Can we turn to Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Jay for answers to present-day problems in Darfur or Iraq? Not surprisingly, there was a difference of opinion among a panel of distinguished historians who gathered at the New-York Historical Society Friday for a program at the Chairman’s Council Weekend with History.

The moderator, Richard Brookhiser,made the case for continuity of public discussion from the Founders to the present. He opened by saying how close in fact we are to the Founders. He once heard Alger Hiss speak. He had clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who as a captain in the Army, the story goes, had warned Lincoln to “get down” to avoid being shot on the battlefield. Lincoln, as a young man, had worked with John Quincy Adams, who as a 7-year-old had seen the smoke from the Battle of Bunker Hill. It’s about five steps in the room, Mr. Brookhiser said, to the founders. “It’s a lot farther,” he said, to Charlemagne.

When Mr. Brookhiser brought up the subject of Darfur, the UCLA professor Joyce Appleby said she would like to challenge the assumption. She saw obstacles in looking directly for answers from people five or six lifetimes removed from the present. She said any person over 50 has probably changed his views on some subject and known friends who haven’t.

About entering someone else’s mind, Ms. Appleby said, “We can’t even predict what they would do in their lifetimes.” For example, Thomas Jefferson spoke less and less about slavery as he got older, while George Washington upon death released his slaves.

The general consensus among the panel was that no clear-cut answers could be gleaned from the Founding Fathers to our present problems, but studying history could give us perspective.

Ms. Appleby brought up Congressional debate in the 1820s over Greek rebels. The congressmen were deliberating over whether “in America we were creating a model for other nations, or do we actively interfere.” They voted to not get involved directly.

The MIT professor Pauline Maier cautioned against melding the Founders into one vision, when in fact they were a varied lot. And Mr. Brookhiser noted that polarization in the 1790s was worse than today’s divisiveness among the electorate.

At one point Ms. Maier told Mr. Brookhiser she hadn’t yet read his book “What Would the Founders Do?: Our Questions, Their Answers” (Perseus Books). But, she continued, she had read the dust jacket. “That’s all you need,” replied Mr. Brookhiser to audience mirth, joking that she could “review it.”

The Yale historian David Blight said the question was less what the Founders would do than how their views might inform us today.

The University of Houston professor Steven Mintz said there was a pattern in America of applauding other revolutions when they begin, but becoming disappointed over time. Enthusiasm is generally followed by disillusionment, he said.

He noted that the population in the colonies in the early Republic was similar to that of the city of Houston. “Can you imagine,” he asked, Houston producing such a group of leaders as the Revolutionary War generation? “It’s truly extraordinary,” he said.

(The Knickerbocker is reminded of once hearing the late historian Henry Steele Commager saying all the schools of government and think tanks – from the Kennedy School to the Hoover Institution – could not produce the Federalist Papers, the product of a few men writing letters to each other in their spare time. “They haven’t yet, they never will,” Mr. Commager had said.)

Ms. Appleby said the Founding Fathers had political imagination. She said in her lifetime one who had exhibited such skill was Nelson Mandela, who had “the ability to imagine an entirely different society.”

The prior evening, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz was joined by the Columbia University professors Andrew Delbanco and Eric Foner, who stood before artifacts and books on display in the library at the New-York Historical Society. “This is the most erudite ‘Antiques Roadshow'” one will ever see, said Mr. Wilentz, standing before a draft of the Constitution handed to delegates. “What you’re seeing is the invention of American politics in these four sheets of paper.”

Mr. Wilentz said the NYHS was important not only to historians who are “readers of dead people’s mail” but to the general public. “The institution is the heart of the country’s self-knowledge.”

Mr. Foner spoke about a cylindrical draft wheel whose use sparked the draft riots in New York in 1863. “It’s amazing it survived,” he said, given the violence that erupted.

“The New-York Historical Society is one of our great civic treasures,” said Andrew Delbanco. He discussed Herman Melville, whom he said was fundamentally a New Yorker.

Mr. Delbanco spoke of the restlessness found among busy New York lives. He said his institution, Columbia, began downtown and moved to what is today the Rockefeller Center area, before settling in Morningside Heights. “Only in New York,” he said to audience laughter, “would you have a great university always on the move.”

Mr. Wilentz said he met his wife in the library of the NYHS. “It kept me coming back.” Mr. Foner told the Knickerbocker he researched his first book, “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men,” at the society and read 19thcentury newspapers and pamphlets in the collection. He said in the 1960s “You couldn’t get lunch anywhere nearby.”

There was merriment that evening when someone mentioned that Teddy Roosevelt once came to the NYHS but found it closed due to a snowstorm.

Doris Kearns Goodwin received the first NYHS American History Book Prize for her book “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” (Simon and Schuster).

She told various anecdotes, including one about Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward, who held extravagant Washington D.C. dinner parties in the 1850s with Northerners and Southerners alike. They had 17 courses with 5 different wines “so they would hug each other at the end of the dinner.”

gshapiro@nysun.com