The U.S. Has a Rich English History | Eastern North Carolina Now

    As Locke wrote in the two volumes of his Treatise on Government (1689 and 1690), private property is absolutely essential for liberty. He referred not only to real property but also to intellectual property. "Every man has a property in his own person. This no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his," he wrote. Locke believed people legitimately turn common property into private property by mixing their labor with it, their intellect, their personality, their ambition, their business skills (and other intangible human qualities) and improving it. In other words, he believed that property is a series of transformations. Man has a property right in himself and his skills which is then transformed into money or bartering power, which is then eventually transformed into private property (real and chattel).

    Luckily, Jefferson, and our other Founders, were extremely well-read and well-versed in the philosophies explaining government and individual liberty.


    Thomas Jefferson completed his draft of the Declaration of Independence in just one day. Only seventeen days later, on June 28, Jefferson's document was presented to the Congress, with a few changes made by Adams and Franklin. On July 2, twelve of thirteen colonial delegations voted to support of Lee's resolution for independence - with NY abstaining. On July 4, the Congress formally endorsed Jefferson's Declaration and copies were then sent to all of the colonies.

    The actual signing of the Declaration of Independence occurred on August 2, when 56 members of Congress placed their names on the historic document. They signed this Declaration even though we were still at War with Britain and unlikely to win. They signed this document even though they knew that if the war for independence was not won, they could be tried for treason by England and executed.

    56 delegates signed the document which would lay the foundation for our new nation. "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." The Declaration of Independence is the first national document in history acknowledging that fundamental rights are endowed upon man from a Creator. America's independence was not only of worldwide significance because a new nation was founded on the shores of the Atlantic, in the New World, but because a new nation, the very first of its kind, was founded 'under God.'

    Many make light of this phrase and its significance, and certainly atheist groups may try to ignore or minimalize it. It is not a statement of theology, but a statement of the ordering of rights and liberty. This one sentence in the Declaration of Independence is the very cornerstone of our Constitution, our system of government, and our national foundation. Try reading the Declaration of Independence without the references to God and see if it has any real meaning. "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness...." Where do our rights come from? How are all men endowed with rights? What is that process? Without the acknowledgement that they come from a higher being, a Creator, then the natural interpretation would be that they come from government. And if the government gives rights, then it can take them away.

    Abraham Lincoln was eternally impressed with the Declaration. He said: "Let us revere the Declaration of Independence...... Let us readopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it the practices and policy which harmonize with it." As Harry Jaffa wrote in his book, New Birth of Freedom: "Lincoln did not appeal to the Declaration of Independence merely because it was our first and foremost founding document. It was, he said, the immortal emblem of man's humanity and the father of all moral principle because it incorporated a rational, non-arbitrary moral and political standard. The equality of man and man was a necessary inference from the inequality of man and beast -- and of man and God. No one possessed of a civilized conscience can fail to feel this sympathy."

   In the summer of 1858, Lincoln addressed a crowd and spoke about the Declaration of Independence. He said, in part:

   "...The Declaration was formed by the representatives of American liberty from thirteen States of the confederacy -- twelve of which were slaveholding communities. We need not discuss the way or the reason of their becoming slaveholding communities. It is sufficient for our purpose that all of them greatly deplored the evil and that they placed a provision in the Constitution which they supposed would gradually remove the disease by cutting off its source. This was the abolition of the slave trade. So general was conviction -- the public determination -- to abolish the African slave trade, that the provision which I have referred to as being placed in the Constitution, declared that it should not be abolished prior to the year 1808. A constitutional provision was necessary to prevent the people, through Congress, from putting a stop to the traffic immediately at the close of the war. Now, if slavery had been a good thing, would the Fathers of the Republic have taken a step calculated to diminish its beneficent influences among themselves, and snatch the boon wholly from their posterity? These communities, by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: '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.' This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. [Applause.] Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. The erected a beacon to guide their children and their children's children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began -- so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built." [The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, pp. 544-546].


    Who were these 56 men who signed the Declaration? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, and nine were farmers and large plantation owners. They weren't rabble-rousers. They were soft-spoken men of means and education. They had security, but they valued liberty more. They signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured. Standing tall and unwavering, they pledged: "For the support of the declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."

    Not many people know that the sentence for treason in those days was brutal beyond imagination. They would hang the traitor to the point of death, then revive him in order to kill him again. They would then disembowel the traitor and then draw and quarter him.

    Five signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured (although none were killed outright by the British). 9 died of wounds suffered in the War, and 12 lost all their property. Many had their family members captured, kidnapped, and/or killed. Francis Lewis, for example, had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months. John Hart was driven from his wife's bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning to find his wife dead and his children vanished. A few weeks later he died from exhaustion and a broken heart.

    On October 19, 1781, Lord Cornwallis surrendered to General George Washington at Yorktown to end the war of our Independence. The following year the Treaty of Paris was signed to officially end the war. The United States was born.

    The next step was to figure out a way to hold us together as a union ("a more perfect union"), keep us strong, and yet honor those reasons that the settlers came to America's shores in the first place. And so, on May 25, 1787, 55 delegates from all of the states (except Connecticut), met in Philadelphia to draft a Constitution that would accomplish these goals.

    The Constitutional Convention (also known as the Philadelphia Convention) took place from May 25 to September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Its purpose was to address problems in governing the United States of America under the Articles of Confederation following independence from Great Britain. The Convention was originally intended to amend the Articles of Confederation to make it more effective in dealing with issues common to all the states and acting on their behalf. Apparently, the intention of certain delegates, namely James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, was not to amend the Articles but rather to create a new government altogether. The delegates persuaded a very sick and debilitated George Washington to act as the President of the convention and to preside over it after several attempts to organize such a meeting had failed to spark sufficient interest.

    The states sent some of their finest minds to the Convention, including James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, and George Mason. These are the men we credit for giving us our new nation, as so perfectly conceived and designed. A few of our most important Founders, and our most brilliant political minds, were not present at the Convention. Thomas Jefferson, one of our most prolific and well-read Founders, was in France during the Convention, acting as Minister to that country. John Adams was also abroad on official duty for the newly-independent nation, as Minister to Great Britain. Patrick Henry was also absent; he refused to go because he "smelt a rat in Philadelphia, tending toward the monarchy." He was likely referring to Alexander Hamilton, who strongly admired the British monarchy. (Hamilton would later side strongly with the Federalists and in fact, become the predominant writer of the Federalist Papers). Also absent were Richard Henry Lee, Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, and John Hancock.


    Delegates included those who fit into three general types: those who admired the monarchy and wanted our new system of government to be designed after the British system (monarchists), those who wanted power centralized in a strong central government, with a "consolidation" of the states and their power (nationalists), and those who wanted a federal government, one of limited powers, where the union is respected as a confederacy of sovereign states such that the states would remain sovereign and strong (federalists). Alexander Hamilton was the most vocal proponent of the monarchist view, and likely the only one at the Convention and James Madison was the most vocal proponent of the nationalist view. That would explain why Madison's original plan was to create a central government with greater and stronger powers than the government established under the Articles of Confederation. In fact, he arrived at the Convention with a plan that he was simply hoping to "sell" to the other delegates. Luckily that wasn't the case. And luckily for freedom-loving individuals, it was the Federalists who won the day at the Convention and it was Federalist principles upon which the Constitution was based. Our Founders didn't want to trade one form of tyranny for another - that is, in the form of big government. In The Federalist Papers No. 39, James Madison acknowledged the Federalist position when he wrote: " in relation to the extent of its powers.... the proposed government cannot be deemed a NATIONAL one; since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects."

    Almost immediately, it was understood that our nation would need to be a republic rather than a true democracy. It would be a nation of laws and not a nation of men. It would be ruled by supreme law and not the mob. In 1780, seven years before the Constitution was drafted, Massachusetts put in its Constitution two very important principles that would be later embraced in the US Constitution - the concept of separation of powers and the rule of law. As it stated in the constitution governing the Commonwealth of Massachusetts: "In the government of this commonwealth the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them; the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them; the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them -- to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men."

    As a very old and very tired Benjamin Franklin was leaving the building where, after four months of hard work, the Constitution had been completed and signed, a lady asked him what kind of government the convention had created. The very wise Franklin replied; "A Republic, ma'am if you can keep it."