My New Book: The Hidden History of American Democracy

Where did the Founders' and Framers' ideas of democracy come from and what can we learn from them to rescue our nation today?

Most Americans just learned, from reporting this week in The New York Times, that Trump, billionaire-funded rightwing think tanks, and some of the leaders of the GOP have a plan to flip America from a democratic republic into an authoritarian strongman-type of government should he or another like-minded MAGA Republican win the White House in 2024.

This would be the death-knell of democracy, the crisis I warn about in my new book, and a historic disaster of almost unimaginable proportions given how much influence our nation has on other democracies around the world.

This week that new book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, hits the bookstores. You can find it on Amazon here, and Powell’s Books here.

What follows is the table of contents and two excerpted chapters.

This was one of the most fascinating of the Hidden History series for me to research and write. It confirmed my beliefs that progressive and small-d democratic ideals are intrinsic to our humanity, and that today’s MAGA GOP’s idea of hierarchy and top-down governance destroys nations and their people — and the Founders and Framers of the Constitution knew it.

I hope you find it fascinating and can pick up a copy of the book!

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Contents
Introduction
Part I: The Founders Meet Ancient Democracy

Some Founders Thought Their “Enlightenment” Came from Rousseau
Ancient Ways
Trial and Error
They Were Citing Native Americans?
Benjamin Franklin’s Enlightenment
Native Americans Changed the World!
The Secular Origin of America
A Nation Is Birthed

Part II: America Gets a Constitution—but Don’t Ask the Average American What’s in It

The Electoral College
The Supreme Court
The Founders Wanted Us to Have Lots of Guns to Shoot at “Tyrannical Politicians”?
Three “Equal” Branches of Government
The Senate Was Intended as a Democratic Institution
Did Rich White Guys Create the United States Just to Guarantee Their Own Privilege, Power, and Slaves?
How Rich Is Rich?
The “Rich White Guys” Hypothesis Crumbles
So What Did Motivate the Framers of the Constitution?

Part III: The Battle for Democracy

How Political and Economic Systems Interact
Democracy’s Modern Crisis
The Modern War on Democracy and Regulated Capitalism

Part IV: A 21st-Century Democracy Agenda

Make Voting a Right Instead of a Privilege
“Regulate” the Supreme Court
Expand the Senate
Offer Free High-Quality Public Education to All—through College
Provide Health Care for All
Support Organized Labor or Organize Your Workplace
Use Tariffs and Trade Policy to Balance Labor’s Playing Field
Bring Back the Middle Class by Restoring the Tax Laws That Created It
Keep Social Security Out of Corporate Hands
Guarantee Americans a Clean Environment and Healthy Public Lands
Strengthen the Sherman Antitrust Act and Break Up Monopolies
Bust Up the Media Conglomerates and Restore a Robust Free Press
Make the Revolving Door between Industry and Regulatory Agencies Illegal
Use Tax Incentives and Grants to Jump-Start Alternative Energy
Keep Human Rights for Humans, Not for “Aggregated Capital”
Keep Church and State Separate
Make the US More Democratic in Its Elections: Set Limits on Campaign Spending, Consider Public Funding
Institute Instant-Runoff Voting to Make Minority Parties Viable
Abolish the Electoral College
Get Involved!

Conclusion

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Introduction

The grand experiment of American democracy didn’t come out of thin air, and it was only marginally based on the experience of the Greek democracies and the Roman republic, contrary to what most people believe.

The one great universal impulse that animates humans working toward self-governance the world over is freedom: an escape from bonds laid on one people by another, by the powerful over the powerless, by the rich over the poor.

As Europeans began driving deep into the American landscape throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries, stories began to trickle back to Europe about people who had figured out how to live in civilized society without the chains of oppression—both political and religious—that were the hallmarks of that era.

Some came from French missionaries to the Indians, others from trappers and traders, and still others from people like Thomas Jefferson’s father, Peter, who made maps and traveled in what became the Commonwealth of Virginia for his work.

Stories spread of these extraordinary people—these Indians—who governed themselves without prisons, chains, or even police. Native Americans who’d become fluent in English or French traveled to Europe and challenged inequality, theocracy, and royalty to its face.

The intelligentsia of France, in particular, was consumed with the idea that egalitarian self-governance might not just be possible but might even be the “natural” or “original state” of humankind. These viral ideas swept Europe every bit as completely as had Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, which he nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517.

As the philosophers of the European Enlightenment were struck by these novel ideas contradicting their biblical and historical notions of the evil nature of humankind, the notions of equality and fraternity flowed back across the Atlantic to inflame the minds of 18th-century American colonists.

While there’s not a one-to-one correlation between the governing principles of, for example, the Iroquois Confederacy and the US Constitution, the core principles animating both were nearly identical: Equality of citizenship. Government is legitimate only with the consent of the governed. Men who claim power through hereditary lineage or a direct line to the gods must be limited in the power they can acquire or possess. Greed and unbridled power are evils. Society’s highest obligation is to care for all its people, not merely to serve those with the highest status or wealth.

Our Founding Generation integrated these concepts into a coherent governing philosophy and then, after independence, crafted them into a clumsy attempt at constitutional self-governance.

It was a bold and dangerous experiment, defying, as it did, a thousand years of European history and the greatest powers of the world at the time.

Democracy within tribal communities has a long history that’s not limited to modern nations or the New World. Jefferson, for example, was obsessed with the democracy practiced by his tribal ancestors living in the British Isles before they were conquered by the Romans 1,700 years earlier.

Virtually every ethnography of tribal people living the way humans did for hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture and the rise of modern warlord kingdoms describes them as egalitarian, be they the ancient San of southern Africa, the seafaring people who populated the South Pacific, or the tribes of Central America before they were conquered by the Aztec and Mayan empires.

Democracy, it turns out, is the default state of virtually every animal species on Earth, and humanity is no exception.[1] Only with the power of great wealth, control of media, or the force of arms and technology is it overcome by dictators, popes, and kings.

Part I

The Founders Meet Ancient Democracy

There was a full moon that night in a cloudless sky.

Thomas Jefferson watched respectfully as the elders and the “head women,” as he’d come to call them, gathered to sit on blankets in a place of great honor near where the famous Cherokee warrior Ontasseté was about to speak. Although Jefferson was only nineteen, at six-foot-two he was conspicuously tall among the Indians and was treated as an adult, the same as his companion, the 28-year-old Thomas Sumter.

Although his shyness prevented him from speaking of it publicly, Jefferson knew he’d earned the right to be considered an adult the year of his fourteenth birthday, when his life was shattered by his father’s death and he inherited full and legal responsibility for his mother, two brothers, six sisters, and 60 enslaved people, along with the family’s farm.

He watched as the sparks from the fire flew toward the moonlit sky, listening to the strange language of the Cherokee and the Creek around him. He understood a few of their words, and later in life he would study their languages with the same sharp mind that enabled him to learn to read and write Greek, Latin, and French before he was a teenager.

Sumter, his companion, was a strong and aggressive man; the contrast between the two—the bold fighter and the lanky red-haired, freckle-faced scholar—was distinct. Jefferson was in his last year of studies at the College of William and Mary, about to study law in a few months, while Sumter, who had left home as a teenager to fight in the French and Indian Wars, would leave the next day to escort Ontasseté to meet the king of England.

Neither knew it that night, but Sumter would one day be a general in the war for independence, and Jefferson would write the document that formally declared it. Sumter’s older sister, Patience, was a well-known midwife in Jefferson’s community and may well have helped Jefferson’s mother give birth to some of his younger siblings, as Jefferson recommended her services to others.

The sounds of the Cherokee language and the sight of the people assembling brought back for Jefferson childhood memories of the many times Ontasseté had visited while traveling from his Cherokee village to Williamsburg, Virginia. Ontasseté liked to spend the night at the Shadwell, Virginia, farm of Peter Jefferson, and often Peter had invited his young son Thomas to join him and Ontasseté in conversations that stretched long into the evening.

Peter Jefferson knew many of the Native people of the region; he was the sort of man who made friends instantly, and he had a fascination with Native peoples and culture. He’d come to know hundreds of their leaders as he mapped the Virginia colony 11 years earlier in 1751. Thomas was nine the year Peter mapped Virginia; Peter died five years later.  

“So much in answer to your inquiries concerning Indians,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in June 1812, “a people with whom, in the early part of my life, I was very familiar, and acquired impressions of attachment and commiseration for them which have never been obliterated. Before the Revolution, they were in the habit of coming often and in great numbers to the seat of government, where I was very much with them. I knew much the great Ontasseté, the warrior and orator of the Cherokees; he was always the guest of my father, on his journeys to and from Williamsburg.”[ii]

On June 19, 1754, when Jefferson was only nine years old, Benjamin Franklin had introduced the Albany Plan of Union at a meeting attended by both his revolutionary compatriots and a delegation from the Iroquois Confederacy. (Franklin had earlier attended an Iroquois Condolence Ceremony in 1753 and used Iroquois symbols in both his writings and his design for early American currency.)

In 1770, Franklin wrote, “Happiness is more generally and equally diffus’d among Savages than in civilized societies. No European who has tasted savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”[iii] By that time, the phenomenon of “white Indians” was well known in America and widely reported across Europe: people who’d been taken captive by Native Americans in battle or otherwise ended up among them and who then refused—sometimes even running away repeatedly when “rescued”—to return to white society.

The heavy influence of Native American forms of government, particularly that of the Iroquois, was a hot topic of conversation during Jefferson’s childhood, and his father’s close association with many Indians—particularly Ontasseté—brought to the now-teenage Jefferson an appreciation and understanding of the event he had been invited to witness.

The assembled Cherokee sat, as did Jefferson and Sumter, and Ontasseté began his farewell address. Although the Cherokee had signed their first treaty with England more than 40 years earlier, colonists subject to the king of England had continued to encroach on Cherokee land and slaughter villagers. Ontasseté had discussed this and similar matters many times with the king’s men in Williamsburg and now was making an official visit to King George II himself—one head of state to another.

Even though he would be the second representative of the Cherokee to cross the Atlantic in the giant ships, most operated by the East India Company, the crossings were always risky, and he didn’t know if he’d ever see his family and friends again. He began his speech, as was the custom of his people, with thanks and prayers.

“I was in his camp when he made his great farewell oration to his people the evening before his departure for England,” Jefferson wrote in that letter to Adams many years later. “The moon was in full splendor, and to her he seemed to address himself in his prayers for his own safety on the voyage, and that of his people during his absence; his sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, and the solemn silence of his people at their several fires, filled me with awe and veneration, although I did not understand a word he uttered.”[iv]

Although he didn’t then speak Cherokee, the teenage Thomas Jefferson understood the essence of Ontasseté’s farewell address. The Cherokee were a people of culture and civilization, but they had suffered terribly, both from recurrent smallpox epidemics and from a series of betrayals by the British colonists with whom they’d aligned themselves during the French and Indian War.

The treaties of 1721, 1754, and 1759 between the Cherokee and England had collapsed, and later in 1759 Virginia colonists killed and mutilated 20 young Cherokee men, collecting a bounty on their scalps. This, and another land grab by the British in 1760, led to a bloody two-year war between England and the Cherokee. Ontasseté, unaware that in just 11 short years the British would be in an all-out shooting war with rebellious colonists, was hoping to make a final and lasting treaty of peace with King George II.

“That nation, consisting now of about 2,000 warriors, and the Creeks of about 3,000 are far advanced in civilization,” Jefferson continued in his letter to Adams.[v] By Jefferson’s presidency in the early 1800s, the Cherokee had created a written language of 86 letters; published their own newspaper, called The Phoenix; and adopted a constitution similar to that of the Iroquois. “They have good cabins, enclosed fields, large herds of cattle and hogs, spin and weave their own clothes of cotton,” Jefferson wrote, “have smiths and other of the most necessary tradesmen, write and read, are on the increase in numbers, and a branch of Cherokees is now instituting a regular representative government.”

Adams replied to Jefferson’s letter on June 28, 1813, writing,

“I know not what, unless it were the prophet of Tippecanoe, had turned my curiosity to inquiries after the metaphysical science of the Indians, their ecclesiastical establishments, and theological theories; but your letter, written with all the accuracy, perspicuity, and elegance of your youth and middle age, as it has given me great satisfaction, deserves my best thanks. . . .

“I am weary of contemplating nations from the lowest and most beastly degradations of human life, to the highest refinement of civilization. I am weary of Philosophers, Theologians, Politicians, and Historians. They are an immense mass of absurdities, vices, and lies. Montesquieu had sense enough to say in jest, that all our knowledge might be comprehended in twelve pages in duodecimo, and I believe him in earnest. I could express my faith in shorter terms. He who loves the workman and his work, and does what he can to preserve and improve it, shall be accepted of him.

“I have also felt an interest in the Indians, and a commiseration for them from my childhood. Aaron Pomham, the priest, and Moses Pomham, the king of the Punkapang and Neponset tribes, were frequent visitors at my father’s house, at least seventy years ago. I have a distinct remembrance of their forms and figures. They were very aged, and the tallest and stoutest Indians I have ever seen. The titles of king and priest, and the names of Moses and Aaron, were given them, no doubt, by our Massachusetts divines and statesmen. There was a numerous family in this town, whose wigwam was within a mile of this house.

“This family were frequently at my father’s house, and I, in my boyish rambles, used to call at their wigwam, where I never failed to be treated with whortleberries, blackberries, strawberries or apples, plums, peaches, etc., for they had planted a variety of fruit trees about them. But the girls went out to service, and the boys to sea, till not a soul is left. We scarcely see an Indian in a year.”[vi]

Back in May 1776, as the war with Britain was already underway and a debate was ongoing in Philadelphia about a formal declaration of independence and the formation of a new nation, a delegation of 21 Iroquois arrived at the Continental Congress.

Two years earlier, at the Albany Conference, they had openly raised questions with their friend Ben Franklin about a government with a chief executive and had been welcomed to the 1775 Continental Congress by John Hancock himself, who addressed a Delaware chief by saying of the meeting that “this council fire, [is] kindled for all the United Colonies.”[vii]

When the Iroquois arrived in Philadelphia, the president of the Continental Congress invited them to watch the debates. They were treated as visiting dignitaries and wise elders. The second floor of Independence Hall (then the Pennsylvania State House) was given them to sleep in for over a month while they watched the near-daily discussions, and Richard Henry Lee wrote that on May 17, 1776,[viii] the newly formed American Army paraded more than 2,000 troops down the streets of Philadelphia for their review.

The Pennsylvania Gazette reported on the parade, saying that “the Members of Congress . . . and . . . the Indians . . . on business with the Congress” reviewed the troops along with General George Washington, General Mifflin, and General Gates.[ix]

Three weeks later, after speeches were made expressing “friendship” that would “continue as long as the sun shall shine,” an Onondaga chief gave Hancock the Iroquois name of Karanduawn, meaning “Great Tree,” in a ceremony carefully recorded by attendee Charles Thompson. (The friendship struck up between the Onondaga and George Washington, apparently at this time, was so strong that an Onondaga woman accompanied Washington during most of the Revolutionary War as his cook, and the Onondaga saved Washington and his men from starvation during the bitter winter at Valley Forge by bringing them corn and other food.[x])

John Adams was there and apparently noticed the events and discussions. In his book A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America,[xi] written while the new Constitution for the United States of America was being hammered out, he noted how the ancient British and Germanic tribes (described by Tacitus and Paul de Rapin de Thoyras), and many of the Native American tribes he had personally known, represented branches of the human race who practiced the three-branches-of-government form of democracy that he and Jefferson advocated for the new United States.

Adams pointed out that the Roman historian Tacitus thought a three-branch democracy was “laudable” but that Tacitus “doubted” its “practicability” and “duration,” and that the great experiment America was about to undertake had never before been done successfully by civilized people.

But it had succeeded, and the Iroquois were living proof.

Adams wrote, “It would have been much to the purpose to have inserted a more accurate investigation of the form of government of the ancient Germans and modern Indians; in both, the existence of the three divisions of power is marked with a precision that excludes all controversy. The democratical branch, especially, is so determined, that the real sovereignty resided in the body of the people.”

He added, “To collect together the legislation of the Indians, would take up much room, but would be well worth the pains. The sovereignty is in the nation, it is true, but the three powers are strong in every tribe.”

Some Founders Thought Their “Enlightenment” Came from Rousseau

Most modern histories of American democracy trace our form of government to debates, discussions, and writings by men considered the “Fathers of the Enlightenment,” particularly Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Hobbes, in his works The Elements of Law (1640), De Cive (1642), Leviathan (1651), and Behemoth (1682), argued that it was possible for people to live in harmony—both domestically and among nations—only when human nature was restrained by the iron fist of church or state.

Without such a “leviathan”—a massive and powerful church or government—Hobbes believed, humanity would revert to its default state as he imagined we experienced before Western civilization emerged. As he wrote in Leviathan about when humanity lacked these powerful restraints against human nature, “In such condition there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual Fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”[xii]

His skepticism of human nature notwithstanding, Hobbes’s major contribution to kicking off the Enlightenment was his assertion that once the overarching leviathan superstructure secured the safety of people from each other, we humans would be capable of governing ourselves. During a time when it was a crime to challenge the authority of the king, this was a major breakthrough on the road toward democracy.

Hobbes was followed by John Locke, whose Two Treatises of Government and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (both 1690) argued that human nature wasn’t as grim as Hobbes postulated, that humans were essentially good (although some among us could be evil), and, because of that, self-governance without a king or church was possible.

Locke went so far, in an effort that could have endangered his own freedom, to explicitly renounce the influence of the Church on the religiously sanctioned governments of his time.

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke wrote that the kingdoms of Europe that looked to the Catholic or Anglican Church for their legitimacy “can allow none to be right but the received doctrines.”

In response to attackers who charged that he was willing to overturn a millennium of the divine rights of kings and replace them with the radical ideas of democracy and egalitarianism that were then all the rage in Europe, Locke wrote, “Truth scarce ever yet carried it by vote anywhere at its first appearance: new opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. But truth, like gold, is not the less so for being newly brought out of the mine. It is trial and examination must give it price, and not any antique fashion; and though it be not yet current by the public stamp, yet it may, for all that, be as old as nature, and is certainly not the less genuine.”[xiii]

The largest debate of the time was about the “natural state of mankind.” If we based governments on our essential nature, it would take a lot less effort to extract compliance by the people to laws of that government.

While Hobbes was on record as believing the necessity of the iron fist of church or state to keep order in society, Locke believed that nature herself provided us and the natural world with a set of operating instructions.

“Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom,” he wrote in Two Treatises, “and an uncontrouled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power, not only to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men . . .”[xiv]

Locke’s “life, liberty, and estate” was cribbed by Thomas Jefferson—who had read Two Treatises three times[xv]—and rewritten as the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence.

Locke also set up Jefferson’s adding “happiness” to the mix in Human Understanding: “Nature, I confess, has put into man a desire of happiness and an aversion to misery: these indeed are innate practical principles.”[xvi]

But it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who put the final touches on the Enlightenment a century after Hobbes stirred things up so much. Rousseau believed that the laws of nature were essentially democratic and noble and that the closer humanity could come to following natural law, the closer we’d be to a life of freedom and happiness.

“Those whom nature destined to make her disciples have no need of teachers . . . ,” he wrote in his 1750 Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.[xvii] “There you see how luxury, dissolution, and slavery have in every age been the punishment for the arrogant efforts we have made in order to emerge from the happy ignorance where Eternal Wisdom had placed us.”

That “happy ignorance” was the original state of humankind, Rousseau argued in contrast to Hobbes’s grim view, adding regretfully, “[T]hanks to typographic characters and the way we use them, the dangerous reveries of Hobbes and Spinoza will remain for ever.”

Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences and his later Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1754) and The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (1762) electrified the young men who became America’s Revolutionary generation.

As John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson on November 15, 1813:

“When Aristocracies, are established by human Laws and honour Wealth and Power are made hereditary by municipal Laws and political Institutions, then I acknowledge artificial Aristocracy to commence: but this never commences, till Corruption in Elections become dominant and uncontroulable. But this artificial Aristocracy can never last. The everlasting Envys, Jealousies, Rivalries and quarrells among them, their cruel rapacities upon the poor ignorant People their followers, compell these to Sett up Caesar, a Demagogue to be a Monarch and Master, pour mettre chacun a sa place. Here you have the origin of all artificial Aristocracy, which is the origin of all Monarchy. . . .

“We, to be Sure, are far remote from this. Many hundred years must roll away before We Shall be corrupted. Our pure, virtuous, public Spirited federative Republic will last for ever, govern the Globe and introduce the perfection of Man, his perfectibility being already proved by Price Priestly, Condorcet Rousseau, Diderot and Godwin.”[xviii]

Probably Rousseau’s most famous statement, echoed in sentiment by John Adams, was this: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”[xix]

In his Letters Written from the Mountain, Rousseau argues, “Freedom consists less in doing one’s will than in not being submitted to that of other people; it consists furthermore in not submitting others’ will to our own. Whoever is master cannot be free, and to reign is to obey.”[xx]

And how would that work out?

The “most necessary, and perhaps the most difficult” task of government, he wrote in his Economie politique (“Discourse on Political Economy”)[xxi], is found in “rendering justice to all, and especially in protecting the poor against the tyranny of the rich.”

Later in Economie politique, Rousseau added, “What man loses by the social contract is his natural freedom and an unlimited right to everything that tempts him and that he can reach; what he gains is civil liberty and the ownership of everything he possesses.” In a statement echoed by America’s Founders, he concluded, “A free people obeys, but it does not serve; it has leaders but not masters; it obeys Laws, but it only obeys Laws and it is through the force of Laws that it does not obey men.”

Voltaire, 17 years before the Declaration of Independence was signed, weighed in as well. “All men have an equal right to liberty,” he wrote, “to the enjoyment of their own property, and to the protection of the laws.”[xxii]

John Adams, in 1744, wrote in the Massachusetts Gazette that the government of England had failed to be “a government of laws, and not of men.”[xxiii] He was elected 35 years later (1779) to help draft the Massachusetts Constitution, which, probably by no coincidence, contains the following Article XXX: “In the government of this commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.”[xxiv]

In America, Rousseau is probably best known for his advocacy of the “noble savage” and, in France, for Robespierre quoting his “Give us liberty, or all is lost” while ordering the executions of French nobles. But his impact on the American revolutionaries can’t be ignored.

So, where did Locke and Rousseau get their heretical (for their day) ideas?

Locke’s predecessor Hobbes was clearly influenced by the naked brutality of 17th-century Europe, where only a very narrow sliver of men of wealth had any rights at all, and even these could be dispatched by the king or a local lord with a word.

Hobbes is the patron saint of the modern political right, Locke and Rousseau of the left, a situation that has persisted since the 1700s.

But what influenced Locke and Rousseau to imagine that society—after millennia of brutal warlords, theocrats, and kings—could govern itself and, as a result, live in peace and harmony?

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Introduction

[1] I covered this at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy (pages 52–53), citing, among others, research by Conradt and Roper showing how animals from gnats to fish to birds to mammals “vote” and the majority rules for most major group decisions. See L. Conradt and T. J. Roper, “Group Decision-Making in Animals,” Nature 421 (January 9, 2003): 155–58, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01294.

Part I

[ii] https://cooperative-individualism.org/jefferson-thomas_correspondence-indigenous-american-tribes-cherokees-1812.htm

[iii] Benjamin Franklin letter to Peter Collinson, May 9, 1753, in Lorraine Smith Pangle, The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

[iv] https://cooperative-individualism.org/jefferson-thomas_correspondence-indigenous-american-tribes-cherokees-1812.htm

[v] https://cooperative-individualism.org/jefferson-thomas_correspondence-indigenous-american-tribes-cherokees-1812.htm

[vi] https://pastnow.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/june-28-1813-adams-to-jefferson/

[vii] Journals of the Continental Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904-1905), III, 433.

[viii] Collections of the New York Historical Society: Richard Henry Lee to General Charles Lee, Philadelphia, May 27, 1776.

[ix] Pennsylvania Gazette, May 29, 1776, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2003533087/.

[x] Cara Richards, The Oneida People (Indian Tribal Series/Phoenix, 1974); https://www.amazon.com/Oneida-People-Cara-Richards/dp/B000P19EZG/.

[xi] John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 3 vols., 3rd ed. (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2001; orig. pub. Hall & Sellers, March 1787).

[xii] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 2017).

[xiii] First published as An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10615/10615-h/10615-h.htm.

[xiv] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. James Elston (James Elston and Crowning Educational, 2016, orig. pub. 1689).

[xv] Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 311.

[xvi] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10615/10615-h/10615-h.htm

[xvii] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences: The First Discourse, 1750; https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/files/arts.pdf.

[xviii] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6198

[xix] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract Or Principles of Political Right (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2010).

[xx] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to Beaumont, Letters Written from the Mountain, and Related Writings, eds. Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012).

[xxi] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Selected Political Writings, trans. G. D. H. Cole (Independently published, 2020).

[xxii] Voltaire, quoted by Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy, ed. Michael Croland (Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 2022).

[xxiii] https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/robert.tierney/govt2302/substantive-course-materials/unit-ii/readings-handouts/john-adams-government-of-law-not-men

[xxiv] https://malegislature.gov/Laws/Constitution