This is the FCB podcast network. They bring us at the Charny for start of the thing, and they thought so when we were in America. And welcome back to the Growing Patriot podcast American History for Kids. Before I start, this is just a reminder that you can find more resources for this episode and every episode at Growingpatriots dot com slash podcast. As you know, we're at the end of the Revolutionary time period. And in the last episode I told you about seven events I hope you remember, and in this episode I'm going to tell you about five big themes I hope you remember. So first, what's a theme. Think about it like an idea that comes up over and over again. And there are a few that just came up over and over again the whole time we were talking about the founding period, and those were the idea of the individual being so important, liberty, fairness and justice, compromise and improvement, not perfection, but improvement. So let's dive in as we talk about how each of them was a theme throughout our entire founding period, from the very first settlers, through our difficulties with English rule, the Revolution, and as we became our own independent country. First up is the individual. From early on, this is what America was all about. Pilgrims came here so they could worship their individual faith safely, rather than be forced into the religion their king or queen told them they had to follow. Colonies had their own charters, which were kind of like many constitutions protecting certain rights. And while those were inspired by the Magna Carta, which was an English document that went way back to twelve fifteen, with the king so far away, these were something different. They were really governing themselves and had far more rights as individual human beings rather than just subjects of a certain king or queen. And it's when the King of England tried to interfere with those rights as individual people that colonists had a problem. They told the king he couldn't do that, and they were willing to fight a war about it, because every person is born with certain inalienable rights to things like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And when the American colonists won, they set up a constitution that was set up to protect every single individual from the government to protect the rights of those individuals, knowing that it's the best way to protect the rights of everyone overall, and in our new country. Without ranks and titles and kings and queens, people could make their own way in the world, prove themselves through hard work, and succeed on merit as individuals. The second theme is liberty. Our entire founding period was a fight for liberty. First, it was the story of people finding liberty in the American colonies, and then when Britain made that impossible, the colonies themselves had to find liberty from Britain. Many of the earliest colonists needed a safe place to live because there was no liberty in their home countries. I mentioned religious freedom before, but they might not have had freedom of speech, the ability to choose where to live, who they could marry, what they could read, what their job was, or any of another million decisions we enjoy every day and don't think about. By coming to an a new colony that was chartered on liberty, they could build a new life. There still wasn't as much choice as there is today, but it was more than they could have dreamed of otherwise, And they knew their children, grandchildren and every generation to come would have even more than they did. And that's why any threat to liberty was taken very seriously by the colonists. Did attacks in Boston really matter to a colonist in South Carolina? Not really. It didn't cost them any money, and they could have ignored it. But it wasn't just a tax. It was Britain saying that America wasn't free to govern itself, that they didn't have liberty like they had agreed to, and that was a threat to every single colony. So they all worked together to fight back and protect liberty in all thirteen colonies, knowing that it could be a huge deal, and it was. It ended up causing the Revolutionary War, but that ended up creating America, a country founded in liberty. The third is the idea of fairness and justice. We've talked about liberty and individuals, so it's important that we talk about fairness and justice. After all, liberty doesn't mean much if it's not fair for every single individual, and our founders worked really hard to make sure everyone was treated equally. One of my favorite examples of this is what happened after the Boston massacre. Let's go back to seventeen seventy for a second. A British soldier named Hugh White was guarding the custom house in Boston and American colonists were yelling at him and causing a big fuss. He hit one with his bayonet and the colonists started throwing stuff at him, snowballs, rocks, ice, you name it. So White called for help. It turned into a big fight and the British fired their guns. Five colonists were killed and six others were hurt. But instead of just hanging the eight British soldiers who were arrested John Adams, and you've heard of him, right he became president later, he said they had to have a fair trial. He was a lawyer, so he defended them himself. He even convinced the judge to bring in people from outside of Boston to be jurors, so the people who decided if the soldiers were guilty or innocent could be as fair as possible. He wanted a fair trial for a couple of reasons. For one thing, he wanted it to look fair. He didn't want to give the British any excuse to get revenge. They had to be able to say they did everything right in the American colonies. But there were also a lot of colonists still loyal to Britain, and he had to show them that the quote unquote rebels were good people, that they were for law and order, that they respected justice and being fair was the only way to get justice. And in the end, no one was found guilty of murder. Two were found guilty of something else called manslaughter, which is a little bit less. And when we talk about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights on this podcast, we talked a lot about our system of justice, but we didn't really talk about the word justice. If something is just, it is fair or right. So that's built into the system if it's built right, and ours is. But justice and fairness in this time period can also be tricky because in the founding period we still had slavery in America and that's not fair and it's not just and a lot of our founders knew that. And that brings me to our fourth theme, and that fourth theme is compromise. I've heard people say that a good compromise leaves everybody mad, and that's because that means that the two sides that disagree each have to give up something of what they want and agree on something they can both live with. So when it came to slavery, a lot of our founders knew what was wrong. They also knew that to win our freedom from Britain and get the Constitution passed, we needed every single colony working together. And there were some colonies that just wouldn't agree to end slavery quite yet, so in the short term they had to compromise, and they knew slavery would come to an end before long. Compromise happened on a million things in our history, and it all comes together in our Constitution, which is all about compromise. The way our country is set up, no one can have their own way all the time. The different branches of government all want different things and they have to work together. And the final theme is improvement over perfection, because nothing is perfect, but we can always keep making it better. In the preamble to the Constitution, we did an whole episode about that. If you want to go back and listen, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase in order to form a more perfect union, and I love that phrase. I think it's something we all need to spend more time thinking about. Jefferson wasn't saying that a free America would be perfect, just more perfect than it was under British control. It would care more about the individual, focus on liberty, center itself on justice and fairness, and work through compromises. But it wouldn't be perfect, because nothing ever is. So he couldn't promise that, but he could promise that we could try to keep making things better. We can keep making things more perfect every day. Still, if you try to make things better in your house, your neighborhood, or your school, that makes America more perfect. So instead of thinking about how impossible it is to be perfect, let's be like Thomas Jefferson and try to make things more perfect. I think he set a pretty good example. Thanks for joining me for this episode. It's the last one in our founding timeline. From here we're going to start getting to know our founding fathers a little bit better and I am so excited. You can find out more about the Growing Patriots, me, the podcast, the books, everything at Growingpatriots dot com or Growing Patriots on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Until next Time agreed us out Jeanny through stand the Thing and they thought so well would be America. This has been a presentation of the FCB podcast network, where Real Talk lives visit us online at Fcbpodcasts dot com.
