government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth

[sophiaserpentia]

Yesterday was July 4, and i spent some time reflecting on sentiments formalized by the Continental Congress 231 years ago.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Beautiful words, and it is hard not to love the sentiment behind them. Yet barely 9 years later, several of the people who signed this document were calling for men to be put to death for (mostly peacefully) resisting injustice supported by their government. Others used the event in question to bolster their argument that the federal government must be strengthened and expanded.

This event was known as Shays' Rebellion, a peasant uprising in protest against the large number of farmers in western Massachusetts who were being driven off their land by debtor's courts and foreclosing banks.

Eight years after that, George Washington (then US president) personally commanded a militia assembled to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania. This, too, was essentially a peasant revolt.

And so, less than 20 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, the nascent United States was already defying its own founding principles, using force to suppress dissent and civil disobedience.

Thomas Jefferson grasped the wrongness of this, though i suspect when he wrote this he was being maybe a little facetious:

A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. ... [W]hat country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

What does it mean that even the people who wrote and promoted these words could only carry them so far, and not to their natural conclusion? These words, drawn by a collection of men many of whom were slaveowners, rest side-by-side in a document characterizing Indians as "merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

It tells us something interesting about the human mind, that one can apprehend an important new principle without really seeing how it applies to oneself and one's own interests. This is why it is vitally important to nurture dissent and honest discourse -- because sometimes we need other people to point out our own shortsightedness.

It tells us something else interesting about the human mind, that it is able to draw inspiration from words beyond what they were really intended to mean, in the process creating a new trajectory in human history. The American Revolution and the subsequent birth of the American Empire would not have been anything new in human history; racism and the use of government force to maintain an unjust social order are common motifs, and revolution so often represents only a changing of the guard. And yet along with it came this sentiment which we have elevated to nearly the status of scripture, because of its capacity to inspire hope that we will someday chart a path to a more complete understanding of human freedom.

Comments

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

The teacher in the movie Dazed and Confused said it best:

"On July 4th remember what you're celebrating - a bunch of rich white slaveowners who didn't want to pay their taxes."

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

The Boston Tea Party is an interesting case in point. John Hancock, who organized the colonial tea boycott, was a tea smuggler. When the British government eliminated the customs on tea, enabling the troubled East India Company to sell tea in the colonies for cheaper than the smugglers could, the smugglers responded by dumping a whole shipload of tea in the Boston Harbor. It's one group of interests against another group of interests, couched in the cloak of "Liberty!"

Ah, the Cloak of Liberty

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

I raised to believe the British were villains and it was noble freedom lovers who resisted. Only to find out that protecting the aristocrats and breaking the British treaties that prevented colonists from settling west of the Pennsylvania river were the main motivations.

The way the native Americans have been treated all the way along kind of kills that 'Land of the Free and home of the brave' thing. Unless one considers "home" to be a crappy trailer in the badlands. I've actually had people tell me that native casinos are "reparation".

[moomlyn.livejournal.com]

The most important line, is of course:

whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it

Really, I would say its not just the right, its the duty.

Something...

[publius-aelius.livejournal.com]

...that will NEVER make it into any Amerikan school textbook's chapter on the so-called "Amerikan Revolution," but which is in MOST of the Canadian schools' chapters on that history:

In 1763, the British inherited, for the first time in their history since the Reformation, a huge population of practicioners of the Roman Catholic Religion, which was proscribed in Britain. The British Parliament was in a quandary, for a while, about how to "tolerate" the Quebecois' Catholicism, but they eventually decided that they were going to make special provision, in order to avoid any persecution of their new French Canadian subjects on account of religion, and, although a number of particularly rebellious Acadians WERE banished to Louisiana, most of the Quebecois were left undisturbed on account of their religious preference.
However, this did not sit well with the British colonists of New England, who became extremely agitated by the thought of a neighbouring colony of the mother country's having Roman Catholicism as its predominant faith. IN FACT, THE VIOLENT DEMONSTRATIONS, RIOTING IN THE STREETS, etc. of Boston and other towns in New England, regarding this issue, WERE MUCH MORE HEAVILY ATTENDED, MUCH MORE SPECTACULAR than anything inspired by tea or "Stamp Acts" or the like. The "Patriots" of New England were, as a whole, much more incensed by this issue of religious toleration for their Canadian neighbours than anything involving "taxation without representation," etc. This historical fact, however, seems to be completely unknown in modern America, except by the "Canucks" of Northern New England and the Canadians and some Europeans.
Amerikan "history" as it's taught in schools, is far more of a farrago of lies and useless propoganda than history as it's taught in any other developed country. We've got a lot of nerve, here, pointing out the "propoganda machines" of foreign governments, when, actually, propoganda works far more effectively, insidiously and dangerously when all the HISTORICAL LIES are agreed to by the unwashed masses.

Re: Something...

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

That's kind of hard for me to imagine because i think of Boston as such a Catholic place, but of course, large-scale Irish immigration here did not happen until quite some time after the revolution.

You're more knowledgeable about this than me, but from what i can find after searching around a bit, some of the revolutionaries, such as Washington, actually discouraged anti-Catholic agitation because they were hoping that Canada would join the rebellion, and for that to happen they would need to have Catholic allies.

I wonder if anti-Catholicism in the colonies was encouraged by the British crown, since anti-Catholic rhetoric was an aspect of British imperialism (especially with regards to Ireland).

Re: Something...

[publius-aelius.livejournal.com]

Washington was a Southerner, and anti-Catholic agitation was practically non-existent in the Southern colonies of that time.

Re: Something...

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

It was kinda eye-opening the couple of times i have visited Canada, to see that many of the war monuments there are to heroes who fought against US aggression. In the US we are rarely exposed to that point of view at all.

Re: Something...

[publius-aelius.livejournal.com]

When I lived in England, I took gleeful delight in showing Amerikans the monument in Westminster Abbey to Major John Andre, the British war hero whom Washington hanged.

[aethyrflux.livejournal.com]

okay, i composed an entry in my journal in an attempt to interpret the implications of this information