And so he really has to push to make sure that that comes out of the first Congress.

Yeah, I mean, just to pick up that last point, you know, people call him the father of the Constitution.

He wasn't the father of the Constitution.

There were no fathers of the Constitution.

Otherwise, it wouldn't be a democratic document.

But in some ways, he was the father of the amending the Constitution process.

So he really...

I

It's something most historians don't talk about, but that summer in Philadelphia, native people were there.

The Choctaw Nation, the Chickasaw Nation, and the Cherokee Nation all send a member of the nation, and the job of that person is to go to Philadelphia and show up and basically try and talk to people.

And that showing up and talking, I believe, mattered enormously.

And it's, it's just like it is today.

Like, we know perfectly well that everything that happens in Congress isn't just because the people inside the room are just sitting around by themselves thinking of things.

They're always reflecting pressures and concerns that are brought to them by people outside of the room.

After Schonondoya arrived in Philadelphia, he went to Independence Hall, where the Constitutional Convention was meeting.

And he meets with George Washington in a very public manner.

And again, it's only in the nineteenth century when you get a strong c-contrast between communism and capitalism that the concept of liberty gets reduced to a freedom from interference concept.

Yeah, I'll just...

I mean, I, I think one of the things that's interesting about the declaration is the words are, um, multivalent.

They were designed to be multivalent.

They've always meant, um, different things to different people, uh, in different spaces, and that's why they're powerful.

I mean, not everybody thinks the same way.

So a vocabulary that, um, can create shared belief and understandings even though people interpret them differently is a very powerful vocabulary.

You know, if you're gonna emphasize equality so much, and you're gonna use the self-evident language, and then you're gonna delete the slavery part, and you're gonna maintain slavery, didn't you make your own document internally inconsistent, and shouldn't I respect it less than all of you people are telling me that I should on the two hundred and fiftieth?

We'll get you another one

...

I grabbed one of these free ones.

But, um, so for me, I think the, the Madison piece that I find just incredibly compelling is the, um, the language of the Ninth Amendment and his understanding of the Ninth Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

And so I, that's why I pulled it out so I don't mess it up.

So Madison was largely responsible for the Bill of Rights.

It's one of his great contributions, and I wrote about that for an essay for the NCC.

Did he take a paternity test?

What do you mean by that, and how did Macaulay's history of the Stuart monarchs help provide the intellectual framework for the idea that a people could legitimately sever allegiance to a king?

Yeah, well, Macaulay in the seventeen sixties, when George III comes into power as a young man, his father dies, and there's a transition moment in the English monarchy.

And Macaulay has just married a Scottish obstetrician.

She was very worried about her own maternal health, and so she marries somebody who she thinks will be able to help her with childbirth.

She goes back interested in history to think about the English Civil War, the time when the English government first was quasi-democracy.

They behead Charles I, and for a while have a constitutional republic of sorts before Charles II is restored.

And she decides to write that history, going back to the Stuart kings, beginning with James I and then moving on to his son, Charles I, the two kings who followed Queen Elizabeth.

What are some of the phrases or ideas that actually appear in both texts, and what do those parallels tell us about Macaulay's influence?