The Founders Didn’t Worship the Founding

And other reflections on 1776 with Jill Lepore

As we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary (our Semiquincentennial), I’m speaking with some of the country’s most prominent historians, all published by W. W. Norton, to ask five questions about the founding and the sweep of American history since.

Norton will publish video clips from the interviews, but with their blessing, I’m also posting the first full conversation here, Skipped History style—with transcript and audio. Because, y’all, how could I not share a conversation with Jill Lepore, one of the sharpest historical thinkers working today?

In our conversation, Professor Lepore reflects on what the founders thought they were doing in 1776 (spoiler: they weren’t planning a national holiday), why Benjamin Franklin’s sister deserves a place in the canon, and how arguing about dishes is, in fact, a form of historical thinking. She also gets into how history can help you find your bearings, even if you’re not pursuing a PhD or planning to start a republic.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and professor of law at Harvard Law School. She’s also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include the international bestseller These Truths: A History of the United States. A condensed transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity, is below. You can also listen to us on the Skipped History podcast:

(Giant) checks and balances

Ben: As we approach 2026, what from 1776 is on your mind?

JL: In 1787, Alexander Hamilton suggested it had fallen to the people of America to decide a crucially important historical question: whether humans are fated to be forever ruled by “accident and force,” or whether it's possible to found a government that rests on a foundation of reason and choice. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution claimed the latter.

I myself am not a grand fan of the bicentennial, centennials, centennial centennials—

Ben: —the names of these centennials are sort of like Roman numerals. At a certain point, why do we need to know any of them?

JL: Ha, but I do think the occasions provide a useful moment to hold up a yardstick. Has the United States realized the promise of its founding? Has it exceeded that promise? Has it failed that promise? Was that promise itself the right promise?

Those are questions we should always be asking. That's what the study of American history really is about.

Ben: What stands out to you as a defining piece, theme, or tension from U.S. history over the last 250 years?

JL: I mean, the nation is founded on these three truths: that all men are created equal, that we are endowed by our creator with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that it falls to us to provide our consent—or withhold it—to a government that we choose.

And those ideas themselves, as I try to show in These Truths, emerge from not their presence but their absence, right? It is the denial of the sovereignty of Native nations that kind of leads people to say, oh, sovereignty would be a good idea. It is the denial of liberty to Africans carried across the ocean in bondage that supports the increasingly sophisticated set of ideas around liberty on which the nation is founded, as well as the denial of equality to the poor, the complete absence of women within the political order structured by the Constitution.

It is as much these absences that make possible the articulation for the first time of our grandest ideas.

Ben: What do you believe is the biggest misperception people have about 1776 today?

JL: My guess is that many people assume that the nation's founding, at the time the nation was founded, was a settled thing.

In other words, that as people drafted the Declaration of Independence, or when the Constitution was drafted and ratified, they believed the United States was exceptional. That these documents would be permanent. That they would be lasting. That they would be honored. That they would one day be worshiped. That somehow the founders themselves venerated the founding.

Ben: I'm picturing giant celebratory checks to represent establishing a system of checks and balances.

JL: Ha, I mean, they had plenty of pomp! But the founders didn’t venerate the founding. Most of them were empiricists. They were really bound up in the idea of the scientific revolution. They believed they were conducting a grand experiment in the science of politics. It was a wait-and-see republic.

So I think the sort of weird, constant desire across the centuries—it doesn't really start until the 1870s—but the desire to venerate the founding defies the very nature of the founding. You can venerate it because you think it’s turned out well, if that's what you think, but to venerate it as if the founders themselves were engaged in that act or founded the country in that spirit is to really misunderstand the experimental nature of a republic.

Ben: In These Truths, you write “in the American past,” there’s “an extraordinary amount of decency and hope, of prosperity and ambition, and much, especially, of invention and beauty.”

If there's one person you wish we knew more about as we approach the semi-quincentennial, who would it be and why?

JL: Of all the people that I've ever written about, I would say that I felt most affected by Benjamin Franklin's sister, Jane Franklin Mecom, who was born in 1712 and died in 1794.

There were 17 Franklin children. Benjamin was the youngest of ten boys, Jane was the youngest girl, and they were the closest two people in their family. In a way, they were something like twins. They were always called Benny and Jenny. They seemed to have the same kind of striving, defiant personality.

There was this not uncommon Enlightenment thought experiment where people wondered: was it natural that men and women were profoundly different in their achievement in society? A number of writers said, what if you had two children who were twins, a boy and a girl, and they're raised in the same family and given the same education and the same opportunities? That's how you would be able to figure it out.

So when I came across the story of Jane Franklin, I was like, oh, well, here's the actual life. You do see what happens. And she did not have the rags-to-riches life that her brother did.

Rather, she had a rags-to-rags life. She had 12 children. Eleven of them died before she did. Her husband went to debtor's prison. Two of her sons went mad after the American Revolution and had to be locked up. She suffered this tremendous series of difficulties that ordinary people suffer.

And she nevertheless came out of the Revolution believing that the lives of ordinary people matter in a way that she had never believed before. Her brother sent her books all the time, and she read a lot, and her ideas about the order of politics and the meaning of freedom and liberty and duty completely changed during the American Revolution. Her life really embodies both the promise of the founding of the United States and its failures.

Ben: One final question: Why do you study history? And how can studying history push us to be better, more engaged citizens?

JL: Everything to me is about the relationship between the past and the present. I think historical thinking is just a deep part of how we do. I'll often say, if you’re having an argument with your spouse about whose night it is to do the dishes, it's because you have a history of how often you've done the dishes.

Ben: In fact, you have a lengthy, very meticulous, detailed history.

JL: Ha, exactly. We think historically all the time! That's how we live, right? The relationship between the past and the present structures all of our lives.

I think being engaged in that relationship in a sustained way, thinking with precision about chronology and cause and effect, is an incredibly good discipline for just understanding how things happen. How change happens. How unusual something is—if it's unusual—and how completely commonplace something is if it has happened a million times before.

I don't see how you get your compass bearings in life without having some sense of where you came from, or where the kind of work you want to do came from. You want to be a management consultant? Who invented management consulting? Wouldn't you want to know, and why? And what's it supposed to do?

I just think that we all have historical questions. And when you study history, you learn how to answer them. You learn how to get to the bottom of those questions and come to an answer that is meaningful and that is true and answerable to evidence. And that really matters.