Ep. 100 – Who Inspired the Founders?

When our founders created America, they embraced a lot of new ideas – like liberty, equality, and justice. But who inspired our founders to see the world that way? In this episode, we talk about something called The Enlightenment and the philosophers who changed history.

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
This is the FCB podcast Network.They breed us at the Tyranny the state
of Things, and they bought sowe work in America and of the Welcome

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back to the Growing Patriot podcast AmericanHistory for Kids. I'm your host,
Amelia Hamilton. We recently wrapped upour whole timeline of the founding period,
from the very first people who cameto Jamestown all the way through the American
Revolution, the inauguration of George Washington, our founding documents, and seeing us

(00:51):
on our way as our own Americancountry. But in all of that,
we didn't spend a lot of timetalking about the founders themselves. So we're
going to go back and spend alittle bit of time with each of them
a few weeks about who they reallywere and talk about their lives. But
before we get into our very firstfounding father, which is going to be

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Benjamin Franklin, I wanted to takeone episode to talk about something called the
Enlightenment because so many of our founderswere influenced by it. The Enlightenment thinkers
were people like Rousseau, Adam Smith, Isaac Newton, and a man named
John Locke. So today to tellus all about the Enlightenment. We're going

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to hear from one of my friendsat the John Locke Foundation. My name
is Donald Bryson. I'm the CEOof the John Locke Foundation here in North
Carolina. And we're called the JohnLocke Foundation because a man named John Locke
wrote the foundational constitution for the provinceof Carolina, which has now turned into

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North Carolina and South Carolina, andwhat he brought to our state, we
were called John Locke Foundation. That'sperfect, And you were the first person
I thought of for today's episode,because as we get into the Founding Fathers,
I bet the kids are going tohear about John Locke an awful lot
and some other people like maybe someonenamed Russo or Adam Smith, Montesquieu,

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and these are all people that arepart of the Enlightenment. So I wanted
to just get a little bit more, you know, some foundation on what
what was the Enlightenment? What doesthat mean? Well, that's a great
question. So you know, someof these kids may have heard of the
Renaissance, which was kind of areturn to classical art where we saw people

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try to actually recreate the human formin art, and that happened in the
you know, fifteen hundreds and sixtyor fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred and sixteen
hundreds. And then along that time, not related to art, but related
to sort of philosophy and thought,came the Enlightenment, and this was a

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rethinking of what human rights were,that human rights existed, how do humans
or how do people interrelate with theirgovernment? Why do governments exist? How
do governments exist? And so youhad a lot of people come along really
over a fairly short span of time, say from sixteen hundred to seventeen thirty

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or so, you had a lotof really bright think Actually, I'll even
go as late as seventeen sixty,really bright thinkers named Thomas Hobbs wrote a
book named Leviathan. John Locke,who will talk about today is Jean Jacques
Rousseau writing in France, who wasvery influenced by John Locke, And they
all had these ideas about, hey, you know, government really exists for

(03:53):
the people. The only reason thatgovernments are allowed to govern people is because
the people let them, and youknow, people have given them consent.
And if the people have given themconsent, that means that the government owes
them some things to people have otherrights based in there, like the right
to free speech, the right tochange government. And so they really started

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flushing these ideas out over time,and so that's why, you know,
we don't have a King of Franceanymore, we don't have an absolute king
of England anymore. We do havea King of England, but he has
to operate under a constitution, hehas rules that he is to live under.
And that all came out of allof the really great work that these
Enlightenment thinkers did over that probably onehundred and sixty year span of time.

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Yeah, and that was a bigdifference from how people had thought before of
their rulers, who were really rulers. You know, they didn't get to
elect people. They didn't really thinkabout having rights. It was more,
you know, if they had anything, it's because the government owned it and
gave it to them and as theysaw it. So this was a really

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different way to think about things.It was an absolutely different way to think
about things. You know that ifyou look back at history, basically from
ancient Rome until about you know,fifteen sixteen hundred, you had the divine
right of kings, which was thatpeople believed that you know, a king
was a king of a country,or a queen was a queen of a

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country, because God had said thatyou had ordained them to be the king
or queen of that country, andthey could rule just absolutely, and they
could decide who was going to collectthe taxes, and who was going to
be in the army, and whowas going to own land, and who
was not going to own land,who could be in jail, who could
not be in jail. And sothis idea that all humans are created equally
and they all have a say inwhat their government should look like, and

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they should all have some sort ofrepresentation in what their government should look like.
Was it really turned things on itshead, and that's why we have
a series of revolutions or revolts.We had the American Revolution for that reason,
and it changed things remarkably for theworld. There's a really good book

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that might be a little old forour listenership, but it's called It is
written by a man named Joanah Goldberg, and he calls what happened in that
time period a miracle because you hadcapitalism where people have had the ability to
determine their own financial outcomes, comingtogether with the idea of democracy and self
government, and from there on humansflourished more than they ever ever had before.

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Yeah, So how did people likeJohn Locke get this crazy idea that
people have their own rights? It'sa great question. So John Locke contributed
a lot to political philosophy, whichis what we're talking about now, and
he also contributed a lot to abranch of philosophy. And this is a
big word, but it's called epistemology. Have fun with that one. But

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the idea of epistemology is how dowe know what we know? It's literally
epistemology means the theory or the studyof knowledge. And he had this idea
that when we're all born, weare born as blank slates, and then
we gather knowledge with our senses wherewe smell what we see, what we
hear, what we taste, andthen with our own reasoning, we're able

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to deduce some things. And oneof those things that he deduced was that
all humans are created equal. Healso deduced that we are made, that
we were made from a creator,and that creator gave everyone the same rights
equally. And this is going tosound very familiar, but that we all
had rights equally to life liberty,and he called it the estate or the

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idea that we could all pursue property. That comes out very clearly in the
American Declaration of Independence when Thomas Jeffersonquotes Locke almost word for word and says
that we all have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And so it's from those epistemics,that epistemology that Locke really like builds

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out his reasoning from there. Butit all has to do with you know,
when Locke isty, He's fifty oneyears old in sixteen eighty three,
so he's not a young man.And then some associates of his. He
didn't do this himself, but someassociates of his get caught in that they
were going to try to assassinate theKing of England, Charles the Second.

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Historians now agree that Locke didn't knowanything about it, wasn't involved in it
or anything, but he was guiltyby association. It's like when your friends
do something wrong and you were justkind of around and you get in trouble
too. That's what happened with JohnLocke. But instead of going to jail,
he fled to Holland. And livedin Amsterdam for about six years.
And when he lived in Amsterdam hewrote the two most famous works that he

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has. One is called Two Treatiseson Government, where he talks about the
role of government and the rights ofpeople. And then the other thing he
wrote was an essay concerning Human Understanding, where he put down his thoughts about
epistemics and how we understand the worldand how we get knowledge and so really,
if it wasn't for this big messit's called the Rye House plot because

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they met in a Rye house likeRye, like the grain. But if
it wasn't for that, we wouldn'thave all the great works of John Locke
and him living in Holland for fiveyears. All right, So he was
in Holland and our founders were inAmerica or not even born yet for some
of them. Right, that's along way, you know, for somebody.
Certainly John Locke didn't have a TikTokor his own podcast. How did

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how did our founders hear about theseideas? Well? He put these into
he put these into books, forone thing. And then not long before
the end of John Locke's life,there was a period in England called the
Glorious Revolution, which is about thethird revolution that England had gone through in
John locke lifetime. It was avery tumultuous place at the time, but

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that brought William the First to powerin England and really changed converted England to
what we'll call now a constitutional monarchy. It's the monarchy that we're familiar with
in England where they have parliament thatreally controls the king more than the king
controls Parliament. They were to finedrights for all of the people, all

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of the people are involved in government, and this idea really began to spread,
and then it spread from England andwent to France, and you had
great writers like Voltaire who kept sortof expounding on similar ideas. Jehan Jaques
Rousseau was doing the same thing.And so by the time we hit the
seventeen fifties, seventeen sixties, seventeenseventies, these ideas were well thought out

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and understood. And remember John Locke, as i mentioned earlier, wrote the
foundational Constitution for the Colony of Carolina. Of course, by this time North
Carolina and South Carolina had split,but these ideas were in the Foundational Constitution
of at least two of our colonies. We see that in Georgia as well,
came along around seventeen thirty. Ithink, so this was all sort

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of boiling under the surface, andthen just this miraculous moment in history where
you have great minds like John Adamsand Thomas Jefferson come together and they were
able to work through these ideas andsay, hey, this guy named John
Locke was right. God did giveus these rights. We do have rights.

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The kings no better of a personthan we are, are, the
prime ministers no better a person thanwe are. We're all created equally.
We're being taxed without having any sortof say so, we feel like we
have the right to say that,and not only that, we have the
right to say that, and wehave the right to change the government when
it's not suiting our purposes or protectingus, which is something also John Locke

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talk that people have the right tochange the government when it wasn't seeing after
them anymore. And so we havethis great document signed July fourth, seventeen
seventy six that really illustrates these ideasthat John Locke had put in these books,
but put them into action, andwe became independent from Great Britain.
Gosh, I have so many otherquestions. When John Locke was in Holland

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and you mentioned King William would beWilliam the first of England, and he
was in Holland too, he wasoriginally a Dutch king prince. Did they
know each other? Is that howany of those ideas got together? Or
I can't say whether they knew eachother or not. I don't think that
there's much indication that they that theyknew each other, but I'm sure that
when Locke went back that there wasprobably some They were probably familiar with each

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other. When Locke went back toEngland, Locke had a very rich benefactor
by the name of Anthony Ashley Cooper. That's a fun name, but he
was the first Earl of Shaftesbury.And I have no idea where Shaftsbury is.
I'm sorry. I know somewhere England, but I don't know where it
is. But Locke became really goodfriends with the Earl of Shaftesbury and became

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his personal physician. Locke eventually,I think through what I'm saying, eventually
became a very successful surgeon. Inaddition, but it took lots of terrible
practice. But he did have amedical degree. He had an undergraduate medical
degree, which you can't really getanymore. That's a new thing. But

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the Earl of Shaftesbury had a problemwith his liver and Locke did surgery on
his liver and they became best friendsafterwards. And so it was sort of
under his protection and having the EarlShaftsbury as a benefactor that Locke one thrived
and two got to know a lotof people in nobility and possibly royalty as

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well. So were any of thoseconnections of his or of Lord Shaftesbury's in
the Carolinas? Is that how hegot connected there? That's exactly right.
So the colony of Carolina was formed, It wasn't given a governor outright to
begin with. It was sort ofgoverned by you know, you can kind
of think of it as a boardof directors like we have for companies.

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Now that they were called the lordproprietors. They were all of nobility.
Well, one of those lord proprietorswas the Earl of Shaftesbury, and he
said, hey, we need somewalls to govern this colony. What do
we do? Hey, John,you wrote this down for US, and
so it's a really neat thing.You go down to the state Archives here

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in Raleigh, North Carolina, andthey have the five pages of the original
document of the original Constitution of theColony of Carolina. If you go down
to Charleston, South Carolina, Charleston'sat the head or at the mouth of
two rivers, and one is theAshley River and the other one is the
Cooper River, after Anthony Ashley Cooper. Interesting. So, I think so

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much of this shows that a goodidea spreads, you know, people are
going to hear. I mean,I suppose bad ideas do too, but
we're talking about good ideas. Youknow, even in a time that didn't
have very fast communication, you know, people were hearing about these ideas.
And I wonder if that's one ofthe reasons that our founders thought it was

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so important to specifically state that wehave freedom of the press. When it
got to the Bill of Rights,it definitely is and a lot of that
came out. I remember, youknow, Locke had to flee to Holland
after the Rye House plot, likewe were talking about, and a lot
I had to do with he wasthe Duke of York at the time of

(15:33):
the Rye House plot, but heended up becoming James the Second of England
and he began arresting a lot ofpeople based off of he called it seditious
libel, which sedition is a it'sa very broad term. That's it becomes
dangerous when people define it broadly.But it's the idea that, hey,

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you're sort of dissenting against the government, you're saying bad things about the government,
and therefore you should go to jail. Well, that doesn't really work
when you believe that everybody is createdequally, even people who are not in
government, and you believe that ifthe government is not acting in the interest
of the people, that the peoplehave a right to change their government.
That sort of flies in the faceof that. And so it's very easy

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to extrapolate the idea of free speechand the very important nature of free speech
when you think about John Locke's philosophy, and so with the Glorious Revolution and
King William the First coming in,you see a lot more political conversation.
You still see the government complain aboutsedition, but you see much fewer arrests,
and honestly, a lot of thereason that the work of the Enlightenment

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philosopher like Hobbes and Locke and Rousseauis because of coffee houses. Very simply
people would go to coffee houses,and he was sort of a novelty item
that was still coming out of theWest Indies, and of course it still
comes out of a lot of aslcombs out of the West Indies now,
But that was a place for themto have conversation. And newspapers were generally

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broad. They called them broadsides.There were one big sheet of paper and
people would discuss the news of theday and discuss the political news and political
implications. They've talked about philosophy,and they would have conversations in these coffee
houses and so very quickly political ideaswere spread, not like the Internet,
but much quicker than it had youknow, in centuries before that. Yeah,

(17:26):
And like you talked about with theconversations, you know a lot of
people couldn't read then, so theywould they could get their news, you
know, from from joining in thoseconversations and inside and outside the coffee house.
And I think that was another ofour key rights in the in that
first Amendment, which is assembly.That's right that that that's another reason why
it's important, because you know,if too many people were at this coffee

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house that I know the people whogo to this coffee house or Republican or
the people of this coffee house orDemocrat, and I don't want them meeting
together and plotting against the governor orthe present or whatever. Then I'm just
going to arrest them all because obviouslythey're seditious and that that's just that's very
dangerous thinking in terms of what powerof the government should or should not have.

(18:11):
And John Locke would have disagreed withthat notion. And I think the
founder such as Thomas Jefferson and GeorgeWashington would have agreed with that is or
would have disagreed with that as well. Yeah, what do you think John
Locke would would think about him stillbeing remembered today? We're still talking about
him on a podcast, there's anorganization named after him. Do you think
he expected to leave such a legacy. I think he knew he was influential,

(18:37):
right, I think he knew thathe was kind of smarter than the
average pair. I think he wouldbe surprised that he's still sort of immortalized
in the way that he is.I don't think he'd be unhappy about it,
because I think he's firmly believed whathe wrote down and if you read
his books on his book on government, he's a little starky, like he's
kind of a sassy pants about it. I think I think he would be

(19:00):
very pleased, if not, besidesof just being startled that you know,
he's left a legacy not just inthe United States, but you know,
really around the world. This ideathat we have of the modern concept that
we have of democracy and democratic republicsthat we have here in the United States.
I mean, you're not going tohave those if you don't have John

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Locke. Yeah, what can allof us be doing to help that that
legacy endure? Well, that's areally fun question. One. It's conversations
like these that I think are reallyimportant and continuing to talk about that.
And you know, these these fellowshaven't been around for a few hundred years,
but the ideas are very important.You know, ideas ideas themselves are

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important to have a life of theirown, and this one, you know,
this idea of the social contract,uh in free speech and you know,
consent of the governm That they're importantideas, and I think that we
should continue to discuss and the sameway that people have those conversations about what
John Locke wrote down, we shouldcontinue to have those discussions because you know
the great thing about the American experimentis that we're not a finished product.

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We're always trying to be better atwhat we're doing. We're always trying to
make a better government to serve thepeople better. And so you know,
that's what we do with the JohnLocke Foundation as we talk about state government
and federal government stuff here. ButI think that the more that people know
about these ideas and apply them andhow they vote and now they think and
when they run business, and Ithink, the better our society will be.

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And so starting these conversations when you'reat a younger age, I know
that I did. I know.I had these conversations when I was you
know, ten twelve. It's beenvery beneficial for me. Yep, me
too. My dad was very intohistory and we went to Colonial Williamsburg a
million times and things like that,and I definitely trace my history NERD credentials

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to childhood. Yeah, no,that's awesome. And Williamsburg is a great
place people should visit. If peopleare ever in North Carolina, you can
go to Winston Salem, North Carolina, and they have Old Salem, which
is very similar to Colonial Williamsburg,shows how people were living in the seventeen
and early eighteen hundreds there. Butwe've got a rich colonial history. And

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people who say, oh, thatwas in the past and it doesn't matter
anymore, Well, that's just areally lazy way of viewing our country.
Some good things happen in our historyand some bad things happen in our history,
and I think we're given a responsibilityto kind of parse that out,
read about it, find out what'sgood, what's bad. The good stuff,
keep doing it, the bad stuffthrow it away. Absolutely well,
Donald, we really appreciate you joiningus today to tell us about one of

(21:45):
the good ones. Well, thankyou so much. I'm always happy to
be on. And John Locke's aninteresting guy, but I don't know if
i'd let him do surgery on me. Something to think about. I loved
hearing about John Locke, and hisstory tells us about the Enlightenment itself too.

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The word enlightenment means having knowledge orunderstanding. It's kind of like when
you turn the light on and nowyou can see or in a cartoon,
when the light bulb comes on oversomeone's head when they have an idea,
it's something new, something to see, something to understand. And that's what
the Enlightenment did. It helped peopleunderstand about their own rights, human rights

(22:29):
and individual rights, and that reallychanged their ideas about how the government should
treat them. And we heard abouthow those ideas came through in America's founding
and you're going to hear a lotmore about those ideas as we talk about
America's founding fathers in the episodes ahead. So I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I can't wait to share the storiesof the founding Fathers with you.

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Thank you so much for listening,and remember you can find out more about
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and Facebook at Growing Patriots Can't waitto see you next time. They
breed us alve for Jeeranny the startof the thing, and they thought so

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well were Americaanda. This has beena presentation of the FCB podcast network where
Real Talk lives. Visit us onlineat Fcbpodcasts dot com.