But here's the problem. It can be dangerously simplistic to speak of the "founders" as a homogeneous collective, and "what the founders believed" or "what the founders intended" in conclusive tones. These are much more complicated questions than most want to admit, especially when arming ourselves with the founders' thoughts and ideals in service of some 21st Century Political debate. Yes, the founders had much in common. They were mainly comprised of land-owning white males of a certain socio-economic status, who would have been considered minor gentry in the British Empire, and therefore near the top of the local hierarchy in the American outpost of that Empire. Yes, many of them were recently arrived at that status, and therefore idealized and exaggerated the virtues which the nobility were supposed to believe in. And yes, they were creatures of their time and their place, many of them educated in the prevailing philosophies of their era, inspired by the words of Locke and Montesquieu, as the enlightenment devotion to reason was displacing trust in Biblical revelation, and deism was all the rage. They were British colonists, and saw the world from that viewpoint. Most of them were far better educated than most Americans today in the history and languages of classical antiquity, and they were especially fascinated by the history of Rome, and its lessons, especially the period surrounding the fall of the Roman Republic and its transformation into an Empire, governed my military dictators beginning with Julius and then Augustus Caesar. Their understanding of science was elementary compared to our own, and their trust in reason without the data which modern scientific instruments have allowed, sometimes led them into absurd beliefs, as for example, Jefferson's refusal, along with other members of the scientific societies to which he belonged, to believe that meteors ever fell from the sky and impacted the earth. They were angered by the events of their time and by their shared interpretations of those events.
But for all of that commonality, anyone who has read even a single (well-written) biography of any one of the founders, and delved into the sometimes violent disagreements they had with one another about the meaning and purpose of the American Revolution, and the proper role of the Federal Government under the Constitution, soon discovers that the way we often speak of "their" vision, in some collective sense, can be incredibly inaccurate and misleading.
Let us take just one commonly believed meme, as an example: "The founders were deists." Everyone who has ever engaged in a freshman dorm argument about the separation of church and state has heard this before. So, what would be involved in trying to defend or refute this commonly shared belief:
The first job would be to define terms. Who "counts" as a "founder" for purposes of this claim? Anyone living in America in 1776 who supported the Declaration of Independence? Or just the members of the Second Continental Congress who approved its final draft and eventually signed it? That would give us Clergyman John Witherspoon, definitely not a deist. But we should of course also include the guys who signed off on the Constitution as it came out of Philadelphia in 1787. Do we include the legislators of the various states who voted to ratify that Constitution in 1788? If so, does that mean we exclude people like Patrick Henry, who argued against ratification, even though most people would think of the person who said "give me liberty or give me death" as, definitely, a founder? Do we include the members of the First Congress to assemble under the new Constitution in 1789, and gave us the Bill of Rights? Or just those that were on that particular committee?
Maybe we just limit the term to the big names we've all heard lots of times before: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison etc. But even here we will run into problems. Does Thomas Paine count? Were it not for the influence of his pamphlet, Common Sense, the Second Continental Congress would never have had the popular support necessary to vote for independence. But Paine held no governmental office, and the biblical history he used to support the arguments in that pamphlet were accepted by an American public which would never have embraced the arguments against Christianity which he asserted to inspire the anti-clerical French Revolutionaries. Still, it's an important question: If I'm arguing for the deism of the founders I'm definitely going to want him on the founers' team. If I'm arguing against, I'm definitely going to want to exclude him.
But even if we can agree on whose opinion counts, we will find further difficulties. At what particular point in a founder's life does that founder's opinion get counted? Alexander Hamilton became far more religious in his older years, after the death of his son, than he was as a young man. It's extremely easy to make the case that Jefferson, who personalized his copy of the New Testament by removing and redacting all the miracles, was a deist. The case is especially easy to make if we focus on the statements he made after his wife died and he took up with his slave Sally Hemmings, in a relationship that certainly did not accord with orthodox Christian teachings, and spent time in France during that nation's very different revolution. But the younger, married, Jefferson, the one who became one of the big-name founders by writing the Declaration of Independence, seems to have been extremely comfortable including religious themes within that document, which relies on the "protection of Divine Providence" and speaks of those rights with which all men have been "endowed by their Creator" and to which they are entitled by the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." Since Jefferson's biggest contribution to the founding was his authorship of the Declaration, does it really matter what he believed about God later in life? Or were his beliefs at the time of his authorship of the Declaration more important to our modern understanding of what the founders were trying to accomplish? Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration was so infused with religiosity that Benjamin Franklin asked him to tone it down, by replacing the phrase "we hold these truths to be sacred" with "we hold these truths to be self-evident" as Jefferson's original wording "smacked of the pulpit" to Franklin. So, OK, Franklin was a deist. But wait: in his final years, Franklin insisted that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia should start beginning their meetings with prayer, to invoke the assistance of divine intervention (a concept which deists don't believe).
The best example of this difficulty, with ascertaining a given "founder's" beliefs, on any particular subject, given that their own views were susceptible to change, during the course of each of their own individual lives, is of course James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution" whose views on the power of the national government under that document kept changing. Madison brought a plan to the Philadelphia Convention which would have given the national centralized government far more power than most of the other delegates were comfortable with, and he left bitterly disappointed that the final document created a much weaker national government than he was hoping to achieve. This opinion changed, however, when Madison realized that the Constitution he envisioned would never have been ratified in the State conventions, and he found it extremely handy to argue that the States should be comfortable ratifying the document, as they were to remain sovereign over all responsibilities and powers which were not expressly delegated to the Federal government in a system of dual sovereignty. Still, he wrote the Federalist Papers with Jay and Hamilton, arguing against the Anti-Federalists' fears of the national government. Subsequently, however, under Jefferson's influence, Madison would start speaking like one of the Anti-Federalists, as he challenged Hamilton's views of the powers which should be assumed by the Federal Government, and joined with Jefferson in creating the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which asserted that individual states had the power to veto federal legislation (a complete inversion of the federal veto power over state laws for which Madison had argued at the constitutional convention, and a theory which would provide the philosophical justification for the secessionist movement that led to the Civil War). After Jefferson's death, Madison's opinions would change again, as he argued in support of a strong federal union during the Nullification Crisis.
This all means that we should be very cautious when throwing around bumper-sticker arguments about what "the Founders" intended, believed, or opined.
That is not to say that it is always a hopeless task to determine what a majority of the founders believed or intended at any given point in time. English is a highly effective and efficient language, and the words that the founders ultimately included in their final signed drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights contained within its first ten amendments are with us still, to guide and direct how the workings of our government are supposed to operate. We can read those words, and, where the meanings have changed or grown obsolete (see for example, an "establishment of religion") we can research the original meanings, to understand the basic parameters of the system the founders created. And we can construe from the system of government which they created, and their writings about the same, what the underlying beliefs and concerns were which motivated their decisions.
We can also look to the precedents the founders created as they established the real government systems which gave life to the words of the written documents. It should be remembered, in that regard, that the American Revolution was fought, in large part, because of many Americans' beliefs that their rights under the British Constitution were being trampled. Britain does not however have a written "constitution." But its citizens have long spoken of a British Constitution, and what governmental actions are or are not "constitutional" thereunder, based on those precedents, charters, historical developments and legislative enactments which have, over time, in fits and starts and in a somewhat organic fashion, created the system of constitutional government (or government as properly "constituted"), which exists in Britain today, or which existed in Britain in earlier eras. Notwithstanding the existence of a written Constitution in America, our own system of government has developed in a somewhat similar fashion, as our written Constitution is not long enough nor detailed enough to answer every possible question. That was its point, to give us a framework for conducting political arguments and operating the government, and to delineate some of the boundaries of what was legitimate (or constitutional) within that system.
But even as we engage in the exercise of understanding the constitutional system the founders erected, we must be cautious about speaking of them too collectively, and we must approach the task of developing a better understanding with a degree of historical literacy which it takes some time and effort to acquire. And as we acquire it, we may be surprised to discover that some of the founders' most deeply held beliefs and opinions, were focused on subjects which have little if anything to do with our modern political arguments, and cannot be readily marshaled to defending our own opinions on modern political controversies.
This is true, for example, of many of the founders' fears, which are given little attention in modern times. [Citation to be inserted]
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