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Each generation can improve on 1776
Faith in each generation
He wrote the main part of the Declaration, and he also wrote that no one would expect a man to wear the coat he wore as a boy, any more than to be governed by barbarous ancestors. He counted himself among those ancestors. Informed by the best practice of the past and by principles like equality and republican government, each generation looks forward.
The limits of his faith
His faith in the people was limited in its own time: he held a narrow notion of who the people were, and he enslaved 200 people when he wrote that all men are created equal. Within those limits, he believed Americans in the future could surmount their difficulties as his generation had faced theirs.
Why it isn't easy optimism
That faith is not easy optimism. The founders knew most republics failed. The responsibility falls on later generations to take the principles seriously and hold to them, and the founders were not better than the people who came after them, only different.
Why did Jefferson want constitutions to expire?
In a September 1789 letter to James Madison, Jefferson argued that the earth belongs to the living and that one generation cannot bind the next. He proposed that laws and constitutions lapse after nineteen years. He based the number on the mortality tables of the French naturalist Buffon, which suggested that a majority of adults alive at one moment would be dead within that span.
Why did Madison resist frequent constitutional revision?
Madison replied in February 1790 that regular revision would strip government of the reverence that time gives it. He also feared that changes proposed amid the passions of the moment would be poorly considered. He made a similar argument in Federalist No. 49, published in 1788, against frequent appeals to the people. The Constitution he helped write contains an amendment process but no scheduled expiration.
Why did founders think most republics failed?
They read the histories of Greece and Rome, where republics had collapsed into tyranny or empire. Montesquieu argued that republics suit small territories, because in a large one private interests overwhelm the common good. Madison answered in Federalist No. 10, published in 1787, that a large republic could better contain factions by spreading them across many interests. Rome's republic lasted nearly five centuries, from 509 BCE until Augustus took power in 27 BCE.
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