The Daily Signal - Michael Barone: Understanding the Founding Fathers’ ‘Mental Maps’

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

The places where they were raised and to which they traveled formed the Founding Fathers’ geographic orientation, which influenced their view of the nation and what the country could become, according to Michael Barone.  While George Washington had “a map that goes north by northwest,” Thomas Jefferson “saw the country from [the] perspective of the West,” says Barone, a senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics since its first edition in 1972.  In his new book, “Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders,” Barone explains how the differing “mental maps” of Founders such as Washington, Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton were sometimes in opposition, but together formed our great nation.  Barone joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the little-known facts about the Founding Fathers he uncovered while researching the new book.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, April 5th. I'm Virginia Allen. The places that they were raised and traveled to formed the founding father's geographic orientation, which also influenced their view of the nation and what the country could be. That's according to author Michael Barone. Now, while individuals like George Washington had a map that went north by northwest, Thomas Jefferson saw the country from the country from the perspective of the West, according to Barone, something that he explains in his brand new book

Mental Maps of the Founders, how geographic imagination guided America's revolutionary leaders. Barone sits down with me on today's podcast to explain a little bit about how these mental maps helped the founders form our nation and maybe some of the areas where they disagreed. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. We get it. With big media bias, it's hard to find accurate honest news. That's why we've put together the Morning Bell newsletter, a compilation of the top stories and conservative commentary.

To subscribe, just head to dailysignal.com slash morning bell subscription or visitdaily signal.com and click on the connect button at the top of the page. It is my distinct pleasure today that we have joining us on the show, Michael Barone. He is the author of the brand new book, Mental Maps of the Founders. Thank you so much for being with us today. Well, it's nice to be with you. Well, I thought we should start this conversation by defining what a mental map is. That probably brings the idea of a map brings a lot of ideas to people's mind.

A mental map brings other ideas. How do you define it in the book? Mental map, we all carry mental maps in our heads. We have some idea of how to, you know, walk to the grocery store or where to, well, which way to go to get to the parking lot, which exit to take off of the interstate to get to where we're going. Some people have very detailed mental maps. I think I've always been one of them of having, I orient myself by maps very much and so forth. And other people have very dim ideas about maps.

I'm afraid that the GPS systems may be deteriorating the quality of mental maps of great numbers of our. our countrymen and people around the world because we don't really need to know the map as well anymore. But, yeah, we carry mental maps and we have particular places and directions that we're interested in that we feature in our mental maps that are important to us. So these mental maps, as you explain in your book, influenced our founding fathers. And in the book, you move through six different founding fathers and explain how those mental. maps were critical to them. So I figured a good place to start would be with our first president, with George Washington. And if you would, just share a little bit about the mental map that he carried and how that formed. Well, I, you know, I wrote this book about the mental maps of the fathers.

I'd read a lot about the founders. I wanted to learn more. I thought, okay, I'll write a book about it and try to learn more. And I'll try to, since I've always been a map buff, I'll try to look at their point of view of their maps. And what you see in George Washington is a map that goes north by northwest, basically, from Mount Vernon. That's a map that recurs again and again in his life. George Washington does not start off as first man in his community. He's born of a second marriage.

He had older brothers. His father died when he was 11 years old. He did not get the British education that has been. brothers did. He lived on land that was owned by, it was a grant, the Fairfax grant, owned by Lord Fairfax, after Lord Fairfax went through a bunch of law court cases in England that extended from between the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers west from the Chesapeake Bay all the way to the source of the rivers and the mountains, then unknown areas. And he hires the, George Washington, one of his older half-brothers marries,

a grand niece of Lord Fairfax. Lord Fairfax comes to know him, and he hires him to do some surveying at age 17 beyond the Blue Ridge in the Shenandoah Valley. So George Washington goes in the wintertime when leaves are gone, and you can cede through your surveying instruments where you're going. He goes north by northwest,

and he buys his first land in the Shenandoah Valley for 125 pounds. the money that he's made surveying for Lord Fairfax at age 18. And this experience enables him to be appointed by the House of Burgesses when he's 21 at age 1750. In 1753 at age 21, they say we want somebody to go north to tell the French not to advance from Quebec, from Canada, into the Ohio River Valley. They want to build a fort at the forks of the Ohio, where the Allegheny Monongahela Rivers formed the Ohio River at Pittsburgh.

And they send the 21-year-old George Washington up to do that. And he goes there the next year with Braddock and Braddock's defeat. He goes within 15 miles of Lake Erie. And that's the credential that basically persuades the Continental Congress that he is the person to lead, to be commanding. and chief of the Continental Army because he has the military experience, he knows this terrain. That's the pathway that he continues to follow through his life. He purchases lots of land there after the Revolution out in the Ohio Valley.

He notices that there's a very good quality of coal on that way. He's anticipating the Industrial Revolution that would make Pittsburgh the center of the coal and iron and steel industry. So George Washington's mental map went that way. It was the part of the country that he saw as most progressive. And one of the things that results from that, I think, is that he turns against slavery, something that he had taken for granted in his early life. And he spends the last year in his life after he's resigned as commander-in-chief and then resigned as president or did not seek a third term as relinquish the presidency.

He goes and sits in his office in Mount Vernon, where he moved the entrance from facing eastward down the Potomac to facing westward toward the mountains. He sits in his thing and writes out with his quill pen documents freeing his slaves and his will. So he's setting a pattern. He's looking towards the lands that supported Lincoln and the Union and the Civil War. The lands of the Northeast connected through Pennsylvania through to the expanse of the Ohio country in the industrial Midwest. It's fascinating. It sounds like in your research and in writing, sort of the discovery is that George Washington,

path to ultimately becoming president really kind of started with this love of land of surveying of exploration in many ways, correct? Well, he did. He was a person who literally saw the potential of the nation going west. It's an interesting contrast there from his fellow Virginia and Thomas Jefferson. Yeah, if you would. His father died when he was 14. one of the maps that Washington did carry with him on those first excursions was a map done by two plantation owners named Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson's father.

Thomas Jefferson inherited all this money at age 14, basically was able to decide what he wanted to do for the rest of his whole life. He was a rich man. And to his great credit, he decided that he wanted to learn about all sorts of things. different things about music and art and architecture and history and geology and botany and plants and production and so forth and became one of the polymaths of the 18th century. He wanted his maps, he kept his maps in his house. He didn't like to travel. Of course, travel was really kind of unpleasant in the 18th century.

He never went as far west as his father did. Really? He looked out over the mountains. He seldom went west of the Blue Ridge just a couple of times. But if you go to Monticello now, the house he built and rebuilt, tore down several times, rebuilt it. When he brings his bride home to Monticello, there's only one room with a roof on it where they place the piano forte. He had imported from France for her. But he's rebuilding this house.

And now you see the artifacts that Lewis and Clark brought back from their exhibition. He saw the country from perspective of the West. His book notes on Virginia is one book that he published, goes beyond the limits of Virginia to talk about the Missouri River, to talk about how many miles it is from Santa Feid and Mexico City. And he sends Lewis and Clark to the Pacific and brings back the Indian artifacts. It's all there, and it's all there for him to study and to ponder and to build gadgets and to amass a library and to consult his wine cellar and his sommelier about what's going to go with the dinner that he's serving that late afternoon. They ate in the late afternoon in those days when it was still light. Sure.

It's so fascinating to hear those differences just between Washington and Jefferson. And you do such a good job in the book of laying out what the differences are between so many of the founding fathers. Well, they had different views. I mean, as I say, notes on Virginia is all about going west. It's got a big view beyond Virginia, but there's nothing about New England, almost nothing about the Atlantic Coast. Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson's great rival in Washington's cabinet, takes a different view. At one point he writes about, he says, if you look at this country on your left hand, you see New England and fronting on British Canada and so forth. If you look on your right hand, you see Spanish Florida and the plantation colonies of the Carolinas and Georgia.

Well, what are you looking at if New England is on your left? left and the Carolinas and Georgia are on the right. The answer is you're looking at the Atlantic Ocean. You're looking at those invisible lines on the map, his mental map, the sea lanes of commerce between the different colonies as they started off, the different states, the different seaports, and London and Bristol and Glasgow. You're looking at cities that he mentions in his writings and finance, he talking about Amsterdam and Hamburg and the Hanseatic ports in the city-states of Italy.

He's looking at commercial. He sees the possibilities, which are just nascent then in the 18th century, of economic growth through commercial activity and industrial production. This stuff is just beginning. Hamilton, who is sort of amazing, genius, a prodigy, sees all this possibility. and his map is a map of those sea lanes, which he'd become familiar with growing up in the West Indies. He was a terrible life. His father deserted.

The mother died. The guardian committed suicide. He was a clerk for a couple of New York merchants. They go away, go to New York and leave him in charge at age 17. And he orders sea captains to change course. He collects debts that they were in every year. able to collect. He does currency transactions and multiple currencies and makes money on that. He's pretty astonishing. And once he gets people to finance him a trip to New York, he never

comes back. Wow. He hated slavery. He was from a slave colony, of course, and it was for abolition of slavery. But he saw that possibility of that commercial republic. So on the one hand, you know, you have Jefferson seeing us as a nation of farmers moving west. And on the other hand, you see Hamilton seeing us as connected with world commerce and economic growth. And as you think about it, the United States, as it developed, turned out to be both, didn't it? It did indeed. And along those lines, did those mental maps always work together well? Or were there points where there was tension and frustration between the founders because their mental maps were different. Oh, yeah, there was frustration. I mean, you know, in Washington's cabinet, you were debating,

there were disputes between Jefferson and Hamilton. Hamilton wanted to assume the debts of the different colonies as they had started off being the different state debts and amassed a national debt would provide the basis for a currency and for ready cash and people to accumulate cash. He wanted a national bank of the United States to encourage the capital accumulation and to people to invest money in things. Jefferson didn't believe in blanks. Jefferson opposed this. So he wanted just farmers to be out on the land and so forth. So, yeah, they had very grave differences on policy, and they also had differences on foreign policy.

I mean, the infant United States in the 1790s was faced with a world war between revolutionary France, which of course France, Royal France had been its ally on the revolution, and with mercantile and Royal Britain, which was its main trading partner in the 1790s. And you had, you know, Hamilton basically sided with Britain and thought that the French Revolution was really an awful thing. Jefferson, even though some of his friends got guillotined, thought the revolution was a good thing. It was a continuation of the American Revolution. He took the side of France. So that was an issue that helps create political parties. I mean, the founders didn't like political parties, but they were faced with this very fundamental foreign policy decision. Which side are you on or how are you going to become neutral and how that plays out?

when you have these two warring parties here who are quite happy to push the United States around, they don't think the United States is much to worry about one way or the other. You know, U.S. diplomats that they send over can't get appointments with any of their foreign secretaries or anything. So this was a natural thing for them to create political parties and political disagreement about because it was a fundamental issue on which people of considerable talent and goodwill had different views. Excellent. Well, we could keep going because you've just done such a good job of laying out in detail the views, the perspectives, the mental maps of so many of our founding fathers. I want to encourage everyone listening to get the book.

If you go to Encounterbooks.com, you can order your copy of Mental Maps of the Founders by Mr. Michael. Barone. Mr. Barone, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate the conversation. Well, thank you very much. And with that, that's going to do it for today's podcast. Thanks so much for being with us this Friday morning. If you have not done so, make sure that you check out our evening show. Every weekday, around 5 p.m. We bring you at the top news of the day. These are the headlines that you don't want to miss to stay informed on what is happening in our world. Also, if you have a moment, make sure that you hit that subscribe button and leave the Daily Signal podcast.

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