Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  The other men didn’t accept the draft exactly as written, of course. They all went over it and made changes as needed, and if you take a look at the original draft, you’ll find it pretty well scratched up with recommendations for its improvement. And they were improvements. Just to give a single example, take that wonderful sentence “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Well, that wasn’t Jefferson’s; nobody’s absolutely sure today whose change it was, but it’s generally believed to be Ben Franklin’s. Jefferson’s original sentence was, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” and then another man’s opinion prevailed and changed it to the simpler and totally perfect sentence we all know today.

  I’m sure that just about every American capable of reading this book or any other book has read the Declaration of Independence, but I’m equally sure that hardly anyone can quote even its superb opening word for word. I think it’s worthwhile, therefore, to remind people of the opening words of our greatest American masterpiece by stating those words here:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident.—That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.—That, whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government . . .

  It goes without saying that the words and the thoughts weren’t entirely new and original. In the preceding century, a number of influential British writers and philosophers, men like Algernon Sidney and John Locke and James Harrington, had expressed similar views on mankind’s natural right to freedom and happiness, and in Jefferson’s own century a number of other writers in other countries had done the same thing, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France, Christian von Wolff in Germany, and Emerich de Vattel in Switzerland. De Vattel and Locke in particular had a great effect on American minds, De Vattel because his book, Law of Nations, was translated into English and published in America in 1760, a crucial time in which Americans were beginning to think hard about their treatment by their king, and Locke because his writings said much the same things that the early Americans began to believe more and more. As Nevins and Commager say in their excellent history of the United States, “Locke maintained that the supreme function of the state is to protect life, liberty, and property, to which every man is entitled. Political authority, he said, is held in trust for the benefit of the people alone. When the natural rights of mankind are violated, the people have the right and duty of abolishing or changing the government.”

  Nevins and Commager go on to analyze the Declaration. “What we have here, of course,” they write, “is the philosophy of democracy, a philosophy which had never before been given so succinct or so eloquent a statement. There are certain things . . . that no reasonable man can doubt - self-evident truths. There is the truth that all men are created equal - that all men are equal in the sight of God and equal before the law. There were, to be sure, even as Jefferson wrote, many inequalities in America: the inequality of rich and poor, of men and women, of black and white. But the failure of a society to live up to an ideal does not invalidate the ideal, and the doctrine of equality, once announced, worked as a leaven in American thought . . .

  “Another great truth proclaimed in the Declaration is that men are ‘endowed’ with ‘inalienable’ rights - among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are not rights granted to men by some benevolent government and held at the pleasure of that government. These are rights with which all men are born and which they cannot lose. This principle, too, worked as a ferment in the minds of Americans and others, changing their attitude toward authority; for, as the Declaration pointed out, it was precisely to secure these rights that governments were organized in the first place. What we have here is the ‘compact’ theory of government - the theory that men once lived in a ‘state of nature,’ that in such state they were continually in danger, and that in order to protect themselves they came together and set up governments, granting to these governments just enough power to protect their lives, their liberty, and their property. In short, men made governments to do good, not evil; made it to protect them, not injure them. And the moment government failed of the purposes for which it was established, it no longer deserved the support or allegiance of men.”

  Jefferson and the other members of the committee submitted the Declaration of Independence to the Continental Congress on July 2, and, following a few small further changes, it was, of course, adopted two days later. It was probably the most revolutionary document ever written, and it has affected many other nations in addition to establishing forever the policy and the philosophy of the United States. It was one of the reasons for the French Revolution and a reason since then for revolutions all around the world. The French Revolution’s own Bill of Freedom has many similarities to the Declaration of Independence, and some people believe that Jefferson had a hand in helping the French write that one as well.

  During the Revolutionary War, Jefferson became governor of Virginia, following Patrick Henry into that job; and then, after we’d won the war, he was Washington’s minister to France from 1785 to 1789, and then, of course, Washington’s secretary of state from 1790 to 1793 and Adams’ vice president from 1797 to 1801. When Jefferson set out to oppose Adams once again for the presidency, I don’t think he did a whole lot of traveling and campaigning. As I understand it, he did everything almost entirely by letters, just writing to all the people he knew. He developed relationships with the leading men in every colony via the Committees of Correspondence, and he knew everybody of consequence in Virginia as well, so I don’t think it was necessary for him to do much campaigning aside from writing a lot of letters. He carried on a tremendous correspondence all his life. I found one letter of his not long ago in which he said he was a slave to his writing table. There are two full volumes of the letters that passed between him and John Adams alone, and that was only part of the correspondence that he carried on. He kept up with all his correspondence, and it was all in longhand, so I don’t see how in the world he ever did it, but he did.

  Of course, he hadn’t done much campaigning to become governor of Virginia, either. In Virginia, in those days, the succession was carried on by cliques just like it is now under Harry Byrd.28 Jefferson was in Boston and New York and Philadelphia all the time while the Continental Congresses were in session, but I don’t think he did a great deal of traveling up and down the country while he was campaigning to become president. In any case, as I’ve said, he was picked over Burr and Adams that first time, and in that second contest against Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, he landslid all over Pinckney with those 162 electoral votes to Pinckney’s fourteen.

  Jefferson did a lot of important things as president, but I guess the three that should be mentioned in particular, before I move on to Andrew Jackson, are his dispatching of the Lewis and Clark Expedition into the Northwest Territory, his purchase of Louisiana, and his bill putting a stop to the importing of slaves into this country.

  That third one is undoubtedly the most important, or at least it would have been if the damn fools who opposed it or ignored it had just had the sense to obey it. As it turned out, opposition to the whole
idea of an end to slavery in this country continued right up until the Civil War and even after Jefferson signed the bill in March of 1807 that prohibited people from bringing slaves into the country commencing January 1, 1808, slaves continued to be smuggled in for many years after that. But, at least, Jefferson managed to get the idea of an end to slavery made more official, and it was an idea that he’d felt and expressed most of his life. Years before this bill was proposed, he wrote and managed to get passed a bill that prohibited slavery in five states getting ready to come into the Union - Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin; and he almost managed to get a bill passed that prohibited slavery in all future states. But that bill was defeated by a single vote, and he wrote bitterly afterwards that “a single individual [could] have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country. Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment! But it is to be hoped that it will not always be silent, and that the friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail.” It took almost another century, and the Civil War for that to happen, and there’s still plenty of injustice to black people in this country. But as he said, it’s to be hoped that right will prevail in the end.

  The other two things were the direct result of Jefferson’s lifelong opinion that land, the ownership of land, is the key to what you might call the good health or strength of both individuals and nations. He was always eager to acquire more territory for the United States so that small landowners could become bigger landowners, and so that people who owned no land at all could get some, and he jumped at the chance when Napoleon agreed to sell Louisiana to the United States.

  Jefferson’s investigation into whether or not some of that territory might be for sale, however, started because he was afraid that France, which was becoming the strongest nation in the world under Napoleon, might develop too strong a presence near our own country. France had originally owned Louisiana, but now, as the eighteenth century drew to a close, Spain owned it; and in 1795, our minister to England, who was one of those Pinckney boys of South Carolina, Thomas Pinckney, sent an envoy to Spain and established diplomatic relations between Spain and the United States. Among other things, the treaty signed that year allowed both Spanish and American citizens uninhibited use of the Mississippi River, and also allowed Americans to deposit grain and other farm products from the Ohio and Mississippi valleys at the port of New Orleans before selling them around the country. But, in 1801, Jefferson learned that Napoleon had done some tough talking to Spain, a much weaker country at that point in history, and had gotten Spain to sign a secret agreement ceding Louisiana back to France. The next year, Spain canceled America’s right to deposit products in New Orleans, and, in alarm, Jefferson instructed Robert R. Livingston, who was then our minister to France, to see if he could negotiate a purchase of part of that vital territory. He also sent his friend James Monroe over there as “minister extraordinary and plenipotentiary,” about as fancy a title as anybody could think up, to help with the negotiations, and he got Congress to give the two men a budget of up to $2 million to make their purchase.

  Jefferson was hoping to buy only New Orleans and a part of what is now the western section of Florida. But to his absolute amazement and delight, Napoleon offered to sell the entire Louisiana territory, an area of more than a million square miles, equal in size to the entire United States at that time, if we could come up with somewhat more than that $2 million. Napoleon, Jefferson realized instantly, was in trouble and cash-poor and eager to refill the French treasury. France and England were not at war at that time, having signed the Treaty of Amiens. Napoleon knew it was a shaky peace and that the two countries would soon be fighting again, and, in fact, they were fighting again a year later. Napoleon was also feeling depressed at the fact that a revolution had been started over in Haiti, which France owned, by a black leader named Toussaint-Louverture, and that French forces there were in terrible trouble. (The French eventually managed to put down the revolution, but a combination of Toussaint-Louverture’s men and yellow fever killed 24,000 French soldiers.) And though Napoleon had always had the ambition to establish part of his empire in the Western Hemisphere, he realized all too well, after the great French losses at the battles of Aboukir and Acre, that his naval people weren’t as good as the forces he had on land, and that he really had no way of controlling the oceans. So he allowed his foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, to ask the Americans what they might be willing to pay for the entire French territory, hinting that 80 million francs, which was then the equivalent of $15 million, might do the trick.

  Jefferson also realized two other things. One was that Napoleon’s price for that entire huge area of land came to a mere three cents an acre, which made it one hell of a bargain for land anywhere in the world, but especially for all that rich farmland and all the other first-rate real estate. The other was that he might be tinkering with the Constitution if he said yes because the Constitution contained no provision whatever for the purchase of foreign lands. There had already, in fact, been protests from many Americans, mostly Federalists, when Congress allowed Livingston and Monroe to show up on Napoleon’s doorstep with $2 million in their back pockets. Jefferson knew, therefore, that the proper thing to do was to go and ask Congress to allocate the additional money and okay the purchase, but he also knew that Napoleon, an erratic and temperamental fellow, might change his mind if he had to sit around and wait too long. On April 29, 1803, Jefferson told his envoys to tell France that they had a deal at 80 million francs, and then he went to work to get the money and Congress’ approval.

  SOME CONSTITUTIONAL LAWYERS say that Jefferson stretched the Constitution until it cracked. And some people say that there’s no point in having a Constitution if you’re going to break it the way Jefferson did. I don’t agree with these viewpoints at all because, as I see it, the Constitution wasn’t broken by Jefferson because he never overstepped its provisions - though he certainly stretched it. You don’t break the Constitution if you’re a good president, as Jefferson certainly was. You just don’t break it. But you do stretch it when necessary because the Constitution is a document built for stretching when emergencies or opportunities demand that it be stretched. And it’s been stretched time and again by our best presidents.

  The thing some people tend to forget is that our Constitution isn’t just a revolutionary doctrine, something no other government in the history of the world had done up to that time; it’s also an evolutionary document. If you’ll read the preamble to the Constitution, you’ll see that it’s a document that’s flexible enough to make the country run no matter whether the population is 3 million or 300 million. The Constitution, and we’re lucky that it’s the case, was arranged so that it could meet the changes in conditions as time went on.

  I’m one of the greatest believers in the Constitution in the country, I guess, and one of the greatest admirers of what it says and the way in which it says it. I think it’s far and away the best government document that’s ever been put together by any bunch of men. It says things simply and beautifully; it’s written in plain language, and it states exactly what’s meant and isn’t tangled up with any legal verbiage or any Latin inserts. And when you read it, you can understand it. I admire the Constitution so much that, when they asked me one time to go down and dedicate a monument to Patrick Henry, I wouldn’t do it because Patrick Henry was one of the bitterest opponents of the Constitution of the United States. Maybe that was going overboard, because he certainly said and did some good things, but I just said I wouldn’t go down there because there wouldn’t be any United States if old Pat Henry had had his way.

  On the other hand, I’ve been going around giving a lot of talks to youngsters, trying to get them to understand what they have and what they have to do to keep it. I think the people who wrote the Constitution were interpreting the wishes of the people themselves, and not trying to lure the people toward
their ideas. The Constitution was conceived on a high intellectual basis, but it was written in such a way that people could understand it and argue with parts of it if they felt like it. That’s the difference between our country and a lot of other countries.

  But I’m a liberal constructionist of the Constitution rather than a strict constructionist. Some people label the two schools of thought “strict constructionists” and “loose constructionists,” but I won’t use that second term because I don’t believe there’s anything loose or unformed or unsupported by logic about the way we interpret the statements in the Constitution. I think the right term is “liberal constructionists,” using liberal in the sense of not being excessively rigid and immovable in interpreting those statements. And I’m a liberal constructionist because it seems obvious to me that a president should interpret what it says in context with the needs and events of his own times, and not necessarily in context with things as they were in 1789. And I’m also a liberal constructionist because I believe that change is always good if the change being contemplated is a necessary change or one that will better existing conditions.

  I’m sure the men who put together the Constitution realized that parts of it would have to be changed as the country grew and changed, and that’s the reason, of course, that the Constitution is set up so that it can be amended. Which isn’t to say that I believe it should be amended casually or lightly, and fortunately, most of the lawmakers of this country have tended to have that same viewpoint.

  You really ought to stop and read the whole Constitution yourself, and read it more than once, because the more you read it, the more informed you become about our theories of government and about what makes this country tick. But just in case you haven’t read it recently or at all, let me remind you that the Constitution has a Preamble that makes it clear in the first seven words that it’s everybody’s document and not the document of a small aristocracy; those seven words, of course, are “We the people of the United States . . .” Then there are seven articles, the first three of which set up the government of the United States and separate it into its three branches. The first article sets up the legislative branch and gives Congress its powers to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper” and puts the purse strings in the hands of the elected branch of the government; the second establishes the executive branch and the fact that the government will be headed by a president and a vice president; and the third sets up the judicial branch and assures all Americans of the right of trial by jury and other legal protections, and sets up courts that can check the legality of laws passed by the Congress. And then it occurred to somebody, and I believe Jefferson was the moving man in the thing, that the protection of the individual from his government had been overlooked - and that an individual must be protected against the encroachment of a government on his rights or we just have the same old go-round that they had in the monarchies in Europe. It’s the fifth article that allows the Constitution to be amended, and Jefferson and his people pushed to get the first ten amendments passed because they’re all amendments for the protection of the people from the government being set up, so people can’t be persecuted and unduly prosecuted by their government.