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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."
This view of the Declaration
of Independence, the pro-Lincoln Indianapolis Daily Journal wrote on
December 22, 1860, "shows us the course to be pursued towards South
Carolina. It is to let her go freely and entirely . . . without
resistance." On January 11, 1861, the Kenosha, Wisconsin Democrat
added that "the very freedom claimed by every individual citizen,
precludes the idea of compulsory association, as individuals, as communities,
or as States . . . . The right of secession adheres to the people of every
sovereign state." "The founders of our government," moreover,
"were constant secessionists . . . not only in theory, but in
practice," the Wisconsin paper reminded its readers.
"[I]f disunion must come,
let it come without war," wrote the Albany, New York Atlas and Argus
on January 12, 1861. For war would mean "the ruin of business, the
destruction of property, oppressive debt, grinding taxation and sacrifice of
millions of lives . . ." On the same day the New York Journal of
Commerce advocated the peaceful secession of the Southern states by
asking, "Shall we, by such a policy [as war] change our government from
a voluntary one, in which the people are sovereigns, to a despotism where one
part of the people are slaves? Such is the logical deduction from the policy
of the advocates of force."
On February 19, 1861 the Detroit
Free Press expressed the hope that "By recognizing the independence
of the Southern Confederacy, we should, to a considerable degree, disarm its
people of the hostility they naturally feel towards the people of the
North." If so, then the two sections could trade with one another,
establishing ties that could eventually lead to a reuniting of the union.
On March 11, 1861 the Trenton,
New Jersey Daily True American editorialized that failing to acquiesce
in the peaceful secession of the Southern states would be to "embark in
the mad and Quixotic attempt of conquering and holding the seceded States in
subjugation." Furthermore, the pro-war argument that "the laws must
be enforced at all hazards" [i.e., Lincoln’s argument], "are
not new arguments; they are such as prevailed with Lord North and the other
minions of George III and their futile efforts to crush out American
Independence." A union maintained by force "would be worse than a mockery," the New Jersey newspaper wrote.
On March 21, 1861 the New
York Times pointed out that even "the Abolitionists everywhere have
been in favor of a dissolution of the Union from the beginning" as a way
of politically isolating the Southern states and pressuring them to end
slavery. (It should be noted that New York did not emancipate its last
slaves until 1853). "Let us separate in peace," the Times editorialized,
for "force, as a means of restoring the Union . . . is out of the
question." Even the Springfield Daily Illinois State Journal,
from Lincoln’s home town, wrote on April 3, 1861 that "the sooner
we cut loose from the disaffected States, the better it may be for all
parties and for the nation." "Public opinion in the North seems to
be gradually settling down in favor of the recognition of the New Confederacy
by the Federal Government," the Hartford, Connecticut Daily Courant
editorialized on April 12, 1861.
Once Lincoln manipulated South
Carolinians into firing on Fort Sumter as a pretext for invading his own
country (the very definition of treason according to Article 1, Section 3 of the
Constitution), newspapers that were associated with and controlled by the
Republican Party invented the fiction that there is a supposed difference
between a right of secession based on Jefferson’s words in the
Declaration and a "right of revolution." The former was
illegitimate, they said, whereas the latter was not. This was not something
that Jefferson or any other founders believed. It was an invention of the
Republican Party propaganda apparatus, and is repeated to this day by
pseudo-historians such as Harry Jaffa and his fellow "Straussian"
neocons.
Another Republican Party
fiction is the bizarre claim that Lincoln was a Jeffersonian for having
mouthed the words "all men are created equal" in the Gettysburg
Address. This fiction is the cornerstone of the Jaffa/Straussian false
"history" of the "Civil War." (Jaffa has never written
anything about the war per se, or even many of Lincoln’s actions and
behavior. His books have to do mostly with the rhetoric of
Lincoln’s speeches).
This second fiction has long
been a cornerstone of the culture of lies and propaganda that supports
American military imperialism. It is the language of permanent revolution, as
the late Mel Bradford wrote in numerous articles and books, not too different
from the ideology of the twentieth-century communist propagandist Leon
Troksky who was also known for his theory of "permanent
revolution." (It should not be surprising that many of the founders of
"neoconservatism" who were students of Leo Strauss or his students,
proudly boasted that they were Troskyites in their youth. The late Irving
Kristol would be the best example).
By the late nineteenth century
Lincoln’s bastardization of Jefferson’s language in the
Declaration of Independence was employed to "justify" aggressive military
imperialism in the name of spreading "equality" around the globe.
"All men" means all men, not just American men, the
"progressives" argued. Therefore, in the name of the sainted
"Father Abraham" [Lincoln], Americans were told that it was their
"divine" duty to invade, conquer, and occupy such places as the
Philippines in order to bring American-style freedom to those lands. Today
the Philippines, tomorrow Europe. For example, one of the most vociferous
proponents of the Spanish-American war was Indiana Senator Albert Jeremiah
Beveridge, who advocated the war in a speech before the U.S. Senate in which
he declared that: "It was America’s destiny to set the world its
example of right and honor, for we cannot fly from our world duties. We cannot
retreat from any soil where Providence has unfurled our banner. It is ours to
save that soil, for liberty and civilization" (Quoted in Gregg Jones, Honor
in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and
Fall of America’s Imperial Dream, p. 95).
More than 200,000 Filipinos
were murdered by American soldiers in order to "save" their
"soil" for liberty. As for the real Jeffersonians who opposed
the Spanish-American war, Beveridge mocked them by saying, "the
opposition tells us we ought not to rule a people without their
consent." But Filipinos were not capable of self-government, he said.
They needed their American occupiers to "rescue" them from
"savage, bloody rule of pillage and extortion." This "march of
the flag" is "America’s divine destiny," he bloviated.
This last passage sounds more like the effects of the American
invasion and occupation of the Philippines than the cause.
If Americans ever began
celebrating the real meaning of the Declaration of Independence, then they
would embrace the Jeffersonian rights of secession and nullification as a
means of fighting back against governmental tyranny. They would also withdraw
their support for the U.S. government’s aggressive wars of imperialism
in the Middle East and elsewhere, along with its hundreds of military bases
on every continent on the planet. They might even begin an opposition to being
plundered by the incredibly corrupt military/industrial/congressional complex
and its main funding sources, the Fed and the income tax.
Originally published on LewRockell.com here
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