About

The initial inspiration for this book stemmed from a robust political debate between me and my two adult sons. Wanting to make my case from the Founders’ perspective, I dashed to my bookshelf to peruse books on the Founding, soon returning with a stack, each with a piece of the answer. We spent hours that night, as we often do, discussing the affairs of the day and how the Founders would speak to those issues.

Following that conversation, and for my own edification, I determined it would be easier to reference the Founders’ ideas if I could pull them from a single source. Having the most relevant words of the Founders in one place would both equip me for the next political discussion with my sons, and inform my public speaking on the topic.

A few months later I gave a presentation on the founding ideals in the words of the Founding Fathers at the Western Conservative Summit in Colorado. Following the positive response, it dawned on me that the presentation of the Founders’ words in the form of a speech needed to be a book. I needed to write a relatable and relevant book for a modern audience that could also serve as a single resource for the Founders’ thoughts and principles — in their own words.

From my home office in Woodstock, Georgia, I set out to collect and collate the most relevant texts from the Founders’ speeches, essays, letters, and the Federalist Papers, weaving them into a tapestry of a speech that builds and develops as a narrative. I knew it would take time, but I did not expect to be pulled into a two-year immersion of their texts and, even more surprisingly, into the words of those who inspired them, as well as many they inspired in the generations that followed. But to tell the full story of America, and of the enlightenment of which they were a part, and through which their promise of equality was eventually kept, I needed to include them all. I needed to hear — and wanted to make accessible — the relevance of all of their words to our issues today, as if the Founders had together visited modern-day America, and reconvened to compose a single speech that would recall America to its founding principles.

As I crafted The Founders’ Speech to a Nation in Crisis, I imagined the readers as an audience, standing in the back of a town hall meeting, or sitting in a church pew listening intently as the Founders’ speech was delivered. I pictured “Scribe,” as I eventually called him, at the front of the church, narrating the Founders’ words with passion, as though speaking them for the first time.

To help the reader follow the speech, I have enumerated and italicized the author of each text in a superscript citation for immediate attribution. Several texts have been mildly curated to support the narrative, for pronoun consistency, and for modern usage standards.

While this book illustrates how the Founding Fathers agreed on the core principles of liberty, it also digs into the disagreements of the Constitutional Convention, as well as the threats of tyranny that soon challenged our fledgling nation in the ensuing years, and continue to challenge our nation to this day. And thus my purpose for this book is to bring to life the ethos and principles of America’s founding while reminding us of who we are as Americans — as a nation of citizens with a common history, as a people with a faith-rooted belief in virtue, and as patriots with a shared commitment to liberty. My hope is that Americans may once again revere the miracle of our nation’s founding, that we might once again unite around our shared American creed, E pluribus unum: Out of many, one.