In a message dated 12/7/2002 5:21:18 PM Pacific Standard Time, williampayne@cix.co.uk writes:
Your correspondent
DAnalogKid writes
"You say that a dictatorship was chosen over this. A dictatorship was precisely what was left behind. No, worse than a dictatorship; a monarchy in which the king was supposed to be ruler by divine right, thereby making his commandments akin to dictum from God himself, and any opposition nothing short of heresy."
This is nonsense and drivel. The king was George III, who was king precisely because the English did not believe in divine right of kings. They threw out James II 90 years before for that reason. If they had accepted divine right of kings, Bonnie Prince Charlie, whom so many Americans today admire, would have been king instead. And he would have been as much a despot as his Italian cousins who ran the worst tyrannies in Europe.
England was a parliamentary state, the most advanced democracy in Europe, constrained by rule of law. Slavery had already been declared illegal on the mainland of Britain by the time of the American Revolution, and any American slave-owner who brought his/her slaves to England risked them being automatically freed. There was a growing movement to liberate slaves in the English colonies. These currents in England had not gone unnoticed amongst the propertied class in America.
Thomas Jefferson heavily criticized that British policy:
He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. . . . Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce [that is, he has opposed efforts to prohibit the slave trade]. 3
Benjamin Franklin, in a 1773 letter to Dean Woodward, confirmed that whenever the Americans had attempted to end slavery, the British government had indeed thwarted those attempts. Franklin explained that . . .
. . . a disposition to abolish slavery prevails in North America, that many of Pennsylvanians have set their slaves at liberty, and that even the Virginia Assembly have petitioned the King for permission to make a law for preventing the importation of more into that colony. This request, however, will probably not be granted as their former laws of that kind have always been repealed. 4
Further confirmation that even the Virginia Founders were not responsible for slavery, but actually tried to dismantle the institution, was provided by John Quincy Adams (known as the "hell-hound of slavery" for his extensive efforts against that evil). Adams explained:
The inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the Declaration of Independence was seen and lamented by all the southern patriots of the Revolution; by no one with deeper and more unalterable conviction than by the author of the Declaration himself [Jefferson]. No charge of insincerity or hypocrisy can be fairly laid to their charge. Never from their lips was heard one syllable of attempt to justify the institution of slavery. They universally considered it as a reproach fastened upon them by the unnatural step-mother country [Great Britain] and they saw that before the principles of the Declaration of Independence, slavery, in common with every other mode of oppression, was destined sooner or later to be banished from the earth. Such was the undoubting conviction of Jefferson to his dying day. In the Memoir of His Life, written at the age of seventy-seven, he gave to his countrymen the solemn and emphatic warning that the day was not distant when they must hear and adopt the general emancipation of their slaves. 5
3. Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Albert Ellery Bergh, editor (Washington, D. C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Assoc., 1903), Vol. I, p. 34.
4. Benjamin Franklin, The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Jared Sparks, editor (Boston: Tappan, Whittemore, and Mason, 1839), Vol. VIII, p. 42, to the Rev. Dean Woodward on April 10, 1773.
5. John Quincy Adams, An Oration Delivered Before The Inhabitants Of The Town Of Newburyport at Their Request on the Sixty-First Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1837 (Newburyport: Charles Whipple, 1837), p. 50.
Americans at the time misunderstood the English constitution of the day. That's why they granted their president far greater power than the English king of the time possessed. The irony is that the American president today is far more powerful and autonomous than parliament ever allowed the supposedly despotic king George III to be.
This is because America has abandoned, not followed, the Framers.
I completely agree that America today is much much worse
than Britain of 1776.
Kevin Craig
www.KevinCraig.US
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And they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and sit under their Vine & Fig Tree.
Micah 4:1-7