Posted on 11/12/2021 7:42:48 AM PST by ProgressingAmerica
Jefferson was a brilliant and well read man, and he may have very well seen that idea.
George Washington, btw, understood that the people didn't understand that, which is why he went out of his way to act like a king, all the while reenacting Cincinnatus and not Caesar.
Even George III expressed admiration.
“If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
That's for sure.
I'm not sure where you get that. Are you talking about the US Constitution, or are you talking about the Declaration of Independence? My recollection is that the committee assigned to write the Declaration of Independence objected to Jefferson's verbiage and made him strip it of the explicitly anti-slavery provisions. By the time it went to the larger body of representatives, it was in it's final form.
Your reference to "two states" sounds more like the debates on the US Constitution in which it was made clear by a small number of states that if slavery wasn't accepted, it wouldn't be ratified.
I have actually read some of the constitutional debate on the issue of slavery, and I have a bookmark for it on one of my other machines somewhere. They basically felt that the coalition was too important to be split apart over the issue of slavery, so the pro-abolition representatives relented.
All of it. Sanger, the wider eugenics quagmire, the role of bureaucracy, Wilson's legacy, TR's legacy, the hoax that the era even ended, that progressivism has anything to do with progress, the similarity between progressivism "progress" and Evolutionary Socialism.(there is no Darwin here.) Everything. Progressive era IRR. Journalism is a hoax. Universities are a hoax. The beginnings of progressivism with Henry George and Edward Bellamy. The domestic effects of WWI. I couldn't possibly list it all. Pretty much anything you can go see in a history book about the progressive era, it's not wholly truthful enough to be called the truth. It's all lies. The only wholly honest thing contained are people's names. They have a massive incentive to make sure nobody sees the era for what it is.
Whew! Far be it from me to defend progressivism, but surely it can't all be bad? And Teddy Roosevelt's legacy? I think the trust busting needed to be done.
Workplace safety rules and building safety rules were a good thing. Removing children from the workforce is a mixed bag, but I think most people today would regard it as a good thing. The creation of the pure food and drug act was a good thing. Health and sanitary conditions imposed on the meat packing industry was a good thing.
You are throwing it all out, and without better explanations I can't see it all as being bad. There were things the progressives did that were actually good for the people and good for the nation.
Yes, there was a lot of bad stuff done by the progressives, and I can sorta see how you might regard it as historical malpractice because nobody writes about all the stupid fascist type things they did.
Could you be a little more specific on one or two aspects of the progressive era you regard as historical malpractice?
Yes, Yellow Journalism was a bad thing, and we've endured it ever since.
In 1780, the Revolution was still going on. Tories were losing their property and being driven into exile. In that context a court decision abolishing slavery doesn’t seem like a terrible thing. There had already been such a decision in Britain, so there was precedent, and the population, inspired by ideas of freedom, did not reject or rebel against the decision. People who might like the courts to declare government intrusions and usurpation unconstitutional might not be quick to condemn the Massachusetts decision. Just what is and what isn’t illegitimate judicial activism isn’t always clear.
What Jefferson wrote in the Declaration regarding slavery and pointing out that the King pimped his veto was removed at the request of two states. GA and SC.
https://vindicatingthefounders.com/library/jeffersons-draft.html
As to your two aspects of progressivism, I’m not going to do that here. I’ll ping you elsewhere to two separate items.
The challenge also is that this is not including the Massachusetts State constitution. (The version that was in place at the time) The states have different rules for their judicial branches.
This was not a USSC case, it was completely contained in the state so the US Constitution does not apply.
This is a good example where the state constitutions don’t get the respect they ought to, when in reality the state constitutions are just as important and even sometimes more important than the US Constitution.
I am looking at your link and I am thinking this man is mistaken. It is my understanding that the Declaration was being drafted by a committee, and it was the members of the committee that said his anti-slave language wouldn't fly.
I have no recollection of the original draft being sent out to the representatives of the states for commentary, so if they never saw a copy of it, how can they object to it?
This is what I remember:
On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress selects Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert R. Livingston of New York to draft a declaration of independence.Knowing Jefferson’s prowess with a pen, Adams urged him to author the first draft of the document, which was then carefully revised by Adams and Franklin before being given to Congress for review on June 28.
It looks like it was Adams and Franklin that stripped out all the anti-slavery language.
No, so far as I know it was the Congress meeting as a whole that deleted those phrases. Later, Jefferson blamed Georgia and South Carolina for deleting his words, though he also couldn't resist blaming the Northerners as well.
"The clause...reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under these censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
Later, Adams said he wished the passage had been kept in.
This is a better support for the claim than I had seen so far. Of course this may only be Jefferson's impression of what happened, and it may very well have been that Georgia and South Carolina were simply the first to speak out against it.
I find it hard to believe that states for whom slavery was profitable would not also speak out against it if it were necessary, so the singling out of Georgia and South Carolina is probably not an accurate assessment of the situation. Probably most of them were against it, but didn't say anything because the representatives of Georgia and South Carolina had already made the objection.
I also find it hard to believe that Adams and the others wouldn't have recognized that this language would likely provoke an objection from the states in which slavery was more significant. They were smart men.
Of course at this time, slavery was waning because it really wasn't all that profitable before the invention of the cotton gin, so maybe there wasn't all that much support for it at that time.
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