Recently
by Thomas DiLorenzo: The
True Source of Monopoly
The Fourth of July was not always a national celebration of the militarization of American society and of the federal government’s never-ending quest for world domination (disguised as "defending our interests abroad").
Americans did not always attend church services on the Sunday before the Fourth of July to "honor" their "military heroes" and pray that they may kill many more human beings in other countries that have done them no harm.Americans once actually read and understood the Declaration of Independence for what it was: a declaration of secession from the British empire and a roadmap for opposing a highly centralized, militaristic empire of the sort the U.S. government has become.
The Declaration of Independence was the ultimate secessionist or states’ rights document.
"Governments are instituted among men," Thomas Jefferson wrote, for the sole purpose of securing God-given, "unalienable" rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Moreover, governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed" and nowhere else. And "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 . . ."
The way in which "the People" were to express their consent (or lack thereof) was through state and local political organizations. Hence, in the final paragraph of the Declaration of Independence Jefferson wrote that: "We . . . the Representatives of the united States of America . . . are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do."
It is important to note that the word "united" is not capitalized but "States" is, and that the individual states are described as "Free and Independent." Thus, the free, independent, and sovereign states were united in the cause of secession from the British empire. The phrase "united States" did not mean, and does not mean in any of the founding documents, the "United States government," as is commonly believed today. It is always in the plural to signify that the free and independent states are united in their common cause of protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To Jefferson and the other signers of the Declaration of Independence, each American state was sovereign in the same sense that Great Britain, France, and Spain were sovereign states. It was through "representatives of the united States" that the consent of the people was to be expressed (or not).
It was Abraham Lincoln, who Murray Rothbard once described as a masterful "liar, conniver, and manipulator," whose rhetoric began to fog the understanding of Americans of their Declaration of Independence. Lincoln’s twisted language in The Gettysburg Address that focused solely on the words "all men are created equal" in the Declaration, were designed to reinterpret the preeminent secessionist document as an anti-secessionist document. It was an attempt to fool Northern voters into believing in the absurd notion that he was a Jeffersonian.
Not that Lincoln ever believed that all men were – or should be considered to be – equal in any sense. As he stated in the September 18, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas: "I will say than that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that here is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race" (emphasis added).
In his first inaugural address Lincoln strongly supported the Fugitive Slave Act and the proposed "Corwin Amendment" to the Constitution, which had already passed the House and Senate, which would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery. Thus, it was his position that slavery should be explicitly enshrined in the Constitution, made "express and irrevocable" to use his exact words, which is hardly the position one who believes that "all men are created equal" would take. It was empty political rhetoric at its worst.
At the time, nearly everyone else in the Northern states understood the actual meaning of the Declaration of Independence, as opposed to Lincoln’s attempt at the rhetorical bastardization of the document. This point is documented in a two-volume work entitled Northern Editorials on Secession, edited by Howard Cecil Perkins. It is a collection of 495 Northern newspaper editorials from September 1860 through June 1861 on the issue of secession. The majority of Northern newspaper editorials, writes Perkins, favored peaceful secession because Northern editorialists generally believed in the Jeffersonian dictum that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The Southern states no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C., they reasoned, therefore, they should be allowed to go in peace, however misguided their reasons for secession might have been. "During the weeks following the election [of Lincoln], Perkins writes, "[Northern] editors . . . assumed that secession as a constitutional right was not in question . . . . On the contrary, the southern claim to a right of peaceable withdrawal was countenanced out of reverence for the natural law principle of government by consent of the governed."
Perkins highlights what he calls "a classic statement" of this position, written by New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley on November 9, 1860: "We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets." At the time, the New York Tribune was the most influential newspaper in America. There are dozens of other statements to that effect from newspapers all over the Northern states. On December 17, 1860, the New York Tribune further editorialized that if "Mr. Jefferson’s statement in the Declaration of Independence that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed" is accepted, and "if it justified the secession from the British Empire of Three Millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861." ...
Finish reading @Source: When Americans Understood the Declaration of Independence by Thomas DiLorenzo
Thomas
J. DiLorenzo [send him mail]
is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the
author of The
Real Lincoln; Lincoln
Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe
and How
Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s
Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution
– And What It Means for America Today. His next book is entitled
Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.
