This is the contemporary-application episode for Week 7 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, and it takes Grotius off the page and holds him against our own moment — then follows the free-sea question to a harder one, closer to home. When the sea is contested and America turns to military force over it, who decides that we fight? The Constitution begins with a plain answer: Article I, Section 8 gives the power to declare war to Congress, not the President. This hour measures ou

This is the story of how a revolt became a republic almost by accident, how toleration and commerce fed each other until a small waterlogged country surpassed a vast empire, and how the men who built it also built, on the far side of the world, a machinery of conquest and slavery that cannot be edited out of the account of it.

The revolt that began as a defense of provincial liberties against a foreign king had produced something its own leaders never set out to build: a durable, tolerant, prosperous republic that governed itself without a crown and became, for a century, one of the richest societies in Europe and among the most free and religiously plural of its political orders. It was the practical answer to the question the resistance theorists had left hanging — not only how to be rid of a tyr