This is a continuation of the series written by Maj. Danny Sjursen about the history about this country …the creation, the war, the battles, the history.
It is the 1780’s and the war is winding down and then Founding Fathers are looking to the creation of a government to run the land that just liberated from England.
Part 7 of “American History for Truthdiggers.”
The Brits Are Gone: Now What?
“The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” —Elbridge Gerry, delegate to the Constitutional Convention (1787)
It has become, by now, like American scripture. We all know the prevailing myths, history as written by the winners. Virtuous American patriots, having beaten the tyrannical British, set out to frame the most durable republican government in the history of humankind. The crowning achievement came when our Founding Fathers met in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft an American gospel: the Constitution. The war had ended, officially, in 1783.
Time for the IST history perspective….(I know all have been holding their breath waiting for this day)
Anyone who has studied American history then they will be familiar with the Federalist Papers and the responses to said…..but in case one has not read the Papers then the links below will help.
But for those looking for the quick way past this subject….a short video
Onward!
Most of the Papers were written by Madison and Hamilton under pen names……but how does their thoughts from 200 years ago stand up today?
First, Hamilton’s thoughts……
Conservatives have controlled our government for three definable periods in recent history—the Gilded Age of the last three decades of the 1800s (progressives followed from 1901 to 1920), the Roaring 20s (progressives followed from 1933 to 1980), and the Reagan Era that started in 1981 and continues to this day.
James Madison traveledto Philadelphia in 1787 with Athens on his mind. He had spent the year before the Constitutional Convention reading two trunkfuls of books on the history of failed democracies, sent to him from Paris by Thomas Jefferson. Madison was determined, in drafting the Constitution, to avoid the fate of those “ancient and modern confederacies,” which he believed had succumbed to rule by demagogues and mobs.
Madison’s reading convinced him that direct democracies—such as the assembly in Athens, where 6,000 citizens were required for a quorum—unleashed populist passions that overcame the cool, deliberative reason prized above all by Enlightenment thinkers. “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason,” he argued in TheFederalist Papers, the essays he wrote (along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay) to build support for the ratification of the Constitution. “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”
Some fascinating reading the two “Papers”…..if you like politics then I suggest that you use the links that I provided and get to know the process that brought about this republic…….a republic that is in deep trouble.
Every Americans should have to study the Constitution and what it took to get this republic up and running……as it is today there are very few that know what the “Papers” were all about……political discourse something that is lacking in today’s world.
These days with the children thing and the quotes saying that the Bible made them do it….I thought I would look at the Founders and their religious convictions….
I get tickled because so-called conservs say that we must keep Jesus in the Constitution…well actually he was not named God was but Jesus was left out for some reason.
The reason basically many of the Founders were “Deists” and not Christians……but why not take a look at 5 of the Founding Fathers that probably could not get elected these days because of their religious beliefs……
To hear the Religious Right tell it, men like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were 18th-century versions of Jerry Falwell in powdered wigs and stockings. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Unlike many of today’s candidates, the founders didn’t find it necessary to constantly wear religion on their sleeves. They considered faith a private affair. Contrast them to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (who says he wouldn’t vote for an atheist for president because non-believers lack the proper moral grounding to guide the American ship of state), Texas Gov. Rick Perry (who hosted a prayer rally and issued an infamous ad accusing President Barack Obama of waging a “war on religion”) and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum (whose uber-Catholicism leads him to oppose not just abortion but birth control).
Did you know that Jefferson put together his own version of the New Testament?
Jefferson’s goal was to clarify the teachings of Jesus which he believed provided “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”
Let’s do a history lesson about our early days of struggle…..
The early days of our fight for independence had our share of chaos and characters…..after the war for independence also had its characters……
Of course, along with Arnold, Aaron Burr stands out in American History as one of its quintessential villains. In addition to killing Alexander Hamilton in their famous duel, he later plotted an insurrection to form a separate country in the American Southwest.
But Burr wasn’t a lone conspirator; he had allies whom he would rely upon to carry out his nefarious activities.
The mass shootings lately, 18 of them so far in 2018, has Americans yelling and thinking about the 2nd amendment…..this amendment to the Constitution has its uses…..
What about the days of the Founding Fathers, this is where the amendment came from……
In the days since the tragic murder of 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, the number of people clamoring for tighter restrictions on the right to purchase or otherwise obtain a firearm crescendos daily, sometimes hourly.
Of course, those familiar with the Second Amendment to the Constitution for the United States of America (that is the official name) would never support such tyrannical proposals, particularly those well-versed in the nearly 1,000-year history of the Anglo-American protection of the right of self-defense.
There is an urgent need for Americans to refamiliarize themselves with the wisdom of the Founding Fathers on this topic, as well as the wisdom of those writers whose words inspired and informed our Founders.
So many claim that the 2nd is what keeps our politicians honest….(pause here for laughter)….our reps are just as corrupt with or without the 2nd in place…..with that in mind…….
As the subject of the Second Amendment reenters the public discourse, the question of whether or not the right to keep and bears arms is an effective deterrent against tyranny must be examined. In the days of drones, fighters, and tanks, what good is a semi-automatic rifle? This question is typically posed by those who envision pitched battles between US Army forces and rebels. That isn’t how wars are fought anymore. Any uprising in the United States would be in the form of an insurgency. During an insurgency all of those high tech toys aren’t government assets, they’re insurgent assets. This doesn’t imply US soldiers would defect en masse to the rebels.
I guess goes along with that quote that has been attributed to Jefferson about the tree of Liberty and the watering with blood….or something like that……
(I expect the readership to go up because my more right wing brethren will have lots to say when it comes to the gun thing)
Let’s talk about one of our founding fathers…Thomas Paine probably the most important person during the Revolution. This man helped Americans envision an independent country and after the war started what was his writings that kept the whole Revolution intact with his pamphlet The American Crisis….the population once again embraced the notion of independence.
Sadly too many Americans only knows him because of Commonsense….there is so much more to the man like his pamphlet The Rights of Man which got Paine in lots of trouble.
After US won its fight with England Paine then took his confrontational style to France which was experiencing a revolution of their own.
During the Reign of Terror Paine was imprisoned awaiting a head chop…..he then appealed to his old friend George Washington to help him out of the situation he found himself……
On December 28, 1793, at the height of the Reign of Terror in France, Paris police rousted Thomas Paine in the cold hours before dawn, arrested him as a “foreign conspirator” and locked him in a wet, 10-by-8-foot cellar in Luxembourg Prison. The only light came from cracks in a boarded-up window. Paine was sure the guillotine awaited him.
Citizen Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense helped ignite the American Revolution, was an enthusiastic early supporter of the French Revolution. He received a hero’s welcome when he arrived in Paris in 1792 and was even granted honorary French citizenship and a seat in the National Convention, the body charged with writing a constitution for the new republic. But Paine angered Maximilien Robespierre and other Jacobin extremists when he urged the Convention to spare the life of the deposed French king, Louis XVI. Instead, Jacobins brandished the king’s severed head in front of a cheering crowd. Then they proceeded to round up thousands of suspected counterrevolutionaries who, Paine observed, fell “as fast as the guillotine could cut their heads off.” Now they’d come for him, too.
The father of our country turned is back on a revolutionary icon……so typical of those that run the this country….then and now……once they get what they want (make no mistake Washington wanted everything that happened to him) then the country and its people mean little.
There has been a bit of a war over the placement of statutes mostly Civil War era commemorations….a statue of Robert E. Lee or Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the KKK and others….there was even a violent confrontation over the removal of one in Virginia just a few months ago….
This is something new for this country to have differences over statues, right?
Well, not exactly…….
President Trump may be infuriating and offending many with his calls to save our “great statues/heritage,” but the unending uproar over Confederate monuments isn’t the first time Americans have feuded over whom we should preserve in plaster—and who’s best left forgotten.
That’s a clash that is literally as old as the nation itself. It began more than 200 years ago with a vicious debate over how the country should celebrate the founding of the American Republic—a debate that continued well into the 20th century.
The closer the election day we get the more total garbage is being said by the candidates….I chose to ignore the mindless dribble coming from all those opinionated twats in the media and look for something that is at least interesting and informative…..
These days we hear about the power grab that Trump has made over the GOP…..but this is not the only such grab.
In my early days of college I was working on a degree in political history….especially the early days say 1765-1800…..those were fascinating days…..the delegates worked to come up with a government for the colonies….
There is a new book coming out about those early days…..”The Founding Father’s Power Grab”…..it is written about the Constitution and its meaning and ratification…..
Throughout the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787, delegates to the Constitutional Convention labored to replace the Articles of Confederation with a new frame of government. While the convention nearly broke down several times over slavery and the apportionment of representation among the states, by late September the delegates had achieved their goal and produced a new constitution—the one Americans still live with. No delegate was completely satisfied with the process or the results; of the 55 who attended the convention only 39 signed the finished document. Overall, though, the signers were pleased with the system they created. James Wilson of Pennsylvania judged it, “The best form of government which has ever been offered to the world.” Next, the Constitution was sent to the states to be debated and, the Framers hoped, ratified.
Few people in the state ratifying conventions shared Wilson’s enthusiasm. The proposed government was less democratic than either the Articles of Confederation or the individual state constitutions.
It is common knowledge that I am a bit of a history nut (some say that is an understatement)…..I have been writing for years about the early days of this republic and why certain things were done…..like the Bill of Rights it was an add on to the Constitution……I focused one such paper on the 2nd amendment….
But like my paper their was much debate on the Constitution….the pros and cons…..this was the birth of the state’s rights movement from the anti-Federalist…..in case you have forgotten about this valuable debate then I give you the two sources so you can see the debate and how valuable it was…..
I read an interesting article on the subject recently printed in the American Conservative……
America’s Counter-Revolution, dedicated “To the constitutionalists of all parties,” gives new meaning to the word pithy. In 20 short chapters (most of which were previously columns in the Freeman and elsewhere) Sheldon Richman achieves a remarkable thematic coherence, giving the reader a nice window into American constitutional argument and thus into American history.
Building on Arthur E. Ekirch’s Decline of American Liberalism (1955), Richman concludes that the Federalists gave America a vague constitution having the appearance of limited powers but marred by implied ones: a “living constitution” for conservative nationalists. The Federalists, recall, set imperial greatness above liberty and thought real limits on power “impossible”; so-called Anti-Federalists opposed the rule of self-nominated aristocrats and believed in dispersed power.
This is what is missing today there is NO political discourse….instead we get name calling, platitudes, slogans and one liners…..until we learn to return to the days of political debate this country cannot move forward….NO matter who gets elected or which worthless party is in power.
But apparently this is what the voting public wants…….we keep making the same mistake election after election and we pretend it is because we are angry……anger and ignorance are not the same thing….
I have been a real fan of Thomas Paine most of my life…..my grandfather gave me a copy of “Commonsense” when I was 10 years old(I still have the copy in my library) although it did not mean much to me until I was 14 and I read it cover to cover….from that day on he has been a big influence in my life and my thinking…..I began reading everything the man ever wrote and I finally got a copy of his “Rights of Man” and his views on war changed everything for me…..
The more one reads Paine the more one will see how he predicted a lot of the BS that is happening with this country……especially our unquenchable thirst for war…..
Around the globe, the United States faces more enemies than ever before. American troops are deploying to Syria and Libya, and returning to Iraq to combat maniacal ISIS terrorists, among others. American forces are shipping out to the Baltic States and Ukraine to contain a revanchist despot in Russia. America’s navy is steaming into the […]
The list goes on and on. Never in its history has America confronted so many adversaries at once. It’s unprecedented. Even World War II, with 50 times the number of US military casualties, had only two theaters of operation.
New foes pop up faster than old ones can be dispatched. An entire generation of American soldiers is fighting twice as long to liberate Afghanistan from tyranny as it took their forefathers and mothers to liberate themselves from the tyranny of a British king.
