefferson already knew or that had
already been circulating for many years. But there were some
things that Adams added to the declaration, and particularly there's
a complaint in there that says that the king has
moved our legislatures around and made it difficult for our
(13:25):
legislatures to meet. And that happens to Adams specifically. The
governor of Massachusetts had gotten annoyed at the Patriots, and
so he ordered the Massachusetts legislature to meet in Cambridge
instead of in Boston, which was a real hassle. But
most of all, it was upset the patriots because it
was like, well, the king can just ignore the legislature
and boss us around, tell us what to do. Violate
(13:47):
separation of powers, and that's not right. And so Adams
got Jefferson to include that in the Declaration of Independence.
And then once the thing was finished, Adams stood up
and defended it against its critics after line after line,
and it took two days for them to finally decide
on the final wording of the declaration, after Jefferson had
written the first round.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
Were there any real sticking points, serious points of contention
between say, Adams and Jefferson or other folks, I mean,
real bare knuckle brawls over what the declaration should say.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
Not between Adams and Jefferson, but definitely between them and
the other delegates. And the most obvious example is the
one about slavery. So Jefferson had included this long, impassioned
attack on slavery at the end of the declaration. It
was the longest passage in the Declaration, and it was
the most emphatic. Jefferson was using all caps and underlining
(14:40):
words and things because it was so angry about slavery.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
I want to stop you. I want to stop you
right there.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Did you hear that, products of America's beleaguered, perverted public schools.
Jefferson hated the institution of slavery anyway, back to you, tim.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
All his life he hated the institution of slavery. And
the idea that Jefferson somehow pro slavery or something like
that is just a ludicrous lie that has been foisted
on a lot of America's school kids. I'm afraid Jefferson
had written this long denunciation of the king so that
when you read his version of the Declaration, it sort
of like rose to this rhetorical climax where it starts
(15:18):
out with, well, he did this, and he did that,
and then he did these worse things, and then these
even worse things, and then these even worse things, and
then worst of all is he prohibited the colonies from
limiting the importation of slaves and slavery is this horrible thing,
And that's how it ended. And Adams loved it, and
years later he said, I loved every word, especially the
attack on slavery. But the other delegates at the Congress
(15:41):
would not allow that in there. And Jefferson later said
that it was South Carolina and Georgia in particular that
were such heavy employers of slaves, but also the Northern states,
which were heavy transporters of slaves, also had qualms with it,
and so they ended up taking that entire paragraph out.
And Jefferson was so upset about that that he went
back to his apartment and wrote out his version of
(16:03):
the declaration and sent it to a bunch of friends
and said, don't you think my version is better? And
then fifty years later in his memoirs, he did the
same thing, copied out his version of the declaration in
order to make sure that everybody knew that he had
tried to do this thing. Jefferson was very much against slavery.
The problem was later in life he just gave up
on the issue when he really shouldn't have. And I
(16:26):
think he does deserve blame for that, But in seventeen
seventy six he was an emphatic enemy of slavery.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
You know, Tim, someday we'll have to impose on your
time a little more and bring you back and talk
about the founding fathers and slavery and the truth about that.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Now.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
I have, to my credit, I have not read the
whole thing, but I have a copy of the book
Arguing About Slavery, which is wonderful. But are there any
other books on the topic you'd recommend. We've barely got
a minute.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
By the way.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Oh yeah, I do love Arguing about Slavery by William
Lee Miller. Absolutely marvelous book. There are some really good
books by oh gosh, what's his name. I'm forgetting the name.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
You know. Drop me a note.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
We'll post it at the website at Armstrong Geddy dot com.
Tim Sanderfer the Goldwater Institute. The new book is Proclaiming
Liberty John Adams Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence. I
truly can't wait to read it. Tim, always enjoy it
so much. Great to talk to you.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Thanks, Joe.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
All right, Thanks, We will talk again soon next hour.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
If you are privileged, if you are if you have
fourth hour privilege. We've got a great conversation coming up
with Gordon Chang about China, not only in the way
of the conflict in the Gulf, but just what they
are up to, because everybody's kind of been looking a way,
including the shocking fact that the Trump administration seems to
have gone a little soft on China and why that
(17:45):
might be.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
So that's our for.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
If you don't get our for, you got to go somewhere,
that's fine. Just grab it via podcast Later, subscribe to
Armstrong and Getty on demand. It downloads automatically and you
get the One More Thing podcast as well. Thanks for
being here, more to come, Armstrong and Getty
Hosts And Creators
Joe Getty
Jack Armstrong
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