- The "Spirit of '76" is still an important phrase in American history, but what did it mean at the time and what does it mean now?

Today, as part of the University of Wyoming's America 250 observances, historian and author Dr.

Edward Larson has some important points to make on that subject.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle."

(upbeat music) Dr.

Edward Larson.

Welcome to "Wyoming Chronicle."

Pleased to be with you here today as part of the Wyoming Humanities Summit here in the campus of the University of Wyoming.

You've written a book, one of, at least more than a dozen that you've written.

I'm pleased to say I've read a couple of those.

And the new one is this one, "Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters."

You talk about the "Spirit of '76," which among other things was used as an advertising slogan back in the days of the bicentennial in 1976.

You and I both were around for that, remember it?

And I'm not sure what it really means to the modern American audience anymore.

But you get into that and say what you think it means.

And one of the things that I took from the book is the "Spirit of '76" is significant because it was a change from what the "Spirit of '75."

- Yeah.

- Had been.

I had seen a movie recently.

I'm gonna let you speak, I promise, where I saw a guy, he was protesting at the city council meeting or something, and the police said, "Come on, get outta here.

You're disrupting the meeting."

He said, "I know my rights.

I want my rights."

And this is sort of the thrust of what you've written about, that we've even gone to battle with the mighty British Army before 1776.

But at that point it was, "We want our rights as British subjects."

And in 1776, that changed.

- That changed.

Yeah.

Well, now I don't need to say anything 'cause you've captured the book so perfectly.

- What changed?

- That was my question.

We were coming up.

Two years ago.

I thought about doing this book.

I had lived through like you the 200th, which was a big event.

- Yeah.

- And I knew we were coming up to the 250th.

And I began musing what made 1776 important?

I'd been teaching American history for donkey years.

And the Revolutionary crisis is much longer.

It really begins, at least with the Stamp Act crisis of 1765.

And then comes to the Declaratory Act of 1766 saying The Parliament has total control.

Everything it says, and of course, there are no American representatives in parliament.

Goes.

And so the Americans have been resisting that.

And of course, taxation without representation.

They paid their taxes.

All the colonies had taxes.

But suddenly now, parliament was directly taxing them.

And they had no representation in parliament.

And that violated their traditional rights as British subjects.

And so they were willing to fight for that.

And that happened all the way through.

But it was always, as you put it, it was always, the mantra was rights and reconciliation.

- As a British subject.

- Subjects of the king.

And they believed that they were under the king.

And here's the way they thought.

And it wouldn't matter whether you were Washington or Jefferson or clearly expressed in Jefferson's "great pamphlet" in 1774, Summary Rights of British Americans.

Franklin's work over there is they thought each colony had its own, they knew each had its own assembly, its own elected assembly.

And they believed that was directly under the king.

They had their charters from the king.

So they were chartered by the king.

They had their own assembly.

And they believed that assembly played the same role.

Before the Acts of Union.

You had the English parliament, you had the Scottish Parliament, you had Ireland.

And when Virginia, the first overseas colony of the British, their original slogan was, and I'm not very good on Latin, but (speaking Latin), Virginia is forth, because they viewed themselves just like Scotland before the Acts of Union.

- And were proud of this.

- And they were proud of that.

But they believed they were subject to the king, and they thought the king would protect them.

And what came about, because of a variety of the sort of the coincidence, a variety of events, because if you think about it, in 1775, issues have been building up.

And to collect those taxes, parliament imposed.

Britain had sent over troops to force the collection, cornered them in homes.

And of course the "seedbed" was Boston.

So they had the biggest contingent in Boston, 4,000 British soldiers and camped in Boston.

And they declared martial law, closed out, took away the charter, and instead of giving up, the Massachusetts stood up for it.

And all of New England backed them.

And they pulled out.

And they had their rebel government out there in Concord and in the West.

And in the west, and they started having their own militia.

And to stop that, the British always had trouble when they left Boston because Boston back then was like an island with a little spit of land, water all around it.

They could put the navy all around it.

They went out, of course, on April 19th, 1775, to capture the rebel government and the Rebel Armory at Concord.

And instead, the militia rose up and fought 'em at Lexington and fought 'em then at Concord.

And then, when they had already taken away all the things from the Armory 'cause they were warned with Paul Revere and Richard William Dawes.

And so on the way back, they were basically behind every, and what did it say, behind every fence wall and tree.

They were shooting in this line of British soldiers.

Half of them were killed going back.

And the British were afraid to leave Boston.

But then Continental Congress issued its Declaration of Causes of taking up arms, appointed George Washington, adopted the Continental Army.

That was all in 1775.

The battle was on.

And yet in that document, the Declaration of Causes for taking up arms, and in the ensuing Olive Branch Petition, they said, we are not doing this to break with the king.

We want to remain as loyal subjects.

We just insist on our rights.

- Our rights.

- And what changed in the next six months was that changed from the mantra being, rights and reconciliation to liberty and independence.

- And what a big change that was.

You have a phrase that maybe you'll be using in your presentation later today.

Before 1776, the king was law.

Starting in 1776, law was king becoming, we were, I'm no longer trying to get you to accept us the way you promised you would, we're gonna overthrow you now.

Had it ever happened quite this way before, obviously there've been, look at the map of Europe, for example.

Borders change because of military conflict.

But the idea that a group of people would say, we're gonna start our own nation instead of this, highly unusual, and for the British sort of this great front is to always how I've sort of thought of it, "You can't do that."

- Not quite in this fashion.

- Yeah.

- And the conditions were unique, I mean, it was after the enlightenment and after they'd had writers like Locke and Rousseau come up with theories that sort of based on liberty, that the theories were that originally people were free and equal, a noble savage.

And then they gave up some of their rights for security to protect themselves and their property.

But they gave them up to their representatives.

And so the representative government, and then monarchy was viewed as in those writings of the enlightenment as sort of a deviation from the origin story they created for themselves.

And what the Americans who had read that and were thinking about those, and with their own experiment, with their own assemblies, which were always their protectors.

Sure, that they would tax them, but they would set up laws.

And so the idea of all this was the monarchy, what they came to see, and Thomas Paine in Common Sense, and John Adams in Thoughts on Government, the two most important pamphlets of the first half of 1776 expressed it most clearly is that, well, what's the alternative to having the king sovereign?

Before that we want our rights and reconciliation of the king because the king is sovereign.

He has sovereignty.

It's in him.

If you read Shakespeare, they always refer to the king, whether it's King John or King Richard or whoever as England or as France.

That's just what they call them because they were the representation of the people.

And now they say, no.

What we're saying is the representation is the people are sovereign through their elected representatives.

And they were theorizing about this and how can this be?

And they were sure drawing on Locke and Rousseau but they were doing their own original thinking.

Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Paine.

They were doing their own original thinking and not just them.

And what they came up with was the idea of that if the republic, if the people are sovereign through their representatives, then the laws they create are the ultimate authority.

But you don't want to have a tyranny of the majority.

You don't want some legislature to go off "half-cocked" and have a 51% control it and "lord over."

So they have to be under a constitution that is more generally agreed to, which is a more collective.

So there's the constitution, and the Constitution sets what we would call checks and balances.

They didn't quite use that phrase, but they would have an established, and then a legislature operating it would adopt laws.

And so as John Adams said, "In England, the King is Law.

In America, the law is king."

- If you're going to accept all these new principles of representational government, there's no place for the king anymore as our absolute Lord and ruler.

- No, because they're saying the people are sovereign.

The states, they were under charters from the king.

They had to create new written constitutions.

Those, to replace their charters, those state, new state constitutions of 1776 were the first written constitutions in the history of the world anywhere.

Because they didn't need that logic.

If you were under a king.

But now you were directed, you were urged by the Continental Congress, by the resolution of independent governments, which were passed in May.

And then articulated in Adams' Thoughts on Government, write your own constitutions.

Those will be the supreme authority.

And if you look at all of them, they all have a similar structure.

They've flipped around.

They all have their grievances, their Declaration of Independence, but they all have their Declaration of Rights or Bill of Rights.

And the top of that always.

And they lead into this.

The people are sovereign, only the people are sovereign.

It stresses that the sovereignty of the people.

And to effectuate that, you have to have a process.

So they had to have a process of, we need a legislature.

What do we need for an executive?

What do we need for judges?

How do we balance this out?

Do we have two Houses?

Some had two, some had one House.

They had different structures.

But they were all trying to think of how we can establish the sovereignty of all the people.

Not just a majority faction, but all the people, everyone.

They're very clear.

Everyone has to be representative.

Everybody should have a say in this.

We should.

And what is our goal?

I mean, this is all before the Declaration of Independence - Right.

- They say that the purpose of government is to protect security and liberty.

They always say that, for "Life and Liberty."

And the goal of government is the maximus human happiness.

And by happiness.

- I'm gonna ask you, happiness in this context.

Doesn't mean walking along the trail whistling a happy tune?

It's a much more complicated definition, isn't it?

- It doesn't mean pleasure.

- Yeah.

- There were two Greek words that in English translate as happiness.

And it was very clear.

They knew their Greek, these founders, they had inspiration from the early Roman Republic.

And they loved Cicero and Cato.

In fact, at Valley Forge.

Washington had the troops perform a play written by Addison.

Addison and Steele were the two great wig essayists who were popularizing the ideas of Locke in England at the time.

And there was a play about Cato.

And he had them perform it.

And with Cato and the old writings of Cato, you see it in Aristotle as well.

But they didn't read Aristotle as much.

Cato and Cicero, the Roman writers, the Roman Republic writers, they would deal with the concept of happiness.

And happiness is a fulfillment of one's inner self.

It's virtue.

Your goal isn't money.

Your goal isn't power.

Your true to your inner self.

It's almost like Confucius would say, your true inner self is the expression of your inner being.

Washington always used the phrase that the goal of the revolution was to lead to a place where, he took it from a biblical phrase, that every man is living content and peacefully under his own vine and fig tree.

- Let me somewhat related question, talk about another term that meant something different then compared to what it means now.

And it's always been borderline amusing to me and that word is "pamphlet".

I think to the modern person, a pamphlet is something you get at the dentist's office and it's tri-fold and it gives you list of phone numbers and procedures and benefits, almost like a brochure.

But in this time, the "pamphlet" was an enormously important part of, I guess, what passed for mass media at the time.

The "pamphlet," and you've talked about Common Sense, and Adams as well.

What was it exactly and how was it so vital?

- Well, Common Sense was 84 pages long.

- Yeah.

A big magazine, I mean.

- Tight text, tightly printed.

It's in a sense, it's bound, it's not bound quite like a hardback book, but it's a solid doc- with a cover with a table of contents.

It's more like a short book.

And the printing presses in America could produce those.

The only books were really published in England and brought over.

And so they had to have another name for this other very substantial document.

And so it was referred to as a "pamphlet."

But no, nobody's raised that point before and I'm glad you did.

It's not just like what we think of as a three page leaflet.

- Leaflet.

There's another word.

- They would call that, they had another document was a broadside.

And that's when they just print on two pages.

And that would be more like what we might view as a pamphlet.

Now this was a substantial document.

And pamphlets were widely published.

We didn't publish books.

We did publish a lot of newspapers.

Newspapers were widespread.

All this was possible in America, because the colonies had very high literacy compared to England.

England, 5%, I don't know.

60% of American people could read back then.

I don't think 1776 would've ever happened without the unique economic conditions that Americans had opportunity and liberty.

- Isn't that interesting?

You mentioned, refer briefly to David McCullough's book called "1776," different kind of book from yours.

And you probably knew him or crossed paths that I presume.

- I did.

I did.

- One of the things he mentioned in his book that stuck with me, and you mentioned it as well, a little differently, was "1776," the American colonists had the highest standard of living in the world.

No wonder the British didn't wanna let go of it.

- And it wasn't just the colonies along the seaboard, it was also the British colonies in the Caribbean and on up to Halifax and Nova Scotia.

They were the richest place.

That's true.

The richest place in the world at the time.

Because they had this wonderful agricultural opportunity.

They had great fishing.

They had some mining going on.

They had a little manufacturing, but mostly it was rich agricultural land.

And enterprising people had chosen to move there.

And they were making the most of it.

And they had liberty in the sense that they were free to develop their economy.

They were entrepreneurial by nature.

The people who went over there, they were taking the most of their opportunity.

And they felt therefore that they had created their own wealth.

Sure, they were able to do so because they were in a great geographical area.

Wonderful climate, healthy climate, great farmland, great fishing grounds that none of which, great timber for shipbuilding.

But they still viewed it as their own enterprise.

It wasn't the British enterprise, it was their enterprise.

Now, the British, I don't think they ever thought about moving London over- - No.

- That was Franklin.

But what they did think is these people are getting rich under our protection.

We wanna tax their money.

That was the problem.

The colonists thought they had earned what they had accomplished.

They had achieved it.

They had built it.

And they were, because of the mercantile system, English merchants and English manufacturers benefited enormously from the colonies.

The colonists knew this because they were sending their products to England first.

And then the merchants in England would re-export.

And Americans had to buy English goods, not goods from other places.

So in the old mercantile state economy, the Americans thought the British were getting off great.

Now, the British wanted more.

They wanted to tax their wealth.

And the Americans thought that was a violation of their fundamental rights of English people.

And so that set 'em going.

But they always thought that the king loved them.

That, you know, the king loves you.

The king protects you.

The king is the father figure, they always thought he was as much their king as he was the king of people in England or Scotland.

There were books about what happened militarily.

- Yeah.

And you have some of that in your book.

- And McCullough's book is purely military history.

- Yeah, right.

- And then Rich Atkinson has brought out a great series, three books.

He's, he's brought out two of them now about the Revolutionary War.

But what's important is they're about where they're different.

They're about the Revolutionary War.

And so Atkinson puts "1776" in the same volume with "1775."

To him militarily, there's not a transition.

The transition is in ideas.

We don't say the "Spirit of 1775."

We say the "Spirit of 1776," because the ideas changed.

And what had happened is that in the fall, and took time for news to get back and forth.

But in the fall of 1775, the king made his annual speech to the throne in parliament.

That's equivalent of the State of the Union Address.

The big thing when he's in there before parliament, and he comes down on the side of parliament fully, he says he is going to back parliament to the hilt before, he sort of, you know, was unclear which side he was on.

And he said he was gonna enforce parliament's law in the colonies with more troops, more ships, mercenary soldiers.

That next year, based on this call, 32,000 British soldiers, there had been 4,000 in Boston.

32,000 British soldiers, the largest army Britain had ever sent overseas in the entire history.

Plus the largest navy came.

And in addition to that, he brought in these Hessian mercenaries, these German mercenaries, which were viewed by the Americans as like barbarians who would eat them.

Who certainly would rape their women and steal their goods.

They were just, that's the way they were viewed.

Thousands of them, and they said, this is the way and he declared the colonies an open rebellion.

The colonies haven't said they were a rebellion to him.

And he took away their protection from the throne.

And that news of that didn't, if you followed the newspapers, which is what I did, the news of that speech from the throne in the fall didn't reach the colonies until January, and so- - Of 1776.

- Of 1776.

So for them, that's when they were reading it.

It was in one paper in 1775 in December.

But it didn't reach the newspapers of the colonies, most colonists till then.

And then it came out, it coincided with news that on January 1st, a British Royal Navy Squadron had bombarded in a fire, ultimately destroyed the peaceful town of Norfolk, Virginia, which was the gateway to the Chesapeake, the second largest city in the American south.

Totally destroyed, a city of thousands.

Totally destroyed.

And then at the same time, just by chance, because it had been worked on by a team for the previous four months, Common Sense appears.

So they all come out in January.

And what you had is you had the king saying, you're no longer under my protection and I'm gonna crush you with parliament's power control.

You had an example of it with Norfolk 'cause that was in all the newspapers.

- Here's how we'll crush you.

Look at Norfolk.

- Yeah.

Look at Norfolk.

And then they read Common Sense and Common Sense, he a new explanation that the problem was not taxation without representation.

The problem, that was just a manifestation of authoritarian rule.

And the problem is the king.

And people now see what's happened to them in a new lens.

And you know, it takes ideas and actions, actions and ideas, deeds and acts.

They have to go back and forth.

And suddenly it's like the scales are lifted and off their eyes.

And they can see, and you can see it in letters by George Washington.

George Washington has always been for reconciliation.

And suddenly he writes in January, after he hears of Norfolk, after he reads the king's speech, and after he reads Common Sense, he said, "Armed warfare," he writes, "Armed warfare coupled with the irrefutable doctrines of Common Sense, will not leave many.

Not supporting separation."

That's when he first issues it 'cause I was reading all these letters.

It's like their eyes are open.

And suddenly they realize that the true way to protect our "Life, liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness," of virtue, of virtue, read it that way, is under making the people's sovereign under Republican rule with the rule of law and constitutions.

That's the only avenue.

- Tell me, why "Spirit of '76" is important today, still?

- Fundamental throughout this story.

Was that popular, the people rule through legislatures, through laws, and through the rule of law.

And that is the way to protect "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

Jefferson did not originate any of those words.

And he said, so he said, I wasn't told to write anything new.

I was told to capture the sentiments of the day.

He takes it from Adams, he takes it from Washington, he takes it from Franklin, he takes it from Paine, he takes it from Mason, especially Mason and the Virginia Constitution of 1776.

And he puts it together beautifully.

And those phrases that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.

Among these, our "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" that became the beating heart of the American dream.

- How do you think we're doing on it in America 250?

- It's always been a work in progress.

(upbeat music)