Barbarous Ancestors
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About This Book
Barbarous Ancestors follows a single disease across eleven centuries, the practice of governing the living by the recovered will of the dead, from a Roman courtroom in the year 897 to the marble one now deciding American life. The book arrives as the United States turns two hundred and fifty, in the middle of a fight over whether the founding generation finished the country's thinking for it.
In January of 897, the reigning pope had his predecessor's corpse pulled from its tomb, dressed in full vestments, propped upright, and put on trial. A deacon answered the prosecution in the dead man's voice, and the sentence was carried out on the body. History treats the Cadaver Synod as a medieval freak show. Barbarous Ancestors treats it as a method, and the method survived.
Constitutional originalism claims the founding text means what its ratifying generation understood it to mean, and nothing since. The book calls that claim what the record shows it to be, a séance performed in robes, and it answers the séance with the founders' own letters and sealed convention notes, and with the amendment machine that generation wrote into the document itself. The verdict belongs to the living, and the closing chapters show what honest inheritance looks like when it builds.
The Argument
Debates over originalism usually stay inside the law reviews, a quarrel among professors about interpretive method. This book treats the doctrine as the newest outbreak of the oldest meme on record, the unit of culture that copies itself by convincing each generation that thinking ended with the one before. Bronze, scripture, sheet music, and marble have all carried it. The bench is only its latest host.
Evidence fills a gallery. The best physicians in the republic drained George Washington by the book of a doctor dead for centuries. Imperial China graded five hundred years of its finest minds against one twelfth-century edition of Confucius. The concert hall invented an authentic Bach, the forger's market sold Europe a Donation of Constantine that Constantine never wrote, and the King James Bible sworn on in court is an edition of an edition. In a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, in 1848, two girls founded the industry of talking to the dead, and the mediums' recovered voices always agreed with the paying customer.
The American chapters put the doctrine under deposition. Ratifiers ratified a public text while the convention's fullest record waited sealed in Madison's drawer for half a century. The founders wrote against ancestral authority in their own hands, Jefferson twice in letters, Washington in the sentence that opens this book, and Paine in the line about governing beyond the grave. A sentence from Chapter Ten carries the charge: "Originalism is founder-worship built on the one generation that told us not to worship founders."
Naming the mechanism does practical good, because a séance loses its power the moment the sitters can describe the table-rapping. The antidote is on the cover: when the Army engineers finished the Washington Monument, the new marble refused to match the old, and they built anyway, leaving a seam that late light still finds at a hundred and fifty feet. The book ends beneath that line, with the case for amending honestly and building forward in our own stone.
Table of Contents
Part One. The Mechanism
Interlude I. Montpelier, After Midnight
Chapter One. The Best Physicians in the Republic
Chapter Two. The Trial of the Corpse
Chapter Three. The Control Group Confessed
Part Two. The Gallery of Ancestor Worship
Interlude II. Moffat, 1759
Chapter Four. Authenticity in Costume
Chapter Five. The Book Defeats the Body
Chapter Six. The Empire of the Model Essay
Chapter Seven. The Gate That Never Closed
Chapter Eight. The Forger’s Market
Chapter Nine. The Original Is an Edition
Chapter Ten. The Invented Ancestor
Part Three. The American Specimen
Interlude III. The Deposition of Thomas Jefferson
Chapter Eleven. The Grammar of the Unfinished
Chapter Twelve. The Sealed Room
Chapter Thirteen. The Founders Flunk the Founders
Chapter Fourteen. The Molt
Chapter Fifteen. Objection, Hearsay
Chapter Sixteen. The Armory
Chapter Seventeen. The Séance Court
Part Four. The Antidote
Interlude IV. Above the Seam, 1880
Chapter Eighteen. Where the Analogy Bleeds
Chapter Nineteen. The Practitioners
Chapter Twenty. The Seam in the Stone
A Note on Sources · Bibliography · Questions for Discussion · Acknowledgments · About the Author · The Ideas & Inquiry Series · Also by David Boles
The Epigraphs
"We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816
"I do not think we are more inspired, have more wisdom, or possess more virtue, than those who will come after us."
George Washington to Bushrod Washington, 10 November 1787
"The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies."
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
What the Book Traces
From a corpse in the Lateran in 897, through Mount Vernon before dawn in December of 1799, the sulphur wells of Moffat in 1759 where a proud young man handed Scotland the ancestor it wanted, the anatomy theater where the book outranked the body until Vesalius climbed down with the knife, the examination cells that spoke in the voice of the sage, the gate of independent reasoning that its heirs believed was closed, the farmhouse raps of 1848 and the commission that tested them, Montpelier after midnight where an old man revises what a delegate said, a deposition Jefferson never agreed to attend, the armory where the modern Court conducts its interviews, and up the scaffold to the seam of 1880, the book follows one idea across eleven centuries while the costume changes on every page and the corpse underneath stays the same.
A Note on the Free PDF
A book about who may speak for the dead should be easy to reach and easy to keep. The free PDF is the whole book set as a reading edition, its fonts embedded so the file looks right on any machine whether or not the reader has those fonts installed, with a full Contents keyed to page numbers and a bookmark panel that runs from Part One through all four interludes and twenty chapters to the bibliography. Download it, read it, and hand it to anyone who still says the founders finished the argument.
Dedication
For Janna, who reads the world with her hands and taught me that a living language answers only to the living who use it,
and for the generation that will inherit this argument and, I hope, settle it better than we did.
Author Interview
Further Reading
Companion essay: The Architecture of Belonging: Resurrecting Habeas Corpus (Boles Blogs), on the 5-4 ruling that restored the Great Writ to Guantanamo's detainees and the living body the law must produce before a judge.
Companion essay: Did the Supreme Court Wait too Long to Stuff the Gays Back in the Closet? (Boles Blogs), on the conservative bloc's now-or-never timing in the marriage cases, a Court racing a living present it could feel moving.
The Synthetic Cause · The Rented Crowd · Ideas & Inquiry · About David Boles