“Think of your forefathers and of your posterity.”

~ Prologue ~
Plymouth, Massachusetts, December 22, 1802 – “Man lives his highest destiny in the continuity of his interests as a unit within his family, his community and his country,” said Senator-elect John Quincy Adams in an oration marking the anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims here almost two centuries ago.

It seemed as though Mr. Adams, from his vantage point of political privilege as son of the incumbent President, was voicing alarm at a general tone of self-seeking among our States and ourselves as individuals. He indicated strongly that perhaps we are falling into the pit of older societies, of using our great heritage for individual gain. Instead, he constrained his hearers to make their present activities a mark of devotion to the past and a foundation for the future of the whole of America. Continue reading →

WASHINGTON, D. C., March 4, 1801 – Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office as President of the United States in an atmosphere which prompted him to devote all of his eloquence to restoring unity among the country’s leaders lest they fall into the divisions of parties against which President Washington warned.

The words of his Inaugural Address were hopeful expressions of unity. The facts were greatly different, for John Adams today sulked in anger against the open revolt led by Mr. Jefferson himself which started the movement called popularly the Republicans, that won the majority of the electoral vote for Mr. Jefferson and lobbed Mr. Adams of a second term.

In fact, until the very hour of the clock arrived last night that ended the administration of President Adams, he occupied himself in filling vacancies in public offices with hard-shell Federalists who might be expected to thwart the more radical tendencies of the new men following Mr. Jefferson under the Republican banner.

Chief among these appointees is Mr. John Marshall, who within the past twenty-four hours was named Chief Justice of the Supreme Court-a conservative Virginian counted upon to check, at the bench of ultimate appeal for all laws, such radicalism as may be written by the new Administration into the country’s laws.

          President Thomas Jefferson

During the contest of opinion through which we have passed, the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely, and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will of course arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All too will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression.

Let us then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind, let us re- store to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect, that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little, if we countenance a political intolerance, as despotic, as wicked, and as capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more felt and feared by some, and less by others, and should divide opinions as to measures of safety; but every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names, brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety I with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear, that this government, the world’s best hope, may, by possibility, want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or, have we found angels in the form of kings, to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Let us then, with courage and confidence, pursue our own federal and republican principles; our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradation of the others, possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation, entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisition of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them, enlightened by a benign religion, professed in deed and practised in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man, acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which, by all its dispensations, proves that it delights in the happiness of man here, and his greater happiness hereafter; with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens, a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government; and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

Postlogue:

                  Chief Justice John Marshall

This Inaugural Address by President Jefferson did not close the gap in political ranks. In fact, his election I marked the birth of the two-party system which, while he could not know it and despite Washington’s warnings, against such a decision, has become one of the great strengths of the American form of politics. For more than a century and a half, American politics have been planted upon the basic idea of responsible leadership by a majority party and the exercise of checks and balances by a responsible minority party; never a pluralty of parties that make possible grasp of leadership by a minority spokesman on the basis of deals with a host of minor parties. Such a system wrecked the French Fourth Republic.

As an echo of the Adams – Jefferson division, the United States won the service of John Marshall as Chief Justice for 35 years, in which time he made the reputation of probably the greatest man to hold that office.

His appointment as a result of John Adams temporary spite became perhaps the most notable action by that stern old New Englander.

            Inaugural Address, [March 4, 1801], reading copy, in Jefferson’s hand. | Library of Congress

John Crittenden

It was July of 1861, and things were looking bad for the United States. The December before, South Carolina had seceded, and the gulf states followed in quick succession throughout January, with Texas joining on February 1. Then, as it became unmistakable that the United States intended to invade the seceded states, and force all other states to take up arms against them, the mid-Southern states had no choice but to secede as well, starting with Virginia’s departure from the Union in April, and concluding with Tennessee’s secession on June 8.

Already the situation was dire, but it was by no means clear that other states would remain. Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri were all popularly inclined to join the seceded states, and Maryland’s secession in particular would have been disastrous, causing Washington to be surrounded by states of the Confederacy. Continue reading →

James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution and primary author of the Bill of Rights, repeatedly emphasized that the United States is a “republic” and not a “democracy.” In stark contrast, Jonathan Bernstein, a Bloomberg columnist and former political science professor recently insisted:

“One of this age’s great crank ideas, that the U.S. is a ‘republic’ and not a ‘democracy’, is gaining so much ground that people in Michigan are trying to rewrite textbooks to get rid of the term ‘democracy’.”

“For all practical purposes, and in most contexts, ‘republic’ and ‘democracy’ are synonyms.” Continue reading →

In 1861 the CSA returned sovereignty to where nature and Nature’s God place it: within the individual person and the polity he and she have decided to belong to. ~ V.M.

“Their revolution (the South in 1861) … was in fact an act of restoration, for the constitution drawn up in Montgomery in 1861 for the Confederate States of America was a virtual duplicate of the United States Constitution.” John McCardell in his Introduction to Jesse T. Carpenter’s “The South as a Conscious Minority, 1789 – 1861”, re-published by the University of South Carolina Press, 1990, p. xiv-xv (emphasis added)

This is a common misperception. The CSA Constitution is not “a virtual duplicate” of the 1787 Constitution. It is a document of greater clarity and stricter understanding. There’s no fabulating. Here’s a list of four (4) major changes: Continue reading →

“It is out of fashion these days to look backward rather than forward,” the poet John Crowe Ransom wrote almost thirty years ago. “About the only American given to it is some unreconstructed Southerner, who persists in his regard for a certain terrain, a certain history, and a certain inherited way of living.”

South Carolina College, 1820

Ransom made the remark in an essay composed for a book about the South called I’ll Take My Stand. The backward-looking Southerner, he said, “feels himself in the American scene as an anachronism, and knows he is felt by his neighbors as a reproach.” Continue reading →

A 232 Year History of our fight against Islam & why it is no longer taught in our public schools…

When Thomas Jefferson saw there was no negotiating with Muslims, he formed what is now the Marines (sea going soldiers). These Marines were attached to U. S. Merchant vessels. When the Muslims attacked U.S. merchant vessels they were repulsed by armed soldiers, but there is more.

The Marines followed the Muslims back to their villages and killed every man, woman, and child in the village.

It didn’t take long for the Muslims to leave U.S. Merchant vessels alone.

English and French merchant vessels started running up our flag when entering the Mediterranean to secure safe travel. Continue reading →

During Reconstruction, true citizenship finally seemed in reach for black Americans. Then their dreams were dismantled.

Black political power during Reconstruction was short-lived—eclipsed, in significant part, by a campaign of terror. Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro. Photographs: Hirarchivum Press / Alamy (Ku Klux Klan); Smith Collection / Gado / Getty (building); Universal History Archive / Getty (flags); Everett / Alamy (gallows)

Not so long ago, the Civil War was taken to be this country’s central moral drama. Now we think that the aftermath—the confrontation not of blue and gray but of white and black, and the reimposition of apartheid through terror—is what has left the deepest mark on American history. Instead of arguing about whether the war could have turned out any other way, we argue about whether the postwar could have turned out any other way. Was there ever a fighting chance for full black citizenship, equality before the law, agrarian reform? Or did the combination of hostility and indifference among white Americans make the disaster inevitable? Continue reading →

Facsimile of Executive order April 5, 1933 (emphasis added)

Executive Order

By virtue of the authority vested in me by Section 5(b) of the Act of October 6, 1917, as amended by Section 2 of the Act of March 9, 1933, entitled “An Act to Provide relief in the existing national emergency in banking, and for other purposes,” in which amendatory Act Congress declared that a serious emergency exists, I, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, do declare that said national emergency still continues to exist and pursuant to said section do hereby prohibit the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States by individuals, partnerships, associates and corporations and hereby prescribe the following regulations for carrying out the purposes of this order:
Continue reading →

President John F. Kennedy
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City
April 27, 1961

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:

I appreciate very much your generous invitation to be here tonight.

You bear heavy responsibilities these days and an article I read some time ago reminded me of how particularly heavily the burdens of present day events bear upon your profession.

You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx. Continue reading →

A rare first edition of a pamphlet written by Hugo and retaining its original photograph of Hugo’s striking line drawing of the 1859 hanging of Brown.

French author Victor Hugo was, it seems, a militant supporter of American abolitionist John Brown.

Prior to Brown’s execution, Hugo sent a letter to the London Evening News decrying the decision to hang Brown. He wrote:

”…When we reflect on what Brown, the liberator, the champion of Christ, has striven to effect, and when we remember that he is about to die, slaughtered by the American Republic, that crime assumes an importance co-extensive with that of the nation which commits it — and when we say to ourselves that this nation is one of the glories of the human race; that, like France, like England, like Germany, she is one of the great agents of civilization; that she sometimes even leaves Europe in the rear by the sublime audacity of some of her progressive movements; that she is the Queen of an entire world, and that her brow is irradiated with a glorious halo of freedom, we declare our conviction that John Brown will not die; for we recoil horror-struck from the idea of so great a crime committed by so great a people…

For – yes, let America know it, and ponder on it well – there is something more terrible than Cain slaying Abel: It is Washington slaying Spartacus!”
Continue reading →

Calls to abolish the electoral college are all the rage these days, but they aren’t new. One such attempt in 1956 was thwarted with the help of a Democratic senator from Massachusetts — a young John F. Kennedy.

The Senate was debating Senate Joint Resolution 31 on March 20, 1956, a “follow-up to what was originally labeled the Lodge-Gossett proposal,” author and law professor Robert Hardaway told The Daily Caller. Continue reading →

Hillary Clinton blamed the Electoral College for her stunning defeat in the 2016 presidential election in her latest memoirs, “What Happened.”

Some have claimed that the Electoral College is one of the most dangerous institutions in American politics.

Why? They say the Electoral College system, as opposed to a simple majority vote, distorts the one-person, one-vote principle of democracy because electoral votes are not distributed according to population. Continue reading →

Through reading the works of Charles Dickens, we may be inspired to take a closer look at our own priorities and come to a deeper understanding of our inability to embody perfectly our own ideals…

Buss, Robert William; Dickens’s Dream; Charles Dickens Museum, London; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/dickenss-dream-191221

Throughout the career of the esteemed literary giant Charles Dickens, selfless love as opposed to selfishness served as an underlying theme in his novels. In the characters of Nicholas Nickleby, Lucie Manette, Bob Cratchitt, Cissy Jupe, and many others, Dickens illustrated the proper understanding and execution of selfless love. On the other hand, in story after story, he condemned those who prioritized their own gain over the good of providing aid to others; Ralph Nickleby, Josiah Bounderby, and Wackford Squeers are a few examples. Continue reading →

What comes next?

November 9, 2012 ~ The world saw a great nation cease to exist a few days ago. Only a handful of people even noticed. Funny thing is — the world was watching as America breathed her last breath — and still — they did not see it.

The human race was told over two thousand years ago what to watch for in the decline and collapse of a nation. Continue reading →

The following was published as an essay by Ronald Reagan, while sitting as the fortieth president of the United States, on the tenth anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. It is more timely today nearly 40 years later.

January 22, 1983 ~ The 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade is a good time for us to pause and reflect. Our nationwide policy of abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy was neither voted for by our people nor enacted by our legislators – not a single state had such unrestricted abortion before the Supreme Court decreed it to be national policy in 1973. But the consequences of this judicial decision are now obvious: since 1973, more than 15 million unborn children have had their lives snuffed out by legalized abortions. That is over ten times the number of Americans lost in all our nation’s wars. Continue reading →

On March 2, 1836, Texas formally declared its independence from Mexico. The Texas Declaration of Independence was signed at Washington-on-the-Brazos, now commonly referred to as the “birthplace of Texas.” Similar to the United States Declaration of Independence, this document focused on the rights of citizens to “life” and “liberty” but with an emphasis on the “property of the citizen.”

The Texas Declaration of Independence was issued during a revolution against the Mexican government that began in October 1835 following a series of government edicts including dissolution of state legislatures, disarmament of state militias, and abolition of the Constitution of 1824. Continue reading →

Accurate history is the first causality in any establishment account of events and their significance. When the fundamental chronicles of national heritage is purged and supplanted with a total reversal of the nature of America’s essence, the public is browbeaten into adopting a phony and destructive departure from traditional values and purpose. The intense disparaging of the America First Committee and their vigorous defense of the Originalist Perspective for a non-interventionist foreign policy was a profound departure from constitutional restraint and limited Presidential authority. Continue reading →

A story that a sweetheart gave a Confederate soldier George Dixon a $20 gold coin dated 1860 as a good luck charm has been validated. The story was that George kept the coin with him always, in his pocket, as good luck. During the Battle of Shiloh, George was shot point blank. The bullet struck in his pocket hitting the center of the gold coin. The impact was said to have left the gold piece bent, with the bullet embedded in it which saved his life.

George’s luck, however, did not last forever. Nearly 150 years ago, the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley, the first ever in history, failed to return to port after its successful maiden mission. The sunken submarine was discovered in 2015 off the waters of South Carolina where it sunk in 1864. Continue reading →

Huckleberry Finn and Jim

Huckleberry Finn is no hero, though he does symbolize the American conscience at the time Mark Twain wrote, or at least the conscience Twain hoped for. Yes, Huckleberry Finn is a coming-of-age tale and a social criticism and satire, but it also asks crucial questions: Who actually changes? What type of American will change?
Continue reading →