Lives, Fortunes, and Sacred Honor: What the 56 Signers Really Paid | David Barton

[00:00:14] Welcome to The Jenny Beth Show. I'm Jenny Beth Martin. Welcome to The Jenny Beth Show. As America prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation's founding, it's a perfect time to revisit the extraordinary men and ideas that gave birth to the greatest experiment in self-government the world has ever known.

[00:00:35] My guest today is David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, a national organization dedicated to presenting America's forgotten history and heroes with a special emphasis on our nation's moral, religious, and constitutional heritage. Through decades of research, David has built one of the largest private collections of original founding era documents in America.

[00:00:56] He is the author of numerous bestselling books and a trusted resource for lawmakers, educators, and citizens seeking a deeper understanding of America's founding principles. Today we are discussing the upcoming 250th birthday of America and his fascinating new book, Lives, Fortunes, and Sacred Honor, The Signers of the Declaration, co-authored with his son, Tim Barton.

[00:01:20] The book tells the remarkable stories of all 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, revealing their courage, convictions, sacrifices, and the very real costs many of them paid for freedom. David Barton, thank you so much for being back on The Jenny Beth Show for this special Fourth of July episode, which we're airing on July 2nd. And that was the day that John Adams thought America would be celebrating the Independence Day.

[00:01:48] Yeah, this is actually July 2nd is Independence Day. July 4th was Declaration Day. So this is the day that Congress voted. They started what would have been yesterday. They started July the 1st. They took up the question of whether we want to be independent or not. And on July the 2nd, they said, yes, we want to be independent. And then on July the 3rd, they said, now let's get to the wording and let's look at the wording of the independence. And on July the 4th, they approved the Declaration of Independence.

[00:02:15] But actually, July 2nd is Independence Day. That's when we said we're breaking away. So, David, why is it so important that we celebrate America 250? You know, I think celebration is a way of helping us recall. It puts an impression on us. It's something we celebrate. We say, what are we celebrating? Why? And I think for us, it's really so easy for Americans to take for granted the blessings we have.

[00:02:43] And if I can take it back for a little bit, the great research done by the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago Law School, 5,800 years of recorded history, thousands of nations in that time. What's the average length of a governing document? And the answer is between 17 and 19 years. So, we're sitting here at 250. Well, that's what we expect. We're so used to this. We have not had difficulties in our lifetime that would cause us to think the country is going to fall.

[00:03:12] So, everybody lives to be 250 years, right? No. I mean, France had a revolution. France, I don't think we would have won the American Revolution without the help of France. They had a revolution 20 years after the American Revolution, and they're now in their 15th constitution in the same period of time. So, you look at even stable nations and look at what they go through. I think we've got to be really, really careful that we don't take for granted what we have and that we realize how unique it is.

[00:03:41] And that when we celebrate 250, we look back and say, why? How have we survived this long? Why are we different? And I think that's what helps us have another possibility for another 50 or 70 or 100 or maybe 250 even. So, what is it that makes America so special that we are able to get to this milestone? And we should just take one moment to take in what you just said.

[00:04:06] The average length of time that a nation's governing documents work are for 15 to 17 years. My children are 23. That means we would have already gone, we'd be on our second one since they were born. Yeah. Again, this is, we're just so Americanized that we see everything through an American filter. And I think one of the biggest things I've enjoyed about FIFA, I'm not a soccer fan. I'm a basketball guy. So, soccer is not my deal.

[00:04:35] But I am loving seeing all these social media posts from all the people who are coming here to America and saying, this is incredible. We came out of Europe. We thought we were free. Look at America. And they were having a blast, whether it's going to Buc-ee's or being able to, I saw a guy from South Africa. He was just going berserk at a truck stop, pointing to all the semi-trucks, the 18-wheelers that are going through and they're not being robbed. They're going slow and nobody's jumping in and taking the driver out. He said, I've never seen this.

[00:05:05] I think we're surrounded with blessings that the rest of the world is really appreciative of. And I've been having a blast just watching the social media posts from out-of-towners, if you will, out-of-natures, talking about how unique this place is. Yeah, it really is quite an amazing country. And I think so many people today take it for granted. And I hope that as they watch the people who are here from the World Cup as they're posting these amazing posts on social media,

[00:05:34] that Americans realize that some of the things that we really do just take for granted actually really are blessings. Yeah, I mean, we have fights over stuff. And, you know, siblings have fights. Families have fights. And we fight over stuff. And we think that that is really defining stuff. And it's important stuff. But our fights aren't like the fights that you have in the rest of the world. I mean, our fights, okay, we have fights. That's okay. That's part of growing up.

[00:06:01] But, man, we have so many blessings that if we don't get fixated on our blessings, if we just stay fixated on our fights, we will not appreciate what the rest of the world sees when they come here. And we really are a blessed nation. What do you think most Americans don't understand about the blessings that they need to understand more? Not necessarily what the blessings are, but how we came to have such blessings. Yeah, I think that that's a story that's starting to be told again.

[00:06:31] I think really in many ways we're recovering our history. And of all people, Gen Z seems to be the ones that are embracing this the best and the fastest. They seem to be the ones that are becoming the most patriotic. You know, the boomers, me. And then we had the Gen X, Gen Y. But Gen Z is going back to really the buster generation, if you will. They're going back to loving their country.

[00:06:58] We're seeing a rise of patriotism among Gen Z and even Alpha that we haven't seen in the other generations. And so there's something positive going on right now as people are looking at this and they're appreciated in different ways. But I think one of the things that's coming out in this is that we're starting to recover our story, the story of who we are. I speak at law schools and universities across the nation. My son Tim does as well.

[00:07:26] And I was at Duke University Law School and put up a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Those 56 guys, that famous massive painting in the U.S. Capitol, put that up and said, call by name who you recognize up there. And they got two names, Jefferson and Franklin. I said, there's 56 guys. Come on, give me some more. And they can't. And Tim, who does the same thing at universities, he has a gift card he carries with him. He said, I'll give you this gift. Anybody who can name five signers of the Declaration, I'll give you this gift card.

[00:07:55] He's had the same gift card for nine years. I mean, nobody knows who these guys are. So we're celebrating something. We don't know who did it. We don't know how they did it, why they did it. And we're starting to rediscover that. We're starting to find out who a Button Gwinnett is, for example, from Georgia. We're starting to find out who a Thomas Lynch Jr. is and guys that we've never heard before. And we'll find these are remarkable people. And in many ways, they're kind of, I'm going to say average. They were used by God.

[00:08:24] But we just finished a book called Lies, Fortune, Sacred Honor. And it's just a short bio, 1,500 words maybe on each of the 56 signers. And I was struck with the fact how human they were in the sense that I look at them as a remarkable group. I know the 56. But you take Button Gwinnett of Georgia, signed the Declaration. He was one of the seven guys who did not survive the Declaration of Independence. He died before he saw independence. But he wasn't killed by the British.

[00:08:53] He was killed by another American. He got in a fight with an American, and an American general killed an American signer of the Declaration. And then I look at two signers from Maryland, Samuel Chase and Charles Carroll. And those guys were passing legislation in the legislature to cancel each other. One would pass legislation. The other would pass it to cancel what he did. And you go, these guys really are human after all. They have the same kind of flaws we do, but they had a love for liberty that drove them

[00:09:21] to go beyond their differences and go beyond what made them disagree with each other to something even bigger. And I think that's something worth capturing is that we're all individuals. They weren't monolithic. They weren't the same guys. They didn't even like each other some of the time. But nonetheless, they fought together and joined together for liberty. And that's a good lesson to learn. So your book, it covers each of the signers?

[00:09:47] It covers each of the 56 signers, the names that most of us have never heard. And it puts a face and a story together. And you come out thinking, I would love to have this guy as my neighbor next door. They're really cool people. You named it lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. I think most Americans are familiar with that phrase. But I don't know if they understand exactly what it meant when those 56 men signed that paper. Yeah, that's a great point.

[00:10:17] And so let me go back to the paper they signed. So the paper they signed, it begins with 161 words that set forth a governing philosophy. We in America, this is what we believe government should do. 161 words, six principles of government. Then after they set forth the six principles of government, they then give you 27 grievances, 27 examples showing how those principles have been violated by the British.

[00:10:45] Here's the six things we believe government should do. Actually, it's five things and then one extraordinary measure. They say these are the five things government should do. And if a government does not do those five things, you have the right to get a new government, which is what they were doing. They were exercising measure number six. So the first five are principles. Then they give 27 grievances saying, hey, remember that principle we just told you about? Here's how the British are violating that principle. This, this, we want the freedom to do these things.

[00:11:13] And so at the end, they say, now having laid it all out, having told the world what we believe and what we're going to do, we now mutually pledge our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to achieve these goals. And so that's, that's the final part of the declaration. The third part where it's the commitment part, where they're announcing to the world that having given you the principles of government, having shown you how the British have violated that in 27 areas, we pledge our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to make this, this new government happen. And they did.

[00:11:43] Now it's cool. We cannot find a single case of any one of them having compromised their sacred honor. But when it comes to lives, seven of them did not live to see what they wanted the rest of us to have. And when it came to fortunes, over half of them lost all they had and were never repaid for by their government for the sacrifices they made, even for the government that they just lost everything. So they did give lies, fortunes. They were willing to give sacred honor and they gave all their honor, but they didn't lose their honor.

[00:12:12] And that's the cool thing about them. There's not a single case of backtracking by any one of those. Not one of them renounced their decision. Not one of them backed off from what they pledged. It's a really cool group. What were the five principles? The five principles starts with there is a God. There's a creator. Then it says there are moral laws that he's established, the laws of nature, nature's God. Then the creator gives certain rights to every individual.

[00:12:42] And then it talks about how that those rights are to be protected by government, God-given rights protected by government. And then after you get through those points, it says then below that you have the consent of the government. And that's significant because they didn't give you the consent of the government when it came to inalienable rights, the right to life. We don't care what the vote is on that. God gave you a right to life. It doesn't matter what the vote is. God gave you a right to liberty. God gave you a right to self-defense. It doesn't matter what the vote is on that. You have those inalienable rights.

[00:13:11] But below that, when it comes to speed limits or traffic lights or size of sidewalks or zoning ordinances, that's the consent of the governed. And then the sixth principle says that any government that won't do those first five things, you have a right to create a new government that will do those five things. So those are the six principles that set forth in those 161 words. Let's delve into the rights endowed by the creator. And how is that?

[00:13:41] Elaborate more on how those rights are different than the right to drive a car, speed limits or whatever, the ones that are endowed by the creator. Yeah. You have those God-given inalienable rights that every individual has a right to simply because you're born and you exist. Then you have those rights that are government-granted rights, and they come below that. They can never violate those above.

[00:14:09] And so what's significant is the founding fathers looked to what they call the laws of nature, nature's God, to define even inalienable rights. And that phrase, laws of nature, nature's God, came out of the most famous law book of that day, Blackstone's Commentaries. Thomas Jefferson said that American attorneys studied that law book the same way that Muslims studied the Koran. So everybody knew that law book and his phrases. And it talks about the dual revelation of God, that when God created earth and created man

[00:14:38] and created nature and all the animals that exist, he had the law of creation and he had the law of nature's God. So the law of creation is that you have a right to self-defense. I don't care what species you are in nature. When you get attacked or your family gets attacked or your life gets attacked, you're going to defend yourself. It doesn't matter if it's a mama cow with a baby calf. It doesn't matter if it's baby rattlesnakes or anything else. There is a right to self-defense. That comes from God. That doesn't come from any law that's passed by any person.

[00:15:08] And that's the things that we call our Bill of Rights. These are what the founding fathers said. These are the rights that come from the laws of nature, nature's God. No government gives us these rights, the right to life, the right to be born. Every mammal species has a right to be born. From the time that there is conception to the time of natural birth, you have a right to be born. That's the natural process. The same thing with so many other natural rights. Liberty is another one.

[00:15:34] There's not, you don't find examples in nature of one species enslave in another. They used to say, well, there's two species of ants and one enslave is the other. And now they backed off and said, you know, it's really not. They work together. It's a symbiotic relation. So there is no example of enslavement in nature. And those are all things you don't need written laws on. That's in nature. But they said now, and they pointed out that because man sinned, Adam and Eve sinned, then it clouded our understanding. We didn't understand everything.

[00:16:04] So that's where God said, let me just write it down for you. And that's the laws of nature's God. That's the written law. So like the 10 commandments, which tells you, you don't have the right to kill someone. You don't have the right to take somebody else's life. You don't have the right to take somebody else's property. Those are all the laws of nature's God. And so those are the two standards that they use in the declaration based on God's creation, based on God's written law. These are the standards that he's given us. And that's what Great Britain is violating.

[00:16:31] And when they signed the paper with pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, you have now studied the life of each of them. Where did you, how did you study them? Where did you do your research? And what surprised you the most? Ask that last question again. What surprised you the most while you were researching? That's a great question. So, I mean, let me just set the stage.

[00:17:01] You study history all the time. So for you to study, to prepare, to write this book is kind of remarkable because many people would think, oh, David Barton, he knows everything about the American history. And even you were studying to prepare for him. Yeah, I'm kind of, I have the same faults every other human does. And part of that is kind of hero worship. You know, I know the big boys. I know George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and those guys, but, you know,

[00:17:30] George Clymer, maybe not. And Thomas McKean, not sure. And Thomas Nelson Jr. So with 56 guys, I know a lot of the bigger names that are out there. And it has just not crossed my mind to go back and research like my great, great, great, great, great grandfather, whoever he might be. You know, I know my parents. I know my grandparents. I don't think about going back generations. And it was the same way with the founders. As I knew most of them, I recognized the name. Oh, he's a signer of the declaration.

[00:18:00] And if somebody said, well, can you tell me a story about him? I would go, no. I can tell you what state he's from. I can tell you he signed it. But I didn't know their stories. And that's where it got fun was to go back and, if you will, kind of be introduced to them and get invited into their house. And here's my life. And here's what I think. And here's what I did. That was what was unique about these guys because I kind of felt like I knew them until I studied them individually.

[00:18:28] And then I go, wow, I really didn't know these guys. So that was a big deal for me, going back and finding those guys, especially the ones that I knew of, but I didn't really know their story. You know, it's like I know the president's United States, but if you asked me to give you stories on Andrew Johnson, president of the United States, I'm going to be a little skimpy on that. I don't know many stories about him. And I think that's the way it is with the founding fathers. We know the presidents. Well, give me stories on them.

[00:18:59] It's kind of sketchy. Same with the signers and declaration. And then where did you do your research? How did you prepare? You know, we've been super blessed. We have we are the only museum. We have two museums here in Fort Worth, Dallas area. We just got a new facility with 172,000 square feet of four acres under roof displaying this stuff. But right now we're the only museum in America that has on display a signed document from all 56 signers of the declaration.

[00:19:28] Now, the Smithsonian Institution and National Archives, they have documents like that, but they don't like the founders right now. So they don't display that stuff. So we're really the only place you can go that we know in America right now. The only museum is somebody else just came online where you can see that stuff. And so really, we went back into so many of the archives that we have. We have textbooks and history books. We have history books from back in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s.

[00:19:55] And it's fun to read history books from like the early 1800s because that's the kids and the grandkids of the guys who fought in the revolution. And so it's like they're talking about their family members. And it's like if you ask my kids about me, they'll be able to tell you more stories than if you ask 100 years from now. And so we went back into history books that were contemporary with these guys living that had interesting stories and perspectives.

[00:20:22] And it's just a lot of fun kind of hearing from the kids and the grandkids and the neighbors and the townspeople that lived with the founding fathers and saw what they did. And that's where we did so much of the research. Okay. And then as you were researching it, what did the British think of these men who signed the documents? You know, that's a really interesting question. And the answer to that today is different from what if you'd asked me two months ago. Wow.

[00:20:52] And the reason is that one of the things President Trump is doing right now is he's bringing back monuments to help us remember. You know, in the Bible, when Joshua went to the promised land, God said, hey, you guys build a really big monument so that when your kids see that and say, what's that all about? You can tell them the story. And so there are 400 statues now going up in Washington, D.C. that haven't been there before. And they're statues to tell stories.

[00:21:16] They just erected just on the east side of the White House 12 new statues on soldiers of the American Revolution. And they're soldiers whose stories we used to know, previous generations knew, but we don't know now. Six of them are black patriots. Six of them are white patriots. And of those six white patriots, three of them are actually preachers who were in the Revolution. One was a major general, the same rank as George Washington. He was under Washington.

[00:21:41] But going back and looking at those stories and recalling them and having monuments to them, that's really important stuff. And so to be able to keep that for generations to come, one of the things that's going up right now when they built back in 1909, I think, they built a bridge that connects the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington Cemetery. When they did that, they put 40 pedestals on it for 40 statues to be placed on that bridge.

[00:22:09] So as you drove across that bridge, you'd see those people and say, who's that? Well, those are going to be filled with Medal of Honor recipients. So as you're driving back and forth to Arlington Cemetery, you're thinking, Medal of Honor. Oh, there's Audie Murphy. Oh, there's John Bassalone. Oh, there's Alvin York. You know, those are names we don't know now, but we need to. We should know those names. And so that's part of the fun part of what's happening right now is there's a renewing coming back of our history.

[00:22:38] And these statues are really they're really highly visited right now. People are going there and reading the stories about them. So to answer your question, the British, the way they looked at this. There's there's a monument they just erected outside the White House, and it's called the Prisonship Memorial. And it's a memorial to those in the American Revolution who lost their lives in American prisons that were being operated by the British. Now, here's where it gets interesting.

[00:23:07] In the American Revolution, you have about 200,000 individuals who fought in the revolution. Of those 200,000, 25,000 were killed as a result of involvement in the war. Of the 25,000 who died, 7,000 died from bullet wounds. 18,000 died from being a prisoner of war camps.

[00:23:32] So it's nearly three times more lethal to be captured by the British than it is to be shot by the British. And you go, what's going with that? George Washington from the very first tried to work out prisoner exchanges and regular prisoner of war treatments. And the British said, no, you guys are not recognized as being in war. You're in rebellion. This is a civil war. You're a bunch of insurrectionists. You're a bunch of terrorists. And so Great Britain would not accord them the rights that you would give to a normal prisoner of war.

[00:24:01] They wouldn't treat them like a prisoner of war. They wouldn't treat them like an enemy fighting. They treated them as if they were civil war combatants. And so it was really, really dangerous to fight in the American Revolution and be captured by the British. Again, you're three times more likely to die in British captivity than you are from British bullets.

[00:24:21] And that's something I hadn't really realized how dangerous it was to be captured by the British at a time when if the British had captured the French, they treated them well. If they captured the Spanish, they treated them well. If they captured an American, you're not like. Now, 80 percent of the people in Prevost's jail died in that jail. They never got out of that jail once they were put in it. They died in the jail. You had about the same thing, about 80 percent on the prison ship in Jersey out in New York Harbor.

[00:24:49] If they put you on that prison ship, that's a death sentence. And it was a slow death sentence. They starved you to death. You were abused, tormented. So that's something that I learned that I didn't know until just about two months ago. And before that, you thought that the prisoners were treated OK? Yeah. You know, generally at that time back then, you had pretty, pretty good civility. I mean, great example.

[00:25:15] When George Washington, not George Washington, when we under George Washington's commander in chief, when we won the Battle of Saratoga, our first major victory in 1777, we captured 6,000 British prisoners. You know what we did with those prisoners? We got them all lined up, said, now, if you guys are promised not to shoot at us anymore, we'll let you keep your gun. You can get on a boat and you can go back to Great Britain. War's over for you. King's X, time out. And that's what they did.

[00:25:41] We marched 6,000 prisoners, let them keep their weapons, put them on ships, send them back to Britain. That was the climate in which wars were conducted back then. It was kind of an honorable thing, if you can say that about a war. And so I thought that was kind of the way the British would treat us because we were British citizens like they were. We were all British until we separated. So same mentality. It wasn't. They saw us as lower than an enemy. We were way below an enemy.

[00:26:07] The way they treated every other enemy, whether it was, again, France or Spain or Italy, anybody else, they treated Americans at the bottom of the barrel. And I had not recognized that we were so despised by the British during that war. Or I thought we had the same treatment every other nation got. And that was just not the case. Do you think that when they signed the document, they knew that's how the British were going to treat them? I don't think so. Because so many times in the war, Washington appealed to the British generals and said, what are you doing?

[00:26:37] This is not the way you conduct war. You've never done it this way. What are you doing? And Washington even on multiple occasions said, if you don't stop mistreating our folks, we're going to start mistreating your folks. And it didn't stop the British and we didn't mistreat their folks. We weren't. You know, it was a threat that he never followed through on. And it's just significant. I don't think we had a clue what was happening in the early years of the revolution.

[00:27:02] We took people like Elias Boudinot, who is the president of Congress, put him over the prisoner negotiations. And he protested to the British all the time on the terrible treatment. And it didn't slow them down in the least. So I think the founding fathers, I know the founding fathers were shocked at the way that they were treated, at the way that the women were treated. Elizabeth Lewis signed a declaration. Frances Lewis, his wife was put in a prisoner of war jail. And she was abused and mistreated.

[00:27:31] And nobody would think of mistreating a woman back then in that way. But they did for her because she's the wife of the sign of the declaration. And that just shocked the founding fathers. They were not prepared for that. Did you think that they knew that they might be risking their lives? Not the torture so much as prisoners of war, but that they may be when they sign lives, fortunes.

[00:27:54] Do you think they realize they may actually die or that they may actually lose all of their possessions or half their wealth? I think they recognized that was a possibility. And the reason I say that is because none of them backed up from that pledge. So I don't think they gave their word lightly. Secondly, when they gave their word, they kept their word, which kind of tells me they were prepared to do that. They were mentally prepared to set things aside.

[00:28:21] And just, I mean, even looking at how some of the people who, and back then we had debtor's jails. If you were, now this doesn't make any sense, but it was the way the world did it. If you were in debt and couldn't pay, they put you in prison until you paid your debt. Well, if you're in prison, you can't work. You don't have a job. There's no way you can make income. How are you going to pay the debt off if you're in prison? But they had debtor's prisons.

[00:28:44] And so you'll find the people like Robert Morris and other founding fathers, nobody would give America a loan in those early years. I mean, who would? I mean, if 56 guys say, I'm going to take on Russia and overthrow Russia, we'd say, you're crazy and we're not going to back your revolution. Nobody was giving loans to the founding fathers. So they took it out of their own pockets. And in doing so, American government was unable to pay them back. We didn't have money to operate.

[00:29:11] There were times where no soldier got paid for months on end. We just didn't have the money. And so what happened, these guys' founding fathers were in debt when the war ended, and they get thrown in debtor's prison because they can't pay their debts. Well, they voluntarily gave it all for America, but they still go to debtor's prison like Robert Morris and others. And so that tells me that they were willing to do that. I mean, they did it. They got there. They didn't complain about being there.

[00:29:40] They understood what was going on. That's the way the law is written. And it just tells me a whole lot about their commitment and their willingness. It's like they counted the cost before they got there, and there's not a single instance of even one of them even slightly backing up on having given their word. Nobody regretted it. So as you were researching this, David, did you learn about what they were thinking as they went into the process? What gave them the courage to risk so much?

[00:30:06] You know, as you go through the process, one of the things that we found to write in this book was they were not as unified on liberty as I had thought they were. When that motion was made on June the 7th by Richard Henry Lee, they said, let's separate from Great Britain. Congress had time out, pulled it. And so they took his motion to separate and become independent, and they tabled that motion. And it was a month before they picked it up again. And they said, we need to investigate this.

[00:30:35] Let's look into this more. And so at that point in time, they tabled the motion for independence. They chose a committee of five and said, you guys go look at this. See if there's a document we can write up that might explain this. If we want to write up a document, if we do, what should we put in it? And that's the five folks that did the Declaration of Independence. And so they work on it, and Jefferson wrote it for 17 days and worked on it back and forth over 17 days and, you know, X out this part and add this part. And they were going back and forth.

[00:31:05] And during that time, they had some test votes in Congress. And there was a time when more than half the colonies did not want to separate. And this is after the motion for independence has been made. And so there's times when, no, we can't do it. As a matter of fact, Pennsylvania, more than half their delegation voted not to separate. So Pennsylvania recalled those delegates, sent more delegates that would vote to separate. So it's really clear that they weren't going into this thing all unified and all together.

[00:31:36] And Delaware, when they had the vote on the Declaration of Independence, they had three delegates. One voted yes, one voted no, and the other was home in bed with cancer. And one of the delegates that voted yes got that with cancer-ridden delegate said, you got to get on your horse and come vote. Otherwise, we're not going to win this thing, this vote. He got on his horse, rode 80 miles with cancer, got out of his sickbed, his deathbed, and went through lightning storms, et cetera, got there and cast his vote as a yes.

[00:32:05] And so Delaware becomes a yes vote, two to one. And it's just real clear these guys weren't all coalesced and unified wanting to do this. They worked their way into it over hours and hours of debate. There was one speech that John Adams himself personally gave that lasted over two hours, and that speech is credited with winning more than half the delegates. John Adams went through and said, guys, here's what we're looking at. Here's our options. Here's what we'll face if we do and if we don't.

[00:32:33] And that two hours, which tells me their minds weren't made up yet. That two-hour speech that he gave converted more than half the delegates to his side, which means they hadn't made up their minds. So it's not as clear cut as I had expected, you know, because we celebrate 250 after the fact. But at the time it was going on, it was really tenuous and still in the air. Yeah.

[00:32:55] As you're sitting there describing that, David, I think about the debate on the Senate floor right now or the lack of the debate. And, of course, we've been working very hard on the Save America Act and the debate on it has – it isn't a real debate. It's just not.

[00:33:15] And these men were doing something so much more difficult than passing a bill that 80-plus percent of Americans agree on regardless of the party. And they had real conversations. They had real debate. They had real speeches. And they were listening to one another and were willing to learn and to have their opinion shaped.

[00:33:43] And it seems like right now in Congress and around the country there are many people who are unwilling to have those kind of conversations where they listen to the other side and they think, well, maybe there's a point or at least I can see where they're coming from. Yeah. The polarization that exists right now is really, really bad. And we react to labels. And we don't even ask what the label represents. What does it mean to be a liberal or a conservative?

[00:34:11] What does it mean to be a Democrat or Republican? We don't even know. We just get the label. And so I was – one of the big things that as I look back in history and, you know, we have this 160,000 documents from history. Look back and the turning point for me is in the 1920s. And in the 1920s, what happened is we changed the pedagogy of education.

[00:34:39] We know – for three centuries we taught students how to think. In 1920, we said we need to teach you how to learn. And what happened at that point was Henry Ford and others talked about, hey, we got all these assembly lines. We got all these textile mills. We don't need – we need workers who will take orders. We don't need workers who will think. We need workers who will do what they're told to do. We have all this mass production coming out. And that's when education changed.

[00:35:06] That's the first time in American history you will see a true-false question. First time in American history you'll see a multiple choice or a fill-in-the-blank. And it's all about did I, the teacher, tell you this, true or false? Did I, the teacher, tell you A, B, C, or D? And it's all about repeating back what we've been told. We're no longer self-feeders. And so if somebody says, you know, Democrats can't be trusted because they're all a bunch of liars, we say, oh, that's a bunch of liars.

[00:35:32] We don't ask the question, are all Democrats liars or just some? Are all Republicans racist? And we don't ask the questions. We just take and buy into whatever they say. And that's where it has changed so much. We are no longer thinkers. We are reactors. We react to labels. And that goes on both sides. And I'm struck with one of the things that we do in the summer is we train young people and back the classical kind of principles.

[00:36:00] And one of those is the principles of thinking. And Jesus was really good on that. In the Bible, Jesus asked 339 different questions. He answered very few questions, but he's asking them all the time. And so we show students how to ask questions to their professors. You don't have to be combative at all. You've got a progressive professor. You've got a professor who thinks there's 81 genders or whatever it is. Here's some questions you can ask. And just be the dumb student.

[00:36:27] You know, Mr. Professor, I'm not sure about this, but what about this? And just ask without combativeness. And we've literally had professors that have been pro-abortion become pro-life simply by a few questions a kid asked. We've had them socialists who have become free market simply by being asked questions. And so we're into the situation now. We don't have real debates. We react to soundbites.

[00:36:52] The average soundbite at the time that Nixon was elected president of the United States was 78 seconds, if you can imagine. The average soundbite now is under five seconds. So how can you have a discussion with a five-second soundbite? We don't. We just feed the system. And so all of us need to take a step back up and start using our brains and start asking questions. What's the consequence of that? Is that going to work the way they said they did? What would be the downside if it did pass? What's the upside of it?

[00:37:21] We don't ask those questions anymore. And that's what we all have to get back to doing is thinking, not learning. You are so right about that. And I think that there are sometimes when people are making decisions based on a split second on, if they're using TikTok or Instagram Reels, they're just swiping through so quickly that they're doing it without even getting to five seconds. 78 seconds, that sounds like an eternity to most people. That's a year and a half.

[00:37:50] Yeah, yeah. You mentioned a few minutes ago that the founders were very familiar with the Blackstone commentary. What other documents and books and authors influenced them? You know, that's a great question. And that's a question worth asking because, again, with 5,800 years of history, we're the only one that's gone as far as we have.

[00:38:16] And so at the University of Houston, professors said, well, everybody's got access to the same set of ideas. Where did our founding fathers get their ideas? And they had a brilliant idea. They said, we think if we go back through the writings of the founding fathers and go through there, and you can't go through their writings. George Washington alone has 123,000 individual letters and documents that he wrote by himself.

[00:38:41] So when you throw in 250 founders, the 55 signers of 55 who created the Constitution, 39 who signed it, the 56 who signed the Declaration, the early presidents, the 17 major generals, the early governors, Patrick Henry. You throw in 250 founding fathers, you've got millions of documents. But what these guys did is that we're going to go through their governing documents, their state constitutions that they wrote, their public documents.

[00:39:10] And we're going to see who they quoted. And that'll tell us where they got their ideas. So what they did was they started with a collection of 15,000 documents from founding era. And these are documents on the conventions that met for this purpose or that purpose or the Stamp Act or whatever. And they said, we're all going to look for quotes in quotation marks so that we know it's a real quote. It's something that they quoted. And so then they reduced that 15,000 down to 1,000 documents.

[00:39:37] They said, these are the key documents, the original state constitution of the 13 colonies, the original, all the stuff. And as they went through, they found 3,156 direct quotes in those 1,000 documents. They said, now, our challenge is to find the original source of every one of those quotes. It took them 10 years, but they found the original source of every one of those quotes. They then published a book called The Origins of American Exceptionalism.

[00:40:05] Every American should have this in your reference library. The Origins of American Constitutionalism, I say Exceptionalism, Origins of American Constitutionalism. And it shows you the number one person that the founding fathers cited most often was Baron Charles Montesquieu. In 1750, he did a two-volume set called The Spirit of the Laws, had a lot on the separation of powers, which was not being done much then. The number two source they cited was William Blackstone.

[00:40:34] The number two individual they cited was William Blackstone, 7.9%. He had the four-volume commentaries on the laws from 1766 to 1769. He wrote that. The number three most cited individual was John Locke, who wrote the two treatises of government in 1690. That was especially heavily used when they wrote the Declaration, but that was the third most cited individual. But the single most cited source was the Bible.

[00:41:04] 34% of all the founding fathers' quotes came out of the Bible, followed at 8.3% by Montesquieu, 7.9% by Blackstone, and 2.9% by Locke. That's the four sources they cited the most often of all the knowledge that's out there in the world that they could gather. Those are the four that they went to most. So the Bible is used four times more often than Blackstone and Montesquieu and 12 times more often than Locke.

[00:41:30] Nobody today thinks of the Bible as the greatest political textbook. The founding fathers proved that it was, and that's their documentation. That's their references. That's what they did. Well, and they were thinking a lot more than we are today. That's right. Because you're right, we've been taught to learn rather than think.

[00:41:50] And so it makes sense that if we can study and think about what they were leaning on and go back and make sure we're familiar with that, I think it would make us better Americans. Totally agree. But I'll be careful how I say this. Four volumes of Blackstone sounds like a lot, though, I have to say.

[00:42:13] I love Blackstone, especially his volume one, chapter two, where he talks about the laws of nature, nature's God, and goes into that in detail what that means. But John Locke is a tough guy. I mean, he wrote this in 1690. And so since the founding fathers used it, especially in writing the declaration, I thought, you know, it'd be nice to have a modern language version of John Locke. Now, why do I say that? Because the Fleischer scale is something that we use.

[00:42:39] You can run your term paper, your research paper through it, and it'll tell you what grade level it's written on. And if you want a best-selling book, all the great best-selling authors, literature guys, whether it be Hemingway or Faulkner or Mishner or anybody else, they write at about a sixth-grade vocabulary level. That's what they write at. Most newspapers are done at a ninth-grade vocabulary level.

[00:43:03] John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, when I ran it through the Fleischer scale, it was 78th grade level. Wow. Are you kidding me? He had one sentence, one sentence that was 278 words long, one sentence. And you go, our founding fathers read that and understood it and used it. And quoted from it. And quoted from it.

[00:43:26] You know, and so I've taken that 278-word sentence, and where he has commas, I put periods in, so I've kind of made it down. So I've got it down to where it's about 11th grade now, still his words, just different punctuation. But that was the thinking capacity they had. They weren't learners. They were thinkers. And, man, they were able to build a nation. We couldn't do that today with what we know because we're too much learners.

[00:43:52] But they are the thinkers, and stuff like Locke shows how good of thinkers they were. That is pretty amazing. And so the version that you have, do you have it available? I haven't published it yet. I still want to. And it's just like it's just not the highest thing on my list because I don't think that's going to be a bestselling book with Americans. It's going to be a great reference book, not a great bestselling book. So we got the one out with the signers of the declaration first because people enjoy that.

[00:44:21] But at some point, Locke's going to come back out because those principles are too good for people not to know. And I am seeing right now we're debating in Texas as our State Board of Education is meeting, and it's a big contested thing. We're finishing our history and social studies and government standards in Texas. And if we win the vote this week, we will be taking a huge step back toward classical learning and classical education for our 5.7 million students here in Texas.

[00:44:48] And so as that happens, and that's going to happen across the nation, I already know a bunch of other states doing the same thing. As that happens, 10 years from now, we're going to have students that will be able to read John Locke and understand it and know what it means. And so I think that's a book that's going to be coming out in the future, but not yet. David, explain to people what you mean when you say classical education, because I think there are a lot of people who've heard the phrase, but they don't completely understand how it teaches how to think. Yeah.

[00:45:17] Classical education is about teaching you how to think. It asks questions, and like Jesus, we pointed out in the Gospels, he asks 339 questions. It asks questions on a regular basis, and it has you read the classical books that were read in previous generations. I was working this week with our lieutenant governor in Texas, and lieutenant governor in Texas was chosen by—he's a good friend of Trump.

[00:45:41] Trump put him over the Religious Liberty Commission, and so there were seven hearings heard on how religious liberty has been attacked, and one of them is in the military, and so in the military, one of the—and it started with Obama in 2011. He just started stripping the military of faith and religion and chaplains and everything else, limiting chaplains, what they could and couldn't say, and wouldn't even let them have services many places.

[00:46:05] And so it goes back to—we used to teach what was called the just war theory. Now, the just war theory is what has made Western civilization. It tells you when war is just and when it's unjust, and it goes back to Bible. There are times—a war of offensive aggression is not a just war, and God's not going to bless it. If it's a defensive war, God will bless that. We felt like the American Revolution was a defensive war. We didn't fire the first shot. The British came after us.

[00:46:33] We defended ourselves, our homes, our properties, and that was a big deal. And the founding fathers wanted to make sure they did not get into a wrong type of war. And so we used to teach that in the war college, even in America, up until about 15 years ago. We taught just war theory. Just war theory comes out of two books. One was written by a theologian in 300 A.D., and the other was written in 1290 A.D. by another theologian. It's the whole concept of what makes a war right and wrong. When is it okay to take a life?

[00:47:03] When is it not okay to take a life? Self-defense, a war of defense versus a war of Islamic aggression where you just go in and start conquering people. We understood that, and we don't teach that anymore. Classics is going back to the classics that developed Western civilizations thinking over millennia. This is the stuff that's been developed over irrespective of country, of nation, of language. This is what's developed of thinking that we've had.

[00:47:30] And so what we've had is progressive thinking for the last century, and that's all that's being taught. We don't know what the classics are. We don't know what Cicero said. We don't know why the founding fathers such as Jefferson loved Cicero. We don't know how they leaned on St. Thomas Aquinas or anything else. Classical education is going back to the ideas that made Western civilization the greatest civilization in the world.

[00:47:53] I think that as AI becomes more and more prevalent, being able to think is going to become more and more important because maybe some people would disagree with it. I have been doing a lot with AI, and you can use it like glorified Google. So you can use it like a glorified search engine, but you also can train it and make it work and do things, really cool things for you.

[00:48:21] And what I've done is probably fairly limited compared to what others have done. But the point is this. As it sits here and it spits things out to you, you've got to know, is this real? Is it right? Is it factual? Where is it getting the information? If it's not getting the information from a valid source, how do you tell it to – how do you guard against what they call hallucinations?

[00:48:45] So you have to be able to think in order to get AI to be as powerful for you as it actually can be. You can't just – it isn't just multiple choice. When it gives you an answer, you've got to be able to discern whether what it's giving you is actually helpful or if it's a bunch of garbage.

[00:49:05] And so I think that as – and I also have thought that as AI is able to do more and more and more, that the more humans can think, the better they're going to be able to adapt to the future as we are living in a world where AI and quantum computing are happening on a regular basis. You have to be able to go through the logic of thinking.

[00:49:32] So I hope that Texas embraces this and does it and that other states around the country follow Texas's lead. I think it's very important that we're teaching kids how to think. And heaven knows in the last two decades, it isn't even that we're teaching them how to learn. We've just been indoctrinating them on horrible principles.

[00:49:55] So if they can think, then they can look at the different principles and think for themselves about whether they make sense or not. You know, progressives are always in this mode of we're always progressing and moving forward and you can't learn from the past. By definition of their philosophy, history is the least important course you can have because we're always progressing past that. We won't make the same mistakes they made. Why would we study those mistakes?

[00:50:24] Why would we study those successes? And so it's striking to me that in all 50 states right now, you go through a public school education. The only course that does not have an end of course test is history. Now, for STEM, science and electronics and engineering and mathematics, we test all that. We test language arts. We test everything. We do not test on history in any of the 50 states. We don't have an end of course test.

[00:50:51] Now, the significance of that is teachers are going to teach because of the test. That's where they get merit pay. It's how the students do on their test. And that's what gets them extra pay. And so we've gone through now 40 years of under-emphasis on history. So we don't even know who we are. We have Amnesia as a nation. And what happens is AI can only spit back to you what has been put into it. And what's been put into it in the last 40 years is a lack of any kind of historical perspective.

[00:51:19] And so it does hallucinate and you get back merely the pablum, a regurgitation of what's been taught for the last several decades. Now, working with Glenn Beck right now, Glenn Beck's coming up with a new AI that will be released. And we have a closed environment there. And the only environment that it can be exposed to are documents that were printed from the death of the founding fathers and earlier, the stuff that they would have consulted. It stops.

[00:51:49] John Quincy Adams died in 1847. It stops about there. Anything after 1847, it can't even go there. And we've trained our AI that when we look, we will not accept anything unless it has multiple original sources. We won't take any professor's word. We won't take any encyclopedia's word. We want you going back to the original sources and documents. And that's a hard train.

[00:52:14] So as this thing is moving and shifting, what has happened with all these other courses you have in the test course but not history? Well, that's starting to change now. And the reason I say this is significant is when you look at right now, if you want to be an immigrant to the United States legally, if you're going to be a legal immigrant, it takes you five years. Part of that, you have to pass the immigration test. Now, the immigration part of the requirement for five years, you can do that in three months. You can take the immigration course.

[00:52:44] In three months, you can pass it. And right now, 91 percent of immigrants who come into America to be citizens pass that test on the first try. So after three months, you've been in Antarctica all your life. You didn't even know the word America existed. And now you're here and you want to be a citizen. In three months, you can pass the test, 91 percent. Joe Foss, who was an ace in World War II, fought at Guadalcanal, Medal of Honor recipient, went on to serve two terms as governor of South Dakota. He started the AFL.

[00:53:13] He started the Super Bowl. The National Rifle Association he was president of. He, in his latter years, moved to Arizona. And he looked at the kids in Arizona and said, they don't know much about civics. And so this was in the 90s and the 2000s. And so he said, what if we were to take all the kids in Arizona and as their exit exam from history in high school gave them the immigrant test? What if high school kids had to pass the immigrant test?

[00:53:41] And so Arizona was the first state to say, hey, we're going to make the U.S. immigration test the high school exit exam. Now, 13 states now do that. So 13 states have used the – we don't have an end-of-course test for history, but now 13 states use that. Here's the deal. As of right now, only 4 percent of American high school students are able to pass the immigration test. Ninety-one percent of immigrants can get it after three months.

[00:54:06] After 12 years of American public education, only 4 percent of our kids are able to pass that immigration test. That's how bad history education is, and that's how bad education is in America right now. Yeah, it is absolutely horrible. And if they don't understand history, of course they're going to embrace ideas like Marxism and socialism because they really don't know any better.

[00:54:30] And they've been indoctrinated in schools into thinking that capitalism doesn't work and it works best when you throw in a sprinkling or a huge chunk of Marxism to go with it. But the AI that you mentioned, when you were talking about the University of Houston and the governing documents and the 15 years or so that it took them to come up with the sources,

[00:54:58] now imagine putting all of that into AI, like all of those governing documents. You said you couldn't put in the letters because 100,000 letters for George Washington and you multiply that by 56 signers and it's so much. But you could put all of that into AI along with those earlier documents and, wow, we could have some fun with that.

[00:55:23] Yeah, and that's part of that AI that Glenn Beck is creating includes all the letters and the founding documents, all the letters to the founders. So I think Washington has 100 volumes of writings. I think Jefferson's at 100 volumes. Franklin, I think, has 80 volumes. Hamilton has 60 volumes of writings. You can put all of those. And if you go to people like Rufus King, who's ever heard of Rufus King, signer of the Constitution, you can put his 12 volumes of writings in.

[00:55:50] So all of that is now going in. And we're also taking all the textbooks that the founding fathers read when they were in school, everything that gave them knowledge, all those Western classics. Those are all going into the AI database. So you'll be able to draw from the same source that they drew from and you'll be able to draw from their having reprocessed all that and Americanized it.

[00:56:15] And so to draw from that kind of a pool and to eliminate the kind of junk that has come, particularly since the introduction of secular progressivism, which goes back to post-Darwinism, which is the late 1880s, 1890s, when the first professors we saw implement secular progressivism. If you can eliminate that out of the system, you go back to a pure system of being able to look at what made the most successful nation in the history of the world.

[00:56:44] And for that matter, Western civilization, which is still the most successful, what created that over the 2000 years that it existed? That's going to be such a treasure for people to be able to use that and to not be contaminated with all the poisons that have been killing our society and culture in the last several decades. Well, I can't wait to use it. I'm very excited about that. Okay.

[00:57:06] As we wrap up, what do you think that Americans should be thinking about as they, not just as they celebrate in two days from now on the 4th of July, but as they take in the importance of the fact that we are at 250 years and they're thinking about how they can make a difference so that we celebrate 300 years and 500 years in the future, what are the things you think Americans need to do? There's several things.

[00:57:36] One is they need to improve their pool of knowledge, not from what they had in school. They need to read outside what they've been used to. They need to go back to some older classics. They need to go back to some older history books or whatever and get a different viewpoint from what they've had. Number two is they need to share that with other people. They need to take what they've learned and pass it on. There's a great Bible verse in Song of Solomon 813 that says, your friends listen to your voice, so speak. Tell somebody else what you've learned.

[00:58:06] Pass that on to others. And then past that, we've got to get involved in the system. We're looking right now where the school board elections are drawing from 2% to 4% voter turnout. Are you kidding me? 2% to 4% voter turnout and you're training the next generation of thinkers who will be our next generation of doctors and leaders and whatever, and you're choosing the faculty and staff that's going to be teaching at schools and universities, 2% to 4%. We've got to get engaged.

[00:58:35] The same thing when you're only having 25%, 26% turnout for a state representative election. We've got to do better. Good people tend to get frustrated and sit on the sidelines and sit it out, which is exactly what they want us to do. You cannot sit on the sidelines. As a good person, you've got to double down and get involved more than you ever have before. And so those are three things I would throw out there is learn things you didn't know. Go to sources that maybe are older than you're familiar with.

[00:59:05] Teach those to other people. Share that with others and then get involved. Make sure you get involved in the civic arena. Don't let any election anywhere pass, even if it's a bond election. If it's a municipal election for water districts, don't let anything pass without you being involved. Take the time to research that issue and know how to vote and make a good decision on it. And the last question, what is your favorite story of the American independence? That is such a good question.

[00:59:36] I think, and favorite is hard to say, but I'm going to throw it out as maybe an impactful one. This would be maybe the most important. When Paul Revere, and this summarizes things we were just talking about. When Paul Revere made his famous ride, he wasn't just riding to the countryside saying, hey guys, the British are coming. The British that night had issued an order to find John Hancock and Sam Adams and execute them.

[01:00:06] They said, you can forgive any of the other patriots. You cannot forgive those two. You find those two and you take them out. So he's riding to find John Hancock and he's riding to find Sam Adams and say, hey, they've issued an order. You guys need to be scarce. And so where in the world do you ride in Massachusetts to find those guys? As it turned out, he knew exactly where to ride. He rode to the home of the Reverend Jonas Clark, a pastor. And that's where they were staying.

[01:00:36] You go, political leaders stay in the home of a pastor? Yeah. And when they got there, Revere said, hey, the order's out for you guys. And by the way, there's 800 British regulars that are coming. They're going to be here in the morning. And so Hancock and Adams both turned to Pastor Clark and said, Pastor, are your people ready for this? And he got indignant and said, of course they are. He said, I've trained them for this very hour.

[01:01:00] So when the 800 British rolled into town the next morning, they battled 82 parishioners from his church. The Battle of Lexington was a pastor leading his congregation to stand up against overwhelming odds. Hancock actually was still there when the battle was going on. He escaped the British, but he was trying to get his gun. And they said, no, you get out of here. And then the British left from there and went to Concord where Reverend William Emerson had 400 guys there,

[01:01:27] had his church turned out and turned the British back. And then as the British go on the road back to Boston, there were churches all along the way who turned out their militias. And I go, I don't think that could happen in America today. That's a cool story where the political leaders and the spiritual leaders join together, and they have trained their congregations and their communities in liberty and how to defend liberty and what to do when it's encroached upon, and that if you're attacked, you fire back in self-defense. You don't start anything.

[01:01:57] And by the way, that's what was significant with the Battle of Lexington. The head deacon of the church was John Parker, and John Parker told the 82 guys from the church, he said, you can't fire the first shot. Pastors taught us it has to be a defensive war, not an offensive war. But at the British fire, you can fire back. And that kind of thinking is just so lacking today. I think that's one of the coolest stories of the revolution,

[01:02:23] talking about how there was principle-driven, and they had embedded those principles from top to bottom, not just in civil society, but in spiritual society and the whole communal society. I think that's a pretty cool story. It is an amazing story. David Barton, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time, and I hope that everyone goes and buys your book right now. Thanks, Jenny Beth. We appreciate you and all you do. God bless you. Thank you so much for joining today's episode with David Barton.

[01:02:53] We will not be having a show tomorrow on July 3rd. Our team is taking the day off to prepare and celebrate the 4th of July. On Monday, we'll be returning, and we will have our Constitution training. It's the first in a series of four episodes on the Constitution and founding principles. We'll air those weekly for the next four weeks, and I hope that you will really enjoy that.

[01:03:16] And it's part of our celebration and our gift to you as we celebrate America's 250th anniversary. Thank you so much for joining me on The Jenny Beth Show. Thank you for your support at Tea Party Patriots Action. And most importantly, thank you for your dedication to liberty and to our Constitution. I hope you have a wonderful Independence Day. If you enjoyed today's conversation, go ahead and hit like and subscribe. It really helps us reach more people who care about liberty and the Constitution.

[01:03:46] You can find this and other episodes at JennyBethShow.com, as well as Facebook, YouTube, Rumble, Instagram, X, and your favorite podcast platform. The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots Action. For more information, visit TeaPartyPatriots.org.