As America prepares to celebrate 'Presidents' Day', it is a good occasion to reflect on what our presidents actually believed concerning the role of federal and state government. Over the next few days I will be posting a series of articles I wrote earlier in the year exploring the history of the American system, with particular emphasis on the importance of states' rights.
In order to understand the importance of states' rights, it is necessary to go back to the very inception of America. The earliest English settlers formed colonies that were fiercely independent. Each colony had a unique culture, a unique way of life and often different religious approaches. This being the case, there was frequent bickering between the colonies, as seen by some of the nasty comments they made about each other. One Puritan said of the Virginians: “The farthest from conscience and moral honesty of any such number together in the world.” Virginian William Byrd II, said of the Puritans: “A watchful eye must be kept on these foul traders.” At least the Puritans and the Virginians could agree about Quakers, saying: “[They] pray for their fellow men one day a week, and on them the other six.” The Quakers, on the other hand, called the New Englanders, “the flock of Cain.” (From Dr. Thomas Woods' The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.)
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The bickering amongst the colonies also extended to religious matters. As Dr. Thomas Woods writes:
“Religion was fundamental to the colonists; and though they worshipped the same God, there was plenty of bickering. Indeed, the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, raised the ire of many colonists. The Puritans, who thought they had purged their worship of the Church of England’s ritual and ‘superstition,’ were still too formalistic for the Quakers. Decades before William Penn settled in Pennsylvania in the 1680s, Quakers living in Rhode Island travelled to Massachusetts to rouse its benighted inhabitants from their dogmatic slumber and awaken them to the aridity of their faith. Quakers disrupted Puritan church services, heckled ministers, and even walked naked up and down the church aisles. The Friends were banned repeatedly from Massachusetts.
This mutual antagonism contributed in a peculiar way to the development of American liberty: Each denomination and colony was vigilant against interference in its internal affairs by others. The differences among the colonies created the presumption that each should mind its own business, and so should any potential central government."
As I shall be arguing, it was these marked differences between the colonies that made the framers and ratifiers of the constitution so anxious to preserve the autonomy of each state and avoid centralism. The colonists were wary of joining intercolonial confederations, unless for practical purposes such as defence. Even then, they insisted that the union should not infringe on the self-government of each colony.
In 1643, the Confederation of New England was formed in case of conflict with the Indians. But Massachusetts was sure to establish the principle that each colony held a veto over the actions of the Confederation. The same spirit led the colonists to reject Benjamin Franklin’s proposed Albany Plan of Union in 1754, which called on the colonies to yield authority to a new intercolonial government to help coordinate defence against the Indians. Not a single colonial assembly ratified the plan because they didn’t want to be joined together.
But didn't that all change when the constitution was framed? Didn't the states become 'united', as seen in the title of our nation, "The United States of America"? Well, yes and no. But that is the subject of my next article.
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I am reading two books right now by the historian Mr. DiLorenzo which deal with exactly what these last two essays are talking about. One is called The Real Lincoln and the other is called Lincoln Unmasked.
It should be uncontroversial that the founding fathers saw the right of secession as axiomatic after having fought their own war for just that purpose. Mr. DiLorenzo pulls the veil away from the Lincoln cult which grips our country by showing that the civil war was fought to consolidate power in the executive branch and had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery. Lincoln’s own views on slavery and race were ambiguous. He frequently voiced support for slavery and said he favored a permanent separation of blacks and whites. Moreover, he spoke of his “natural disgust” to the idea of intermarriage between the races and tried to convince black leaders to immigrate American blacks to Haiti and Liberia. Why is this important? It shows that the civil war was not fought to free slaves. Slavery was practiced in the northern states and was already on its way out in the south. In fact, the civil war probably prolonged slavery. Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has been ridiculed recently in the mainstream press for bringing these ideas into the light, yet if you look at the primary documents from our countries founding, which Robin has just posted, two things become clear as day: The state governments saw themselves as autonomous units, with the federal government acting only as their agent, and they reserved the right to secede from the Union. What would we say of a president who decided to change all this by launching an unprovoked and illegal invasion without the approval of congress, in the process waging one of the bloodiest wasr thus far in world history, much of which depended on civilian casualties? Would we deify him by bringing flowers this time of year to his Zeus-like shrine? Apparently…because that is exactly how we celebrate Lincoln.
“If we would grasp the significance of the Civil War in relation to the history of our time,” quoted in Lincoln Unmasked, “we should consider Abraham Lincoln in connection with the other leaders who have been engaged in similar tasks. The chief of these leaders have been Bismark and Lenin. They with Lincoln have presided over the unifications of the three great new modern powers (U.S, Germany and Russia)…Each established a strong central government over hitherto loosely coordinated peoples. Lincoln kept the Union together by subordinating the South to the North; Bismarck imposed on the German states the cohesive hegemony of Prussia; Lenin began the work of binding Russian into a tight bureaucratic net.”
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