Many of the founding fathers weren’t optimistic about the long-term viability of what they had created. They may have been right. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:
Thomas Jefferson – one of my long-time heroes – was convinced that he and his friends blew the chance they had to establish freedom in America. I know that a hundred thousand self-praising textbooks, speeches, pundits and songs claim that Jefferson and the rest established freedom, but that’s not what Jefferson thought, and it’s not what he said.
Nearly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, he was of the opinion that the founders didn’t fully live up to the moment presented to them.
Here is a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Cartwright on June 5th, 1824. Jefferson’s words are in plain text and my modern paraphrasing of the lines are in italics:
Our Revolution presented us an album on which we were free to write what we pleased. Yet we did not avail ourselves of all the advantages of our position.
The Revolution gave us a shot at real liberty, but we blew it.
We had never been permitted to exercise self-government. When forced to assume it, we were novices in its science. Its principles and forms had little entered into our former education. We established, however, some (but not all) of its important principles…
We weren’t prepared for what we had to do.
