Rick Green: 0:12
Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. This is WallBuilders, where we take on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. I'm Rick Green, America's Constitution Coach, serving here with David and Tim Barton David's, of course, America's premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders. Tim Barton's national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. All three of us were at the ProFamily Legislators Conference a few weeks back. We had great speakers from across the nation, legislators from across the nation exchanging ideas. It was just incredible and we had some fantastic talks that we want to share with you our WallBuilders radio audience. And so today we're going to pick up right where we left off yesterday, with David Barton opening the conference with a talk on a tale of two cities. Let's jump right back in.

David Barton: 0:53
We can look at the pilgrims and say, hey, these guys gave us elected government. This is something we enjoy in America today. We have the concept that they set forth. They practiced it. The other thing you find from these guys is they came up with a free enterprise because when they came they were a congregation and they were much what we see in Acts 2 and Acts 4, where the people had everything in common and their governor, william Bradford said, called it communitarian. We're like a community of believers, we're sharing everything together. But he talked about how that some of them worked harder than others, and there were some in the church that didn't want to work hard at all, but they got the benefit of what everybody else was doing because they took what they had. They broke it up among all the different families and so everybody got the same amount. And he said you know, we need to provide everyone for his own household. And that is out of 1 Timothy 5.8. It says if you do not provide for your own household, you're worse than an infidel and you've denied the faith. So they started providing for their own household. Also cited what John Smith has cited 2 Thessalonians 3.10, talks about if you don't work, you don't eat. We got people among us not working. Here's the deal you provide for your own household and if you don't work, you're just not going to eat. So if you want something to eat, get off your tail and go do something. So that was the way they started into it. And there's lots of other economic teachings in the Bible to deal with free enterprise. Look at Jesus' teachings in Matthew 20 and Luke 19 and Matthew 25. Great economic teachings. Jesus has got so many good economic teachings. And so this is where we have the first free enterprise system, free market system, and it started in 1627. This is the first free market business for a thousand years. Essentially, this is where you see. It started in Massachusetts, and Governor Bradford said that within two years of having gone to this free market business, he said their productivity increased seven fold. He said there never was a time after that in Massachusetts when they did not have plenty. They had plenty in abundance. They did not go through any starving time. They did. The first year, the first winter, they got here. They got here at the wrong time of year and they didn't have any food and their food had rotted on the way over. And so of the 102 pilgrims, half of them died that first year. They had their own starving time, but they weren't like Jamestown, they didn't eat people and they didn't butcher, they just ended up dying because they had nothing they could do, and so they never again had a time of want after they went to that free market system. The other thing you find with these guys is they're very significant with private property, because when they arrived in December of 1620, it's wintertime, and when they got there they did not see a single Indian Indians had sense enough to be out of the winter and be somewhere warm where they'd save food for the year. So the pilgrims go through this really tough winter, and that's where half of them died in that first winter. And as they come out of it they get introduced to Somerset, and Somerset introduces them to Squanto, squanto gets them to chief Massasoit, and so, as a result of what happens, they said you know we passed last winter and we're on somebody's land, but we don't know who it is, but we know it's not ours. See, they had this thing like with the 10 Commandments. 10 Commandments is don't take somebody else's private property, don't even want somebody else's private property. They understood the respect for private property. God's really big on that, even in the 10 Commandments, not to count the other verses. So they said, hey, we're on somebody's land. We would really like to live here. You think anybody would sell us some land? Is there an agreement we can make with somebody? Is there a way? And so they sought a way to be able to purchase land. And significantly, one of their later governors, about two generations later, governor Josiah Winslow. He talked about this trait of the pilgrims. He says, governor Josiah Winslow said I think I can clearly say that the English did not possess one foot of land in this colony, but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors, everything we bought. We've got a title deed to it. And when that title deed was signed, both sides were happy with the agreement, sellers and purchasers. That's why we made the agreement. We actually have accumulated one of the very largest pilgrim collections in America, about 1300 documents from that era. But we also have a lot of Indian treaties signed by chiefs selling land. We actually have the treaty from the chief who sold the Bronx to the English. So we got the title deed for the Bronx. I don't know what we'd do with it. We don't want the Bronx, they can have the Bronx, but nonetheless we've got the title deed for it. But they had title deeds for all this stuff. So this is the way that they viewed private property resulted that the longest lasting treaty in American history between settlers and between Native Americans was with the pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians, from whom they bought that land. And when the treaty was finally broken in 1676, it was the Indians who broke the treaty and not the settlers who broke the treaty. So again, the pilgrims are very different from the image we see of most settlers and textbooks today. In addition to private property, you go to civil rights. Now mention how that slavery is a world problem. The pilgrims are trying to address that. And in 1641, pilgrims said look, there's a slave trade going all over the world. What's going to happen if slaves come here to this colony? And so they passed that law in 1641 and they quoted directly from Exis 2116. Exis 2116 is the verse that talks about man stealing. Man stealing is going somewhere, stealing a person, moving them to another place and selling them. So man stealing is what we would call the slave trade. And they said look, the Bible talks about this. We know it's going all over the world at this point in time, and so this is part of what they call their capital laws. These are part of the civil laws they passed. The one in the middle says right here it says if any man stealeth a man or mankind, he shall be put to death. Exis 2116. So this is your first really significant anti-slavery law. You get involved in a slave trade. That's a death penalty crime here. So what happened was, five years later, a ship pulled into the harbor and it had slaves, and slavery is common all over the world. You can't find a slave, a nation that didn't have slavery, so they get off there at the ship. They get off the ship, they're employment, say, hey, we got slaves, we need slaves, we've got lots of slaves, we've got a good deal of slaves. And the pilgrims go you got what? We got slaves. And so the pilgrims freed all the slaves and they arrested the owners and they sentenced the owners to be executed. And the owner said wait a minute, you guys don't do slavery, everybody does slavery. You don't do slavery. We didn't know that. If we'd known that, we wouldn't have brought our slaves here. And so the pilgrims go fair enough, you didn't know, but you do now. If you ever come back to this colony with slaves, we will execute you at that point in time. So they made it really clear that this is our law. We're not going to have slavery here. And on top of that, the pilgrims themselves took up a collection. They hired a ship and they hired a captain and a crew to take those captured slaves back wherever they had been taken from, wherever they pilgrims didn't have a responsibility to turn those folks back to where they'd come from. They took up a collection and did that. They sent those folks back wherever you want to go. We're going to get you back to where you want to go. So when you look at Massachusetts, at the Plymouth colony that became Massachusetts this is why in 1792, this is called the Equality Bolt it happened in 1792. This drawing was done in 1793. And what it shows is Massachusetts on the left side, the white guy there shaking hands with the black guy. The white guy is John Hancock. The black guy he's shaking hands with is a guy named Paul Cuffy. Paul Cuffy is the wealthiest black man in America. He and his sons own a global shipping business out of Massachusetts. They send ships all over the world. They do booming business and they're celebrating the fact that in Massachusetts, blacks and whites have always been equal. Matter of fact, this man, robert Brown Elliot, who was a congressman in the 1870s, he said there never was a time in Massachusetts history when blacks and whites weren't equal and when blacks and whites couldn't vote. And so that doesn't fit the narrative we hear today of critical race theory in 1619. This is the history we don't hear anything about. Nonetheless, this is what they did with race relations. And if you look, we're told today about critical race theory that, oh, a bunch of white guys founded America. And that's true, a bunch of white guys founded America. And how do we know what these guys even look like? Because this painting is done in 1821. And that's 45 years after the founding fathers signed the declaration. And none of them look really old in that picture, except maybe Ben Franklin. So how did you get the pictures to look like they looked back 45 years earlier? Here's the deal. If you did something significant in history, then not only in America, but in the world. If you did something significant in history, they painted a portrait of you. Of course, no cameras and it costs money, time and effort to paint a painting. But if you do something important, we'll paint one. And so if you're a famous preacher, if you're a famous soldier, if you're a famous educator, president of Harvard or Yale, if you're a guy who signed the Declaration of Constitution, we have portraits of you. We know what you look like. Well, we also have a lot of portraits a whole lot of black folk from back then, and the fact that we don't know their story today or that we don't show these portraits, doesn't mean that there weren't huge black influences back then.

Rick Green: 9:47
Alright, folks, hang on one second. We gotta take a quick break. We'll be right back. We're listening to David Barton speaking at the Pro Fam the Legislators' Conference. We'll be right back on. WallBuilders ["Wall.

Tim Barton: 9:59
Builders"]. Hey guys, we want to let you know about a new resource we have at WallBuilders called the American Story. For so many years people have asked us to do a history book to help tell more of the story that's just not known or not told today and, we would say, very providentially, in the midst of all of the new attacks coming out against America, whether it be from things like the 1619 Project let's say America is evil and everything in America was built off slavery, which is certainly not true or things like even the Black Lives Matter movement, the organization itself, not the statement Black Lives Matter, but the organization that says we're against everything that America was built on, and this is part of the Marxist ideology. There's so many things attacking America. Well, is America worth defending? Well, what is a true story of America? We actually have written and told that story, starting with Christopher Columbus, going roughly through Abraham Lincoln. We tell the story of America not as a story of a perfect nation or a perfect people, but the story of how God used these imperfect people and did great things through this nation. It's a story you want to check out. WallBuilderscom the American Story ["WallBuilders"].

Rick Green: 11:04
Welcome back to WallBuilders. Thanks for staying with us. Today is the middle of a three-day program, so we broke up David Barton's talk at the Prophemy Legislators Conference, where he opened the conference on a talk A Tale of Two Cities. And today's the second day and we're right in the middle of part two here, so let's jump right back in with David.

David Barton: 11:24
You go even to so many of these names, I mean, if I start just calling names, most we don't recognize, but they're all there because they did something significant. I'll show you one guy in particular I like. This guy's a guy named Wentworth Cheswell. Wentworth Cheswell is from New Hampshire. Wentworth Cheswell, black man, elected to office in a white community in 1768. So he becomes an elected official in New Hampshire in 1768. He's re-elected for the next 49 years in New Hampshire. He held political office. He held eight different political offices in New Hampshire. So having a black elected official in 1768, that's pretty significant. Yeah, but that's not even close to. First you got to go back to somebody like Matthias de Souza. Matthias de Souza is a black man who lived in Maryland and in 1641 his white community in Maryland elected him to be a state representative in 1641. Wait a minute. 1641, we're elected black individuals to office in America. By the time you get to 1876, we've elected more than a thousand black representatives into office across America. Now, just to put that in perspective, great Britain never gets beat up for being racist. When's the first time Great Britain elected a black official to office? 1987. Or let's take somebody like Russia. It's 2010 for Russia, 2008. For Italy, it's 1641 for us and we're the bad guys in the world. That shows how little we'd our own history. See, we weren't doing critical race 30 years ago because we needed too much of our own history for anybody to be able to get away with it. It just wouldn't happen. We don't know that history anymore and so we literally are historically illiterate and so on. There's stories like that with every one of those faces, so many other portraits we didn't have space to put up there. So civil rights pilgrims really kind of blazed the trail on that. Public education, of course these guys are escaping from tyranny in England at the price of their life if they stay, and so they brought their kids with them. But they want their kids educated. They don't want their kids being barbaric over here. So they start creating schools. The first public school law is passed in 1642. Another one is 1647. They're printed in the code of 1650. This is also the code that has the anti-slavery laws. The man see, all this is that they're legal stuff. And if you look at their legal stuff, the first public school law ever passed in American history, passed by those guys up there at that point, and it's called the old deluder Satan law. That's an interesting title for a public school law and it says when you get 50 children into a community, you have to get them a teacher. When you get 100 children in a community, you have to build them a school. And so when you look at why they would want their kids educated, it says here under schools. It says it being the one chief project of that old deluder Satan to keep men from the knowledge of the scriptures, as before. Satan's whole purpose is to keep us out of the Bible and that's what he did for all those years and that's why we had all those atrocities. We're not going to let that happen in this new land. We're going to make sure everybody knows the Bible so that we don't get into the same kind of government atrocities that happen elsewhere. So this is the start of public education in America. Is this law this first public school law? And of course they wanted everybody to know the Bible, which is why they educated both boys and girls. Try finding that in Europe and that advanced civilized state of Europe. It didn't happen. You'll find that the highest literacy rate for women was in Massachusetts, was higher than anywhere in Europe, which is amazing. A backwards colony of Massachusetts where you don't have any of the civilized stuff, a higher literacy rate for women than what they have in all the high courts across Europe? Yep, because they wanted everybody to know God's word. So education is a big thing for them. Now, if I jump forward 170 years, I'm going to take New Jersey, because New Jersey is up there. That area of you've got Massachusetts and Rhode Island and Connecticut and New Hampshire and New Jersey. All those were founded as very devoutly religious colonies with practicing religious people, not like Jamestown colony, they're practicing religious people. And so all of you from your state, you've got public records that go back to your days. I mean Texas. We've got records that go back to the colony time. You may have seen over at the museum today the actual beginning of the state of Texas. It was the Austin colony and the 10 provisions he had to do to be a colony here in Texas. That is the founding document of Texas. But we have the records from Texas as a colony, the Texas as an independent nation, the Texas as a state and all of you do. You've all got records. You can go back and you can see how many public schools there were in whatever year, and how many kids were at school and what they were teaching. I just chose New Jersey to show what was happening up in that part of the country in 1816. This is the state board of education report on what's happening in the schools and they're going to talk about what they call the first and second classes. We would call that the first and second grades. They did new grades, they did classes, and so you see here, all the scholars of the first and second classes commit to memory portions of the New Testament, or Psalms, a lesson in the Catechism, several hymns and the text of the preceding Sabbath. That's public schools. And what's the text of the preceding Sabbath? Well, pastor Tim here, whatever he preached on last Sunday, we're going to memorize all the verses he talked about last Sunday. That's the text of preceding Sabbath. Now, they did point out that one of the kids they had in the state was a lot sharper than the rest of the kids. They pointed out. They said one of the scholars has committed to memory the book of John and the first 30 Psalms, together with 119th Psalm. What grade? Oh yeah, first and second grade. That's what we're talking about here. Now he's a smart kid. We all know smart kids like not everybody's a smart kid, and that's what they pointed out. They said the majority have committed to memory the gospel by John. Wait a minute. So nearly all the first and second graders in New Jersey in 1816 memorized the gospel John. Yeah, but we had one kid that was so smart, he also had 30 more chapters out of Psalms and Psalms 119, but everybody does the gospel John. I don't know that I've met many adults in their life who memorized the gospel John and this is second grade public schools in New Jersey in 1816. Again, look at education up in that area. So lots of examples Go to due process, due process. We have the due process clauses in the Constitution, the Fourth of Date, the Amendment. So the right to confraterric use. It's how legal cases work, it's how trials work, etc. And this is where Massachusetts really kind of has a fall out here. They don't do great on this one initially. That's why any textbook you look at American Textbook Day we'll talk about the intolerant Christians there in Massachusetts. How do we know they're intolerant? Because they had the witch trials. You see, they came here to America to practice what they believe, but when people disagreed with them they started killing those people and so what you'll see is with that and, by the way, massachusetts at this point is not what Massachusetts was when the pilgrims got there. You see the yellow boot kind of down at the bottom there. That yellow boot, that is the Plymouth Colony. That's where the pilgrims were. That pink colony up top, that's the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the Puritans 10 years later. So the Plymouth Colony in 1620, the Puritans start the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Those two colonies came together in 1692 to become the state of Massachusetts or the colony of Massachusetts Sinclair. So where we're talking about the witch trials is not down in the Plymouth area, but it is in the Bible-believing area a little north of that, north of Boston, up towards Salem. That's where they're having the witch trials. So when you look at the witch trials and see what was going on, these witch trials in Salem, apparently 27 people died as a result of all the proceedings with the witch trials and those witch trials lasted about 18 months up there. Now that's significant. Keep these numbers in mind 27 deaths, 18 months because across the world at that time, which trials were happening everywhere? It's just like slavery wasn't happening only in America, it was happening in every nation of the world. And so let's look at the whole world situation to compare things. Same thing here. So when you look at the which trials that were going across the rest of the world, how long did they last across the rest of the world? Over a century. They went for more than 100 years, of which trials in Europe. So America had 18 months. So maybe the most important question is why did it only last 18 months? Why did they come to an end so quick in Massachusetts? And the answer is really pretty simple. There were three Christian leaders Reverend John Wise, Reverend increased Mather, Reverend Thomas Brattle went to Governor William Phipps. He said Phipps, you're just copying Europe. You're not doing what the Bible says on criminal justice stuff. You're not using due process, you're just doing what everybody else is doing. And when they showed it to them, took them through it, phipps goes you're right. And so Phipps called in Judge Samuel Sewell and said Sewell, we've got to stop the trials. We're not, we're just doing everybody else. That's not what the Bible says to do. And so they stopped the trials. And it's interesting, over the next month they tried to do what they could to make things right. For example, once which trials were stopped. They took everyone who had been involved in those or accused in any way legally and they took their name off the books. They said these people should not have been accused because this wasn't done the right way. So they took their names off the legal books so they would not appear as being perpetrators or something that was done wrong. Then, after they took all the names off the books those and, by the way, let me even back up further than that, because Sewell made the mistake of having these trials he's just doing what Europe is doing, just following the judges there. Sewell actually stood up in church and in front of the church confessed been guilty of shedding innocent blood, which will bring God's judgment on them people. He stood up and confessed to sin openly in front of the congregation. Also, governor Phipps called a colony-wide day of humiliation, fasting and prayer. You got to avert God's judgment for having shed innocent blood. That'll bring God's judgment on the nation. The Bible says so. So they have a colony-wide day of repentance. They took the legal name, they took the names off the legal books and then they took the families that had been involved and paid them all restitution. They wanted to do what they could to make it right for those families that did something wrong with. So we hear about the witch trials, we don't hear about the rest of it. Let's go back to this intolerant Christian stuff for a bit. I mentioned witch trials are going across the world. Do you know how many people were killed in the European witch trials? Over 500,000. 27 in America. In every single American textbook we'll talk about the 27 and never mention the 500,000. It's not that Christians are perfect. They make mistakes. So what here? We got out of them a whole lot faster than the rest of the world because we were more committed to doing what the Bible said. The rest of the world was. We had people who came here and spent hours a day in the Bible conforming their life to what it said, rather than making the Bible conform to what they already believed. So it's significant. This is where so many of the due process rights come from. And, by the way, justice Stephen Brow, I've had the blessing of being involved in 13 cases through a Supreme Court in some way shape, fashion, form, capacity, and in reading one of Justice Breyer's decisions and Justice Breyer is the most recent justice who retired from the Supreme Court and Justice Breyer, I think we can safely say is probably the most secular justice in the history of the Supreme Court. Probably pretty easy to say that. So, stephen Breyer, in a decision he said well, just reading the decision he said well, we all know that the due process rights came out of the Bible. And I was taken back and said really, what's your source? And so I looked at his footnote and his footnote went to federal practice and procedure, volume 30. If you practice federal law, there's a series of federal law books that go from here out the door and across the park a lot. I mean just a long series of books. But volume 30 deals with some of these due process rights. And there are nearly 20 pages in volume 30 that show how that the pilgrims and Puritans use John 8.10 to guarantee your right to confront your accuser. So the right to confront your accuser that we have in the Bill of Rights is actually out of John 8.10. Other rights the same way the right to compel witnesses on your behalf, proverbs 18.17. The right to be able to speak in your own defense. Look at Acts 22.1. Turns out that so many of those due process rights literally came from biblical teachings. So when we talk even about due process, although Massachusetts, the pilgrims didn't, but the Puritans got it wrong for a period of time, but they got out of it faster than the rest of the world. These due process rights, I mean, this is what the pilgrims gave to us, and we don't spend hardly any day studying the pilgrims and if we do, we mis-portray them and try to make them look like the 1619 project. So when you look at pilgrims, I told you that virtually every time you see a painting of these guys, it has the Bible with them. Every one of these guys got a Bible with them. They were called the people of the book for their very reason. They were definitely evangelical, professing Christians, but, unlike Jamestown, they were also very biblical Christians. They tried to put that into practice in the Libbite and they changed their culture to make it match what the Bible said, rather than trying to wrap the Bible around the culture they already had, and that's a big difference and that's a big distinction. So this contrast that I'm making between 1619 and 1620, it's not that that's a really cool contrast to make. I came up with something no, no, go all the way back to 1888. This is what we would call a wall chart. So you know, in schools you'd have these charts on the walls, and this is kind of like one of those and this 1888 chart. You'll see that there's two things that come across America and what you see here is there's two ships that have landed Over here. 1619 will say that's Jamestown, that's a ship landing in Jamestown. And up here in 1620, it's a ship landing at Plymouth. And if you take that 1619, it's hard for you to see even close, much less at the back there's a circle there. So let me blow that circle up. You see that circle right there with the ship. Outside the circle it says Mammon, what's that? Oh, jesus talked about that in Matthew 6. Mammon, that's a love of money. And on the inside of that circle it says $1. Oh, so they're showing us a coin. They're showing us that Jamestown was founded as an economic colony. It was all about making money. That's how it was founded. So when you look at that, there's a lot of bad stuff that came out of that. And so they say God's curse of slavery. As you go across that, I'll just read it from here it's avarice, it's lust, it's ignorance, it's superstitions, it's ambition, it's secession, it's the Dred Scott decision, the Kansas, nebraska Act. It's the fugitive slave law of 1850s, the Missouri Compromise of 1820. That's all the bad stuff that came out of that part of the country. Now, that's what the 1619 project wants to make you think all of America is.

Rick Green: 26:16
Okay, folks, we're out of time for today. You've been listening to David Barton speak at the Pro Family Legislators Conference. His topic, that opening night, a tale of two cities. Tomorrow we will get the conclusion. So don't miss tomorrow here on WallBuilders. Thanks so much for listening. You've been listening to WallBuilders.