Noah Webster on the Limits of Revolution
Revolution is in the air. Radicals on both sides vehemently call for it, while conservatives decry it. Economic revolutions, cultural revolutions, social-justice revolutions, green revolutions, a second American Revolution — all are in the works, we're told. Meanwhile, coteries of right-wingers pursue counterrevolution, said to be necessary in light of past revolutions' total victory.
Revolution, at least in its incipient stages, has typically been the province of elites and intellectuals, who hope and labor to mobilize the masses. Sometimes these visionaries claim popular backing that doesn't quite exist, and are frustrated to find themselves in the vanguard of no army. There is, however, a pantheon of revolutionary theorists who can claim to have fathered regimes with their pens, even if in some cases they didn't live to see them — or might not have been pleased if they had. Karl Marx, of course, heads that list. More recently, Herbert Marcuse, Derrick Bell, and Paulo Freire — the latter profiled by David Corey in these pages — can reasonably be viewed as progenitors of the contemporary "woke" revolution. Right-wing counterrevolutionaries, for their part, might hark back to Joseph de Maistre or Julius Evola, or look to contemporary neo-reactionary thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin.
But for conservatives, there's a consensus hero: Edmund Burke. In times of revolutionary turmoil, they gravitate toward Burke and his canonical response to the quintessential modern revolution. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, this philosopher-statesman set forth a defense of custom, prescription, hierarchy, and order, to which conservatives have returned ever since. He also inveighed against the principles and events that are celebrated every July on France's Bastille Day.
Burke probably garners more praise from American conservatives than from those who reside in his own land of Britain. But these Americans tend to neglect their own native counterpart to Burke, their own grim critic of French fervor: Noah Webster. Webster's distinctively American response to the French Revolution aligned with Burke's on many counts, but made important departures from it, too. Those differences can inform us of the strengths and liabilities of our national tradition, and perhaps teach us about how to regard more recent revolutions.
CULTURAL FOUNDING FATHER
Webster's most enduring legacy is of course his dictionary. The University of Washington's Joseph Janes has described this work as "the first serious articulation of American English as it was growing increasingly distinct from the British variety." The progenitor of American English had an all-American pedigree: Webster could claim descent on his mother's side from William Bradford, Mayflower passenger and founding governor of Plymouth Colony, and on his father's side from Connecticut governor John Webster.
Noah Webster was born in what is now West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1758, during the Seven Years' War between Britain and France that featured a bloody American theater. Harlow Giles Unger, his biographer, saw this fact as formative. "The atmosphere of disunion at the time of his birth," Unger wrote, "would permeate Noah Webster's entire life," causing him to fear "that liberty unleashed would devolve into anarchy." This anxiety led him to balance his "ardor for individual freedom with respect for the sanctity of societal bonds."
As a young man, Webster graduated from Yale University (during which time fighting in the American Revolution broke out) and passed the bar after studying under future Supreme Court chief justice Oliver Ellsworth. But he did not become a lawyer, having suffered from stress and depression while studying and teaching school simultaneously. In 1782, he taught at a private school in Goshen, New York, where he developed educational methods and wrote his first speller, in addition to books on grammar. He married in 1789 and spent a few years back in Hartford, where he ventured into city politics and helped found an anti-slavery club.
In 1793, Alexander Hamilton persuaded Webster to move to New York City to found and helm a pro-Federalist Party daily newspaper, The American Minerva, and a semiweekly publication, The Herald. It was during this period that he penned his critical response to the French Revolution.
In 1806, Webster published his first dictionary of the English Language. His more comprehensive dictionary required many more years of effort, not being printed until 1828. While compiling it, he lived in New England, where he did some farming, continued his involvement in local politics, and helped found several educational institutions, including Amherst College.
Webster was a prodigious man. He displayed a spirit of enterprise and a penchant for associational life of the kind Alexis de Tocqueville would later describe as distinctly American. And yet, notwithstanding his participation in local politics and Federalist activism, Webster hardly ranks as a political founding father. Not having sought high office like most other founders, he "disappeared into the pages of his own dictionary," as Unger put it.
Nonetheless, Webster stands as a cultural founding father of the American nation. Nurturing an American identity distinct from that of Europe was the great work of his life, and his lexicographical efforts aimed at this goal. He sought to end the primacy of Samuel Johnson's English dictionary and replace it with one that reflected the language actually spoken by Americans. "Grammar is formed on language, and not language on grammar," he once said, revealing an empiricism that rated organic folkways above abstract principles. He believed that universal education in a common language was essential for the consolidation and preservation of the American republic. "Language," his dictionary's preface declared, "is the expression of ideas; and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas, they cannot retain an identity of language."
His endeavor largely succeeded. He defined and sanctioned many American spelling usages in contradistinction to British ones. He is the reason we typically spell "plow" this way instead of "plough," why we don't include a 'u' in the words "humor" and "color," and why the word "public" does not end in a 'k.' As Jefferson Davis (the same man who would become the president of the Confederacy) observed in 1859:
Above all other people we are one, and above all books which have united us in the bond of a common language, I place the good-old spelling book of Noah Webster. We have a unity of language which no other people possess and we owe this unity above all to Noah Webster's Yankee spelling book.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the indirect and under-documented nature of Webster's influence, it is possible that he did more than any founding father to shape the American outlook. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the rest declared political independence; Webster pioneered cultural independence.
COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY
Webster can certainly be regarded as a cultural revolutionary and prototypical American, but other aspects of his thought and character complicate this portrait.
In politics, he was a Federalist, part of a faction whose political leanings often veered anti-democratic — especially when the Jeffersonians were winning. This meant he was partial to a cause that would go on to suffer resounding defeat. The Federalist Party was practically extinct by 1817, doomed in part by its assumption of aristocratic positions and a patrician tone that grated on strengthening democratic sensibilities. Webster was a specimen of this losing formula. Many accounts paint him as an arrogant snob, and he might in fact have suffered from obsessive-compulsive personality disorder — which could explain his disagreeable manner as well as his lexicographical talents.
It was an instinctive conservatism bred of his inherited Calvinism, not his vigor for reform, educational progress, and national independence, that animated his treatment of the revolution in France. Reared in a devout Congregational family and church community by a father who served as a deacon, Webster imbibed a typical Reformed Protestant belief in "total depravity." While ostensibly devoted to Enlightenment pursuits, his conviction of humanity's incorrigibly selfish and rebellious nature distinguished him sharply from those who insisted on man's perfectibility. Like the deist Francophile Benjamin Franklin, Webster founded schools, promoted literacy, and criticized "superstition," but Webster had none of the former's confidence that rational self-discipline can produce moral faultlessness. Such perfection, he believed, was impossible, and moral decay was likely apart from God's grace. The ambition of the French Revolution aroused his religiously grounded distrust of man's unaided capacity for righteousness. His convictions also made him alert to attempts to forge human ideals into idols.
Four years after Burke published his Reflections, Webster issued his own response to the events in Europe. From the first sentence, he showed considerably more ambivalence toward the revolt than his British counterpart. "In the progress of the French Revolution," he wrote, "candid men find much to praise, and much to censure." Burke, a statesman under an anointed king in a country soon to be at war with republican France, did not find anything in the revolutionary cause to praise. But Webster was an American — a citizen of a nation that had concluded a revolutionary war for independence about a decade prior to the upheaval in France. He could not lambast revolution qua revolution quite the way Burke could. Nor could he speak of France's toppled ancien régime with Burke's reverence — one can't imagine Webster saying "the glory of Europe is extinguished forever," or waxing poetic about Marie Antoinette, as Burke did.
Indeed, Webster dismissed "the feudal and the papal systems" as "tyrannical in the extreme; they fettered and debased the mind; they enslaved a great portion of Europe." Before launching into his critique of the revolution, he went so far as to call "the cause of the French nation...the noblest ever undertaken by men." Had it been pursued differently, it could have continued the three-centuries-long trend — begun by the Reformation — of reason "removing the veil of error from [man's] mind."
Nevertheless, the emerging character of the revolution disturbed Webster profoundly. Like Burke, Webster was aghast at the breakdown of order and lawful authority, expressing a particular horror at the aggressive atheism of the revolutionaries. Both men criticized the overweening rationalism that the Jacobins inherited from the radical Enlightenment thought of the philosophes. And both denounced what they saw as French libertinism, contrasting it with a certain kind of qualified liberty: Burke avowed the worthiness of a "manly, moral, regulated liberty," while Webster professed a "love of liberty" operating under "the restraints of religion and law."
Both men also understood the French Revolution to be more than a political transformation. "The revolution in France," Webster wrote, "is attended with a change of manners, opinions and institutions, infinitely more singular and important, than a change of masters or of government." His words reflect Burke's description of the upheaval as "a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions." The implicit contrast here is with the American Revolution, viewed by both thinkers to be a more modest political project with roots in the English tradition.
Webster, of course, favored the cause of revolution in America. Although Burke did not share that view, he recognized validity in the colonists' complaints. The radicals across the channel, by contrast, sought to sever the French nation from every part of its history: They tore down all social distinctions, repudiated the Christian religion, and attempted to scrub the past clean by restarting the calendar at Year One. In Burke's words, they "chose to act as if [they] had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew." For him and for Webster, this pursuit evinced breathtaking presumption and disserved the cause of true liberty — not to mention justice and piety.
REPLACING, NOT ABOLISHING
Despite their agreement on the baleful effects of the French Revolution, Webster departed from Burke on a crucial point.
In his Reflections, Burke bemoaned how the revolution stripped away the beautifying garments of time-tested convention and sound prejudice, leaving in their absence stark, callous reason — or a radical caricature thereof. He decried how the revolutionaries tore off "all the decent drapery of life," and dispensed with
[a]ll the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal....All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.
In Burke's telling, the French radicals shunned the eternal truth that there "ought to be a system of manners in every nation," opting instead for their own ungarnished ideas. They failed to recognize that the "sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place."
For Webster, the chief evil of the revolution was not its abolition of a system of manners: He took social convention to be so fundamental to human nature as to be ineradicable. In this sense, he leaned more intensely than Burke into the British statesman's own Aristotelian belief that custom and political authority arise not merely from conscious artifice, but from the natural order itself. The question for Webster was not whether to preserve these things, but what form they would take, and whether they would be practiced in a better or worse manner.
Webster observed that the French revolutionary regime erected its own system of manners. The empire of reason brought its own "moral imagination," clinging to fashions even more antiquated than those of the ancien régime. For "decent drapery" it substituted vulgar attire; for "pleasing illusions," displeasing ones. "[S]uperstition and enthusiasm," he continued, "are beat down; reason is exalted upon a throne, temples are erected to the goddess, and festivals instituted to celebrate her coronation." If cold reason, bare of the clothing of sentiment, was empowered, it was only for an instant: "Then begins the reign of passion; the moment reason is seated upon her throne; the passions are called in to support her."
For Webster, the French did not really do away with throne and altar, as Burke lamented; they simply erected a new throne and a new altar. Burke extolled the twin pillars of the ancien régime: "the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion," the nobility and the clergy. Webster didn't have much time for French aristocrats or Catholic priests, but he did perceive, and relentlessly underline, the fact that the French had not eliminated aristocracy or state religion, but had instead rustled up inferior substitutes. The Jacobins supplanted the nobility, while the Cult of Reason pushed aside Christianity, converting the church of Notre Dame into its temple. The king's throne was cast down, and "the throne of reason" set up in its place.
Webster and Burke understood the inevitability of political authority, of rule by some men over others. Even if, as Burke wrote, revolutionaries "change the names" of the offices of king, ministers, priests, and judges, "the things in some shape must remain. A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community in some hands and under some appellation." Webster, too, observed that "a new species of aristocrats, as they will be called, will arise out of the equality of sans-culottism." Yet Webster's critique went deeper than politics: He insisted there exists not only a permanent human need to entrust political power, but also a permanent need to bestow worship.
Horrified as he was by French deists and atheists, Webster charged them with falling swiftly into the channels worn by ancient religious conventions and categories. This was always inevitable, he claimed, for
I am yet one of the old fashioned philosophers, who believe that, however particular men under particular circumstances may reject all ideas of God and religion, yet that some impressions of a Supreme Being are as natural to men, as their passions and their appetites, and that nations will have some God to adore and some mode of worship.
This being so, there was never any question of successfully digging up the sacral foundations of political society. These foundations could, however, be transmuted. According to Webster, the Jacobin regime's "inveterate war with christianity" had not created an impartial, irreligious public square, but had rather "established, not deism only, but atheism and materialism." His use of the word "establish" drove home the ironic skewer.
Piling on further, Webster deployed one of the radicals' favorite slurs against them: superstition. He showed how the Jacobins, casting about to fill the void left by their eradication of traditional Catholic ceremonies, seized on classical antecedents. For Christian holy days, they substituted pagan festivals; the goddess Reason stood in place of Athena or Artemis. They had revolted (understandably, from Webster's staunchly Protestant perspective) against Roman Catholic superstition, but by rejecting Christianity altogether, they had recycled even worse hocus-pocus.
Here, Webster anticipated Alexis de Tocqueville, who in his 1856 work The Old Regime and the Revolution would describe the revolution's ideology as "an incomplete religion." Abandoning traditional piety, this public cult reposed faith in "man's perfectibility and power." The French revolutionaries imitated the means and movement of both the Reformation and the original Christian revolution of the first century, adopting universalist dogmas that transcended national borders and spreading them by means of "preaching and propagandism," in Tocqueville's words. The Girondins, the Jacobin faction that controlled the government before the Reign of Terror, exported the ideology of Reason in a secular holy war against Europe's monarchies. When Maximilien Robespierre's more radical Montagnards ousted the Girondins, they turned the purifying crusade inward on the French nation.
POLITICS AS RELIGION
Webster saw clearly the religious quality of the zeal consuming France. He would have agreed with Tocqueville's later observation that the "French Revolution, though political, assumed the guise and tactics of a religious revolution." The Jacobins didn't merely concoct a heretical echo of Christianity to deceive human hearts, as had been done before; they were now advancing a political religion.
"[T]he Supreme Jehovah," Webster remarked, "is reasoned or ridiculed out of existence, and in his place is substituted the omnipotence of national sovereignty." Where before the Christian Sabbath was celebrated weekly, "they have ordained a political sabbath once in ten days." The Committee of Public Safety repurposed the early modern French apparatus of inquisition against those who opposed — or were suspected of opposing — the new orthodoxy. "The Jacobins differ from the clergy of the dark ages in this," noted Webster: "[T]he clergy persecuted for heresy in religion — the Jacobins, for heresy in politics."
In place of a religious calendar and measurements of time, they substituted secular, political markers: They "abolished the christian era," choosing rather to date events from "the foundation of the republic." In doing so, the revolutionaries applied Jean-Jacques Rousseau's vision of civil religion, patterned after his idea of the classical world, where "each State, having its own cult as well as its own government, made no distinction between its gods and its laws."
Webster pinpointed a key feature of civil religion and its proponents: "They despise all religious opinions; they are indifferent what worship is adopted by individuals; at the same time, they are establishing atheism by law." Virtue is defined not in terms of interpersonal duties or ascending layers of obligation, or paying coexistent debts to God and Caesar, but in terms of every individual's overriding duties to the polis — or, in the French case, to the Nation. Robespierre could thus write that morality is nothing other than political morality. "Within the scheme of the French revolution," he stated candidly, "that which is immoral is impolitic, that which is corrupting is counterrevolutionary." Moral demands on the individual can only be made as civic demands.
Some of today's calls for revolution follow the French revolutionaries in seeking to establish a new political religion, granting contemporary relevance to the analyses of Webster and Tocqueville. Georgetown's Joshua Mitchell recently applied Tocqueville's concept of an "incomplete religion" to the 21st century in a way that mirrors Webster's polemic. Mitchell pulled on a thread from the Jacobins to Marx and forward to what he identifies as today's incomplete religion: "identity politics." Like Tocqueville, Mitchell emphasized how this new religion borrowed and distorted elements from Christianity, elevating victims and decrying oppressors, but "without God and without forgiveness."
Mitchell's reflections on identity politics are the latest additions to a long line of conservative critiques of incomplete religions, stretching back to Webster. Eric Voegelin and William F. Buckley, Jr., warned against communism's drive to "immanentize the eschaton." More recently, conservatives viewed the pandemic slogan "believe the science" as a demand for reflexive obedience to quasi-clerical authorities, sometimes at the expense of more fundamental political and religious obligations.
It's not only conservatives, however, who can learn from Webster and more recent critics of incomplete religions. The emergence of civil religion he described in France — the replacement of religion by politics, or rather the redirection of religious impulses into political activism — can happen and has happened on the right. Revolutionary France looked to Sparta and Rome for models of holistic civic virtue with a martial edge, but so did the fascist regimes of the 20th century. These governments either shouldered aside traditional religion (Germany) or co-opted it (Italy) while repackaging its tropes. Joseph Goebbels leveraged Christian symbolism to make a martyr of Horst Wessel, a young Nazi militant killed by communists. The state newspaper praised his "sacrificial death," while a Hitler Youth song trumpeted forthrightly: "No Christ do we follow, but Horst Wessel!"
Warnings about the return of fascism on the right have become a staple of the contemporary left's political discourse. Although this tends to be hysterical and politically counterproductive, neo-fascist ideologies are in fact gaining supporters online. Meanwhile, the historical ties between the American right and religion have begun to weaken in recent years. The percentage of Republicans who reported going to church weekly dropped about nine points from 2008 to 2022. Far fewer GOP voters support traditional evangelical and Roman Catholic stances against abortion and same-sex marriage than did in the early 2010s. Clearly the right has not escaped the tides of de-Christianization.
As a result, more secular Republican voters have begun to subordinate religious principles and objectives to political ones rather than vice versa, paying less heed to biblical injunctions to charity and mercy. Meanwhile, post-Christian influencers on the right are contemplating eugenicist ideas that Christians have strenuously opposed for a century.
One might expect the left to cheer the prospect of a conservative movement that no longer dreams of an American "theocracy," but not everyone is rejoicing: Last fall, Jacobin magazine (appreciate the irony) ran a piece lamenting the demise of the religious right. "For secular liberals who have made 'believing science' their own kind of religion," wrote Dustin Guastella, "the possible waning of Christian conservatism may seem like a blessing long overdue. What if it isn't?" After decades of fighting the religious right, the American left is staring down the question of whether the post-religious right is really preferable to the Moral Majority of the late 20th century.
Webster's insights can speak to liberals and leftists who are shaken by what they view as senseless atavism. For one, he can help them see that attempts to discard and transcend living religious traditions don't tend to work as planned, but rather engender new, incomplete religions that lack the guardrails of time-tested confessions and dogmas. Second, Webster warned that these modern revolutions, failing to eliminate religious impulses, instead channel them into politics, to destabilizing effect.
Medieval and early modern Christian thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin held that rulers have a duty to enforce right morality and punish heresy, but they didn't make politics itself into a religion. While they didn't sunder religion from politics in the way classical liberalism does, they also didn't synonymize them in the manner of the Third Reich, making civic life the only valid venue for religious devotion.
A FAILED EXPERIMENT?
The rise of incomplete religions on the left and right, and the waning of Christianity's cultural influence in the West, has bred a new group of counterrevolutionaries. These "post-liberal" critics of liberal modernity have become increasingly pessimistic about the American experiment itself. They see America and the West as having succumbed to the spirit of the French Revolution, to its worst and most licentious definition of liberty. Alarmed by the rapidity of cultural change, they behold with Burke "a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions." Some are openly skeptical or dismissive of democracy. In their view, modernity and all its revolutions — including the American one — are botched experiments that should be aborted.
Many religious people of various political persuasions observe something more radical still: a society that has replaced God with idols. They perceive this in nature worship by environmentalists, in identity politics, in crass materialism, and in nationalism. "Re-paganization" has become a significant concern. A recent book titled Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come prophesies that "America as we know it will come to an end. Instead of a republic of free citizens, we will be slaves in a pagan empire."
Such disillusionment with revolution and the vices it unleashes is almost as old as the American republic itself. Here again, we turn to Noah Webster. For the 26th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Webster gave a pessimistic oration. This cultural founding father regarded with sorrow a prodigal son going astray after what he deemed the soft Jacobinism of Jefferson, who had been elected two years earlier. "The real truth is, our revolutionary schemes were too visionary," he opined mournfully, "our hopes too sanguine."
Sharing Webster's disillusionment was fellow Federalist Fisher Ames, who put things more ominously: "Our disease is democracy. It is not the skin that festers — our very bones are carious, and their marrow blackens with gangrene." Ames condemned the country as "too big for union, too sordid for patriotism, too democratic for liberty....Its vice will govern it, by practising upon its folly." From the opposite end of the political spectrum, John Randolph of Roanoke accused supposedly rationalist Jeffersonians of superstitious devotion to "the saint of Monticello." America, according to these statesmen, had hardly taken baby steps as a republic before falling into French radicalism, with its civil-religious madness.
It is not wholly wrong to identify civil-religious devotion to the nation as a fixture of our republic. In Federalist No. 49, James Madison expressed a hope that future citizens would regard the Constitution he had helped frame with "veneration." The Roman symbol of the fasces, a bundle of rods with a projecting axe blade that represented sacred civic authority, stands behind the speaker's rostrum in the U.S. House of Representatives. (The fasces, of course, was later appropriated by the fascist regimes of the 20th century for more nefarious ends.) American history since the founding has only lent more validity to this concern. In his Lyceum Address, Abraham Lincoln urged Americans to "let [reverence for the laws] become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor...sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars."
Are critics of the American experiment right, then, to say the project was doomed from the start? Are revolutionary democracy and political religion our terminal "disease"? Webster, like many today, felt some disillusionment toward the American project. But if we return to his writing about the French Revolution, we find a thinker who can guide radicals and reactionaries alike toward a crucial truth about all revolutions: They owe a profound debt to the establishments they overthrow.
Many on today's right like to say they oppose revolution qua revolution, but in most cases, they're simply adherents of an older revolution. Some conservatives want to conserve the American Revolution, others the Reformation. Still others view both of these projects as scandalously anti-traditional while granting unacknowledged approval to the papal revolution of the 11th century that forged the Roman Catholic Church as we know it. All Christians, however reactionary, endorse the original Christian revolution that overran Roman society and made possible, as the Catholic Tocqueville admitted, all subsequent Western revolutionary movements. Traditionalist Jews have the oldest revolution of all, looking to the radical experiment in theocracy that began at Sinai. The only thoroughgoing counterrevolutionaries are the neo-pagans who lament the Christian revolution (or perhaps its Jewish ancestors) as the font of all Western decadence. This doesn't mean it is incoherent to oppose particular revolutions. Rather, one must be conscious of what revolutionary commitments one has, and why.
On the other hand, it is impossible to be a consistent revolutionary. As first the Marquis de Lafayette and his moderate allies, and later the Girondins, and finally Robespierre found (and as the Russian Mensheviks would later discover), another revolution is always coming, one that will leave today's cutting-edge rebel on the high and dry ground of reaction. Many people on the center left are experiencing this today. Just as trying to outflank every reactionary drives people off the edge of the map, seeking to stay abreast of revolution is like striving to outrun a train.
Webster understood this, if imperfectly. A proud defender of the Protestant Reformation, he excoriated the French Revolution. When he saw French elements appearing in the American project he had helped midwife, he candidly expressed his alarm. But he did not let this disappointment extinguish the theological virtue of hope.
Hope is not the same as optimism, for it doesn't rest on any rational expectation that things will be all right in the near term. Rather, hope entails assiduous labor, preparing the ground for rain that may or may not come. Webster put it this way:
But while considerations like these should abate the expectations of the enthusiast, we should carefully avoid despondence, and faithfully exert our talents to realize the blessings of freedom, under our present [form] of government. The real object of the revolution was, to secure to the United States, the privilege of governing themselves...not to dissolve all government and resign our country to be the sport of licentious passions and wild misrule. The real object of Independence ought not to be abandoned[;] it must be steadily and perseveringly pursued. Weak or wicked men may occasionally rise to distinction in the public councils; but whoever may be the men in power, let the government be obeyed.
Exercising the privilege of self-government is still a worthy pursuit for all Americans today. Let it be the mission of all lovers of true liberty, rightly ordered by religion and law.