I mentioned a while back that I was reading through the Heidlers's biography of Henry Clay, and that I'd stopped for a while because I lost the damn thing somewhere. I found it a couple of months ago and began where I left off, with the so-called "Corrupt Bargain." (A bad rap, say the Heidlers.) Now, in my reading, old Hal has lost the presidency to James K. Polk and is in what turned out to be a very temporary retirement. A long time ago, George Reedy, who is as close to a mentor as I ever had, told me that his great unfinished project was a book on what he called, "The Four Morons" -- the quartet of presidents that preceded Lincoln, and who presided over the country's irresistible slide into Civil War. Where I am now with Clay can be seen as the first faint stirrings of a slide down the slipperiest, bloodiest slope of them all. This is another period that fascinates me, and has ever since I read Merrill Peterson's The Great Triumvirate, his magisterial account of the careers of Clay, Daniel Webster, and that iron-eyed old loon, John C. Calhoun. All of which led me to consider this day the notion of the Founders, and who were the real Founders of the country, and whether or not we even should restrict membership in that club to the people usually considered to be the Founders.

Certainly, the powdered wig set of the latter half of the 18th century were Founders. Many of them were flawed; the three-fifth's clause of the Constitution is proof enough of that. But what that bunch did do was set up a framework through which succeeding generations could lay legitimate claims to being Founders, in the very real sense of the word. They set up the structure within which the creative act of self-government could go on, and within which that act could go off in a number of different directions of which the first generation of Founders never dreamed, which was certainly the case with John Marshall, who made himself a Founder in this way while most of the Founders were still alive, and did so by whacking around James Madison, who pretty much wrote the Constitution. I would argue that Clay, Webster, and Calhoun were Founders. Their work created a different country, as did that of Andrew Jackson, for good and ill. Abraham Lincoln certainly qualifies, on the words of the Gettysburg Address alone, but so do William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and, in his own mad way, John Brown. Susan B. Anthony and all the people who gathered at Seneca Falls were Founders, and both Roosevelts clearly saw themselves that way, especially FDR, who even proposeda second Bill Of Rights. Most of Martin Luther King's public rhetoric, especially his great speech on the National Mall, was the rhetoric of a Founder who came along at a different time to redeem, as he said, the "promissory note" taken out by the original Founders. If you want to put Ronald Reagan in there, I might bridle in principle, but there's no question that he might qualify. As does the current president, at least in the speeches he made to get elected in 2008.

This isn't just a matter of policies enacted or bills passed. (Neither Garrison nor King did either, and Garrison burned the Constitution in protest of what he believed was a bargain it had made with the devil.) It is about recognizing the potential within the country of the framework that the original Founders left behind, and how to build a new, and better, and more just, self-governing political commonwealth. It is about having a vision that is empowered by that framework and yet goes beyond it, to create a new framework that functions as well as the old. People talk often about the "living Constitution," a concept with which I happen to agree, and what James Russell Lowell described as, "a machine that would go of itself." But the living Constitution was not the experiment. A living Constitution was designed for a purpose -- to create a living Republic, one that can be "founded" over and over again. That requires leaders, but it also requires a people willing to engage in that work themselves. The Founders left us a considerable obligation, but they also left us the mechanisms through which we can meet it. On this President's Day, when we celebrate Washington and Lincoln, undeniably both Founders, we should remember that obligation that the Founders passed down through posterity. We are all Founders, or ought to be.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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