Universal Advertiser, founded in i767 and largely devoted to challenging the influence both of the Penn family and perceived British intrusion into colonial affairs. At this point, of course, Franklin positioned himself in a British context; he was clearly an individual born with a determination to succeed (being one of twenty children may have fomented that ambition) but not necessarily in a new national context. Ten years before he became involved with the Chronicle, Franklin had been sent to Britain to represent Pennsylvania, and took the opportunity to promote the idea of increased self-government for the colony, but with little success. On his return to the colonies, consequently, he increasingly advocated colonial unity and opposition to what he regarded as overbearing dominance of colonial affairs by a parliament 3,000 miles away. The Chronicle reflected the growing radicalism of the day in its publication of John Dickinson’s Letters from a Pennsylvanian Farmer, which argued against overtaxation. As a member of the Second Continental Congress, Franklin contributed to, and was a signer of, the Declaration of Independence, and in the year that it appeared (1776), he was dispatched to France to persuade the French to aid the American colonies in their conflict with Britain. Franklin returned to the by then United States two years after the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783) that ended the American War of Independence.
Margaret Fuller was born in Massachusetts and, as was and remains the fate of many educated women, her career began in teaching, largely because, after her father’s death, she had to support her younger siblings. However, active in journalism (she edited the transcendentalist journal The Dial and wrote for the then-moderately radical New York Tribune, edited by Horace Greeley), she was able to access a broader constituency beyond the classroom, and actively promoted not just women’s rights but equality more generally. Many of the arguments that appeared in her book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), were outlined two years previously in a long essay published in The Dial, “Man versus Men, Woman versus Women,” in which she emphasized the national promise inherent in the Declaration of Independence. “Though the national independence be blurred by the servility of individuals,” she wrote, “though freedom and equality have been proclaimed only to leave room for a monstrous display of slave dealing and slave keeping,” nevertheless the idea that all men are created equal remained “a golden certainty, wherewith to encourage the good, to shame the bad.” Sent to Europe by Greeley in 1846, Fuller furnished a series of “dispatches” published in the Tribune, in which she detailed the events of what she described as the “sad but glorious days” of the Italian revolution and the importance of the leading revolutionaries, notably Guiseppe Mazzini, and their ideals to the United States. “The cause is OURS, above all others,” she wrote to her country, a nation she believed to be “not dead” but sleeping through the issue of slavery, and one in which “the spirit of our fathers flames no more but lies hid beneath the ashes.” When in Italy, Fuller met and (possibly) married the revolutionary Marchese Giovanni Angelo d’Ossoli, with whom she had a son, Angelo. As they returned to the United States in 1850, their ship was wrecked off the coast of New York and all three perished. Fuller was not well served by her contemporaries as far as her lasting legacy was concerned, and her dispatches from Europe, although available in the Tribune, of course, were published as At Home and Abroad (1856), edited (and modified) by her brother, Arthur. The fame that she eventually was accorded as a women’s rights advocate has tended to overshadow the much broader importance of her analysis not just of women’s rights but of citizenship rights in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.
Alexander Hamilton, another of America’s Founding Fathers (and another lawyer), was actually born in the West Indies and was sent to the American colonies (to New Jersey) for his education in 1772, which he then continued at King’s College (now Columbia) in New York, where he became a strong supporter of the colonial cause and soon captain of an artillery company raised by the New York Providential Congress. He announced himself in print with the publication of “A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress,” which defended the Continental Congress from Loyalist attack, but his route to fame really began when he was appointed aide-de-camp to George Washington in i777, a position he held for four years. Hamilton’s experiences during the war, and especially over the terrible winter at Valley Forge when the revolutionary army was at its lowest point - both in terms of morale and men - is often cited as a factor in his later arguments in favor of a strong centralized federal state. Like Washington, Hamilton perceived that individual state concerns and loyalties operated against the efficient conduct of the war, and would most likely have the same effect on the (still putative) nation. He argued for a revision of the Articles of Confederation, and found he had common cause with others, such as future president James Madison and John Jay and, together with them he would compose and publish what became known as The Federalist Papers (originally The Federalist). This was a series of constitutional essays that appeared in the New York press between 1787 and 1788, and which was devised to support the case for a revised Constitution for America. It remains of relevance, and is sometimes cited, in contemporary Supreme Court rulings. One of Hamilton’s most notable contributions (Federalist 84) to the constitutional debate was his objection to the inclusion of the Bill of Rights on the grounds that to enumerate a series of rights risked restricting those rights already enjoyed by “the people.” A separate Bill of Rights, Hamilton, believed, would be “not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous.” Why, he asked, “declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” In 1789, Hamilton was appointed the first Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington, a post he held until 1795. In this capacity, Hamilton was instrumental in establishing the fiscal framework of the nation, its banks, revenue, national debt and credit systems, and the rules governing manufactures.
Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in Massachusetts, the son of doctor and author Oliver Wendell Holmes, and attended Harvard. When the Civil War broke out, he joined up to fight for the Union, and was wounded and left for dead after the Battle of Antietam in 1862 (his father recounted the experience of traveling to the battlefield to look for his son in an Atlantic Monthly article, “My Hunt after ‘The Captain’”). The war is usually deemed to have been the formative event in Holmes, Jr.’s life, the origin of what is sometimes described as his moral skepticism, largely because, toward the end of the century, he delivered two notables addresses on the subject of war and the life struggle. In 1884, in a Memorial Day Address delivered to the Union veterans’ association, the Grand Army of the Republic, Holmes argued that “the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.” A decade later, speaking before the graduating class at Harvard on Memorial Day, 1895, he urged the students “to keep the soldier’s faith against the doubts of civil life.” Holmes was certainly not unusual in evincing, in his later years, a robust and possibly slightly romanticized recollection of a conflict faced in his youth. By that time he was already very well established in his legal career, which he had taken up after the Civil War. He edited the American Law Review from 1870 to 1873, and in 1880 delivered a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute, which began with the observation that the “life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” Holmes was briefly professor of law at Harvard Law School but was appointed as associate justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in 1883 and became chief justice in 1899. As a former soldier, he naturally appealed to Theodore Roosevelt who appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court at the end of 1902. His most famous ruling was perhaps in Schenck vs. United States (1919), in which he established that the First Amendment did not protect an individual if they posed a “clear and present danger” to society (the individual in question had been encouraging Americans to avoid the draft). In Abrams vs. United States (1919), he argued - in what some interpreted as a contradiction to his previous judgment - that there was no “clear and present danger” (the individuals in this case had been distributing leaflets denouncing the war effort). There was no contradiction, because the crucial part of Holmes’s 1919 decision was that the words “are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger.” In fact, Holmes was consistent throughout his career in his emphasis on the importance of free speech as underpinning American liberties.