Posted on 02/05/2011 6:18:31 AM PST by Jacquerie
Also thanks to you for introducing Frothingham to me some months ago. I have spent many happy and engrossed hours consuming our colonial history.
Our Constitution could not have happened without the Articles of Confederation, or the revolution, or almost 200 years of colonial (mostly) self government.
I am particularly fascinated with the period during the English Civil wars, in which we were literally abandoned to our own devices to survive French and Indian predations. Do you have any further reference material dealing with this time?
And if the list were to be one with things that most pleased them, could they even get to ten?
ML/NJ
And that accounts for the state of the Republic today! For decades, the foundations of liberty have been eroded and replaced with the same old substitutes from which our forefathers escaped in the 17th and 18th Centuries.
"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court even can do much to help it." - Judge Learned Hand
"If I have learned anything from the reading of history, it is that the man who, in violation of great principles, toils for temporary fame, purchases for himself either total oblivion or eternal infamy, while he who temporarily goes down battling for right principles always deserves, and generally secures, the gratitude of succeeding ages, and will carry with him the sustaining solace of a clean conscience, more precious than all the offices and honors in the gift of man." - Sen. Zacharias Montgomery
After Thomas Jefferson, in his First Inaugural, had enumerated the principles which would guide his Administration in his First Inaugural, he added:
"These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and the blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety."
So-called "progressives" of the 20th and 21st Centuries, in their arrogance, have removed (censored) the Founders' ideas of liberty from America's textbooks, but technology has outstripped their efforts. Every American school child and adult now has potential access to almost every word the Founders' spoke and wrote, and their ideas are being rediscovered and circulated in a manner unheard of even 10 years ago, as if by the hand of Divine Providence. How else can one account for the events of 2010?
Enduring principles, according to the Founders were just that--enduring and "self-evident."
The sacred Rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power>" - Alexander Hamilton
"Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness, as you confess those invaded by the Stamp Act to be. We claim them from a higher source - from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence, which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us, exist with us, and cannot be taken from us by any human power, without taking our lives. In short, they are founded on the immutable maxims of reason and justice." - John Dickinson (Signer of the Constitution of the U. S., as quoted in "Our Ageless Constitution, p. 286)
GREAT post.
That very well may be where that quote came from.
I would also add that I STRONGLY believe the following Jefferson quote to be SO timely and SO relevant to our current situation that it needs to be posted as a stand alone thread here on Free Republic! Please consider doing that!
"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers."
Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39
And if you’re homeless the Constitution doesn’t apply.
The constitution applies to all of course!
Do you imagine that the homeless do not possess property as defined by Madison in the essay under discussion here?
Written while owning slaves.
Excellent point!
One sometimes forgets that almost 200-year "seedbed" for liberty which, then, in its miraculous accomplishments, provided another 200 years of the greatest experiment in liberty the world has ever witnessed.
Yes, written with the knowledge that human bondage was a contradiction of our founding principles.
“Providence punishes national sins with national calamities.” George Mason
But, our original sin was expunged some 80 years later at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
What confounds me is that the people most prone to criticize America today for the sins of 220+ years ago, are the same who support the white men who defend the murder of hundreds of thousands of black babies a year.
Black Slavery was awful. It has been in the past tense for 150 years. Black Murder is now. It is also illogically framed as a fundamental “right.”
Orgs. start up innocently enough and then rot sets in as people figure out how to profit from it until it's septic and they walk away.
Everything’s a right until someone bigger than you wants it.
Thanks for pinging me to the aip website.
Madison’s thoughts are as timely now as when they were written. I really appreciate you bringing them to our attention today.
Good!
Peeling away the covering on the constitution....
For the youth among us, we should, it seems, make every effort to present as complete a history as is possible regarding this point, however, in order that we do not assist in undermining the truly unique events of that period in our nation's history. The so-called "progressives" have done enough rewriting of our history in order to set us against each other to allow their counterfeit ideas to prevail and "change" America.
When observing that the Founders were slave owners, one must consider the historical context within which those Founders found themselves, as well as the enormous contributions they and their generations made toward eradicating slavery from these shores and creating a constitutional republic which could, ultimately, affirm and protect the rights of ALL people:
Of special interest in that regard is Jefferson's Autobiography, especially that portion which states:
"The first establishment in Virginia which became permanent was made in 1607. I have found no mention of negroes in the colony until about 1650. The first brought here as slaves were by a Dutch ship; after which the English commenced the trade and continued it until the revolutionary war. That suspended...their future importation for the present, and the business of the war pressing constantly on the (Virginia) legislature, this subject was not acted on finally until the year 1778, when I brought a bill to prevent their further importation. This passed without opposition, leaving to future efforts its final eradication."
Jefferson also observed:
"Where the disease [slavery] is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication. In the northern States, it was merely superficial and easily corrected. In the southern, it is incorporated with the whole system and requires time, patience, and perseverance in the curative process."
He explained that, "In 1769, I became a member of the legislature by the choice of the county in which I live [Albemarle County, Virginia], and so continued until it was closed by the Revolution. I made one effort in that body for the permission of the emancipation of slaves, which was rejected: and indeed, during the regal [crown] government, nothing [like this] could expect success."
Here is another quotation, cited in David Barton's work on the subject of the Founders and slavery, which also cites the fact that there were laws in the State of Virginia which prevented citizens from emancipating slaves:
"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. . . . The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded who permits one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other. . . . And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep for ever. . . . The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. . . . [T]he way, I hone [is] preparing under the auspices of Heaven for a total emancipation."
A visit to David Bartons web site (www.wallbuilders.com) provides an essential, excellent and factual written record of the Founders' views on the matter of slavery.
One source he does not quote, I believe, is the famous 1775 Edmund Burke "Speech on Conciliation" before the British Parliament, wherein he admonished the Parliament for its Proposal to declare a general enfranchisement of the slaves in America.
Burke rather sarcastically observed that should the Parliament carry through with Proposal before it: "Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation (England) which has sold them to their present masters? from that nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic?" He continued: "An offer of freedom from England would come rather oddly, shipped to them in an African vessel, which is refused an entry into the ports of Virginia or Carolina, with a cargo of three hundred Angola negroes. It would be curious to see the Guinea captain attempting at the same instant to publish his proclamation of liberty and to advertise his sale of slaves."
Ahhh, how knowledge of the facts can alter one's opinion of the revisionist history that has been taught for generations in American schools (including its so-called "law schools"!!)
Human beings are allotted ONLY A TINY SLIVER OF TIME ON THIS EARTH. Each finds the world and his/her own community/nation existing as it is. If lawyers and judges educated themselves (in this day of the Internet) on the history of civilization and America's real history, and if they used that knowledge and the resulting understanding, to do as much on behalf of liberty for ALL people as did Thomas Jefferson and America's other Founders, the world in the next century would be a better place.
Remember, Thomas Jefferson was only 33 years old when he penned our Declaration of Independence which capsulized a truly revolutionary idea into a simple statement that survives to this day to inspire people all over the world to strive for liberty!
Your reference to the Edmund Burke speech prodded me to review it.
He so much as told George III and his ministers, in a gentleman's way of course, that they were vengeful idiots who would deprive the empire and its people of the vast wealth of the American colonies.
“An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.” Edmund Burke to Parliament 22 March, 1775
BRAVO!
Yet another GREAT post!
Burke also held a firm understanding of the role of religion in the "fierce spirit of liberty" of the colonists.
Burke and Thatcher - two kindred spirits of American liberty!!
Exploration of the idea of "property" and its meaning in the Madisonian way of thinking reminded me of something from Tobin James Mueller's 1987 "The New Age Politics - a contemporary declaration of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Dignity."
In Mueller's section, "Property Rights as Basic Right," he wrote:
"Separating out specific rights from the generic concept of property rights causes them to be transformed into privileges defined by the government. They can no longer be inherent, inalienable, unabridgeable rights upon which no one, including government, can morally or legally infringe."
He then quotes Auberon Herbert, as follows:
"It is impossible to look upon a man as free, so long as others have unlimited command over his property. It is imposssible to separate the rights of actions from the rights of acquiring and possessing. A man acts through and by means of the various substances of the world, and if he is not free to acquire and own these substances as an individual, neither is he free to act as an individual."
Mueller's observations, coming from a contemporary mind not molded by the same background of thought as James Madison, are both interesting and encouraging.
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