Huntington Exhibit Stokes the ‘Sacred Fires of Liberty’

On a chill February Friday in 1788, James Madison, prime mover in the struggle to obtain ratification of a new federal constitution, confidently informed readers of the New York Packet that, one day, the charter on whose behalf he argued would be regarded as “the mirror of political liberty.”

Like most of the Founders, Madison believed that the republican ideals embodied in the new Constitution offered a universal model of governance and not one particular to this country or, even, to this continent. However, the degree to which this has come to be so--the frequency with which people around the world strain to catch the reflection of their own freedom in the American mirror--would have astonished even the optimistic Virginian.

Today, after a century of often bloody confrontation with competing political systems--hereditary authoritarianism, fascism, Marxism-Leninism--no governmental formula exerts a moral authority equal to limited democratic administration and its co-worker, free enterprise. No other system, no matter how utopian its blandishments, even excites the imagination of a significant number of people.

This, then, would seem to be a singular moment in the history of this nation and its durable democracy. And yet, what might have been a warm season of triumph has become a summer of discontent. Increasingly, Americans find themselves and their politics preoccupied with difficult and divisive questions, from abortion and civil liberties to the rights of people accused of crimes. These are questions with profound, which is to say, constitutional, implications.

These days, when Americans gaze into their “mirror of liberty,” what they see is an anxious, indecisive, often angry image.

At such a moment, first principles matter more than most. And an unusual opportunity to consider them has been created by the Huntington Library in San Marino, which, on Tuesday, will open an extraordinary and thought-provoking exhibition entitled “The Sacred Fire of Liberty: The Creation of the American Bill of Rights.” It can be seen Tuesdays through Sundays until Jan. 26., 1992.

The exhibition, conceived to mark the last in the series of anniversaries connected with the U.S. Bicentennial, is restrained in scope but surely is among the more substantial and significant of Bicentennial observances. It is displayed in just two rather modestly proportioned rooms--the library’s West Room and West Foyer--which have been handsomely renovated under a grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation, which also underwrote the exhibit.

The first room contains a series of mainly graphic introductions to contemporary issues involving the Bill of Rights. The heart of the exhibit is contained in the adjoining chamber. There, 60 compelling and original documents, along with period cartoons, broadsheets, maps and portraits, have been brilliantly selected and shrewdly arranged by John Rhodehamel, the Huntington’s archivist of American historical manuscripts.

The material is displayed chronologically, beginning with the origins of England’s “unwritten constitution” and proceeding through the American Civil War and the consequent amendments to our own Constitution.

Among the documents on view are a 700-year-old illuminated copy of the Magna Carta, an original letter of King George III agreeing to the separation of his former colonies and rare copies of secretly printed drafts of the Constitution used by the Committee of Detail, which produced the version offered for ratification.

The drafts include the handwritten notes of George Mason of Virginia, who was George Washington’s political mentor and whose Virginia Declaration of Rights was acknowledged by Thomas Jefferson to have been the chief model of our federal Bill of Rights. Also on display are a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation autographed by Abraham Lincoln and a number of rare and important documents from the Colonial and Federal periods, including an unusually fine and legible copy of the Declaration of Independence.

It is a measure of these documents’ enduring value--as well as the rigor and clarity with which Rhodehamel has edited his material--that this exhibition speaks directly to some of our most perplexing dilemmas.

The Founders were attracted to republican government because they were steeped in the Enlightenment’s admiration for the political institutions of classical Greece and Rome. But because they had reflected deeply on the fates of both civilizations, they were wary of simply substituting popular absolutism for the encroachment of the crown.

Even Madison, who initially opposed inclusion of a Bill of Rights in the Constitution, noted in the Federalist X, “Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true.”

This, Madison went on to write, had created an “increasing distrust of public engagements and an alarm for private rights, which are echoed from one end of the continent to the other.”

Three months later, as demands mounted for a written guarantee of rights, the author of the Federalist LI--probably Madison--argued, “It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. . . . If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure. There are but two methods of providing against this evil: the one by creating a will in the community independent of the majority--that is, of the society itself; the other, by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable. . . . The second method will be exemplified in the federal republic of the United States.”

Here we see whole one of the basic tensions of the American system--a belief that the widest possible dispersal of liberty is the best guarantor of civil peace opposed to a habitual uncertainty over how widely the protective cloak of freedom ought to spread. Disagreement over this question--which touches on profound issues of personhood--was at the heart of the wrenching battles over Abolitionism and women’s suffrage and, in our own time, is at the center of controversies over civil rights, the rights of those accused of crimes and abortion.

Perhaps the most graceful and provocative of Rhodehamel’s curatorial gestures is his central placement of two letters--one from Jefferson to Madison, the other from Mason to Washington--in which the authors state their reasons for opposing ratification of a constitution without an enumeration of rights.

“I now add what I do not like (about the proposed constitution),” Jefferson wrote from Paris, where he was then American minister. “First the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly . . . for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection from standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by juries. . . . Let me add that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse or allow to rest on inference.”

Paradoxically, it is not the Founders’ beloved republicanism, but this sentiment--that individual rights must be formally acknowledged and strictly protected, a sentiment that a majority of the Framers initially opposed--that has made American government a mirror of liberty to the world.

It is the most remarkable of the Huntington’s range of achievements in this exhibition that we are thus reminded that “the sacred fire of liberty” was fueled at its beginning by such reasoned and heroic dissent.