Commentary: America at 250 doesn’t need marble saints

At the memorial to Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark, there’s a line carved above the murals: “Great things have been effected by a few men well conducted.”

It’s a good line because it doesn’t put on airs. It doesn’t allude to perfect or powerful men. It says good comes from a few men “well conducted,” those disciplined and guided by something larger than ambition.

Clark beat the British at Fort Sackville (now called Vincennes) in Indiana in 1779. His tiny force crossed freezing floodwaters and took the fort from a far larger British group, securing American claims to the territory that became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. That victory created a practical question for the new nation: What would Americans do with the vast territory they won?

They could have built an empire, treated the West as a colony, or let slavery spread wherever money and power carried it. There was no guarantee at the time that the 13 colonies would coalesce into a unified country, so it was equally plausible that they simply splintered into 13 nations.

Addressing how to handle what became known as the Northwest Territory helped bring them together, and in 1787, Congress adopted the Northwest Ordinance.

That document deserves a larger place in our civic memory, especially as the country marks its 250th birthday. The Ordinance promised that new states could enter the Union on equal footing with the old. It protected religious liberty, trial by jury, education, and the settlers’ basic rights. And in an unprecedented sentence, it declared that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.”

The Northwest Ordinance did not free slaves in the South nor end racism. But it did reinforce something remarkable about the Founders. On the frontier, in one of the country’s very first acts, they chose to put freedom first and keep slavery out.

That fact complicates the easy story we now tell about the Founders.

Modern Americans tend to put the Founders on trial. We see them as imperfect slaveholders. Some were. A few wrote of liberty while holding other human beings in chains. Some made deals with the devil, looked away, and should have done more.

But the Founders were not frauds either. They were men of their time, standing between an old order and a new idea that would eventually condemn much of that world, including their own failures.

Through the Declaration and Northwest Ordinance, they handed us a measuring stick.

Abraham Lincoln knew that. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Stephen Douglas made an argument you still hear today. The “all men are created equal” in the Declaration, he said, did not apply to Black Americans. After all, Jefferson and many who signed it owned slaves. If they lived that way, Douglas argued, then their words must have been for white men of European stock only. Equality was not a universal principle.

It was a clever way to turn a man’s failings against his ideals. Lincoln answered by first conceding that the Founders fell short and they never intended for all men to be equal in all things. But they did mean to declare all men equal in certain natural rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In doing so, Lincoln argued the Founders set a standard. They knew they had not reached it, but they expected later Americans could move toward it.

You see this in the Northwest Ordinance. Rather than let slavery into the Northwest, the Founders restricted its expansion.

This was personal to Lincoln because it influenced his own home state of Indiana. The Ohio River divided slave and free states. Lincoln grew up on the free side; his father moved there in part to avoid slavery. In Indiana, he first read the Ordinance’s ban on slavery and the Declaration’s call for equality.

The Declaration he read as a boy became his compass. He returned to it all his life in debates, at Gettysburg, in the Emancipation Proclamation. He clung to it because a Union stripped of the Declaration’s truths was not worth saving.

That is what we ought to mark on July 4.

Through the Declaration, the Founders gave us precepts no generation has escaped: equality before God and government, consent of the governed, and the duty to set things right when we stray. Marking it does not mean looking away from the Founders’ failings. We do them no favors by making them more than they were. But we are no better off pretending they were less.

That is why Clark Memorial’s sentence lingers for me. “Great things have been effected by a few men well conducted.”

Part of America’s genius is that our best ideals have always indicted our worst practices. The Declaration judged slavery long before we had the stomach to end it. The Northwest Ordinance gave that judgment teeth in Indiana where Lincoln grew. Then Lincoln pressed the issue for the whole country.

America at 250 does not need marble saints, nor does it need to tear down heroes. We need memory mature enough to hold thanks and realism together.

The Founders were flawed. They were also remarkable. They gave America its most powerful claim: that every human being holds rights no majority may deny. You won’t find that promise fully honored in 1776 or 1789, or even today. But it remains the powerful, rightful standard by which we judge ourselves.

That is why the Clark memorial’s sentence still resonates. “Great things have been effected by a few men well conducted.”

The men were not always well conducted. But at their best, they were conducted by an idea better than themselves. If that idea still guides us, great things may yet be effected.

Joshua Claybourn is an attorney and author of the forthcoming book Lincoln’s Compass.

Joshua Claybourn