For instance, not long after the “Shot Heard ’Round the World,” the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, told the British ambassador to the Austrian imperial court, “The cause in which England is engaged. In short, the American Revolution launched a new chapter in human history, and while those drunk on the fierce arrogance of Now may condemn it for not fully implementing its ideals in every particular all at once, those alive at the time saw it for what it was. Prior to the Founding, there was no democracy and precious little in the way of inalienable rights for anyone but nobles and monarchs. The correct comparison is between the Founding and what came before it. My standard response to such progressive indictments is that, yes, these things look bad when measured against the yardstick of the present. Women couldn’t vote for a century or more, and non–property holding men had to wait a while as well, though not as long. Another oft-heard gripe is that the franchise wasn’t granted to everyone overnight. It wasn’t until the 1950s that Forrest McDonald and others debunked Beard’s shoddy and polemical history. The progressive historian Charles Beard launched a new front, arguing that the Constitution was drafted to protect the wealth and property of the people who wrote it. The missing context, however, is that it was the abolitionists who did not want blacks to be counted at all, while the slaveholders wanted them to be counted in full, so as to give the slaveholding South more political representation and power. The clause, rightly, is denounced as a stain on our founding charter. Constitution, we are often reminded, had a “three-fifths clause” that counted blacks as less than whites-for purposes of congressional representation. It is a common habit of progressives to denounce various aspects of American history as racist, sexist, or in some other way bigoted.
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