…just what are the key elements that certifies that we are a free people, in charge of our own affairs?
That has been from the very beginning the down-deep belief common in America since 1787, and still found nowhere else, after 240 years that the lowest levels of society have a right to assert their vision of just what it means “to be free and American”…and to act on it.
The American Civil War just doesn’t match up with that definition of “liberty”, or the lay of the land today. That was not what is happening today. In 1860 11 states, all who endorsed slavery as an institution, in very lawyer-like language, simply invoked their constitutional right to sever their original arrangement with the non-slavery states, which by 1858 had just outnumbered the slave states, 17-15. (Four additional slave states, all on the border, did not fully secede and just straddled.) By 1861 the Free states rocketed to 19. With the West just opening up, the handwriting was on the wall.
As we all know, the issue of slavery was hotly debated during our Constitutional Convention from the beginning, in 1787. But, the notion sunk in among ALL the Founders gathered there in Philadelphia, slave and free, that something much bigger was on their docket, (a concept I haven’t personally seen in two generations among our literary journalists and influencers) that in order to secure what still is considered the closest thing to the “prefect contract” between “the People” and “their Government”, they would all shortly join hands… agreeing to shelve the slavery issue, and stick to the liberty issue. The general belief, or wish, was that slavery would not be so profitable in 50 years.
After all, England would still be almost 50 years (1833) before they abolished slavery, although they’d been whittling around the edges for years.
What the 1787 Founders didn’t know was that the 1860 “Slavery or Bust” profiteers did see happen was that a Massachusetts inventor, Eli Whitney, would invent the cotton gin in 1792, which would throw 7 new slave states along the Mississippi River states into millions of new acres of cotton-producing land; land which was not much good for anything else. This cotton gin would re-align the balance of power and the bank balances of all states involved.
(Arguments that the dice were loaded by the North bring out the best of my Kingfish George Stevens rants, who none of you can remember from 1950s comedy television. Today, only 6 of those 15 states still produce cotton.)
Because of America the upper-floor European states have had to cede much of their royal prerogatives to the people, if for no other reason, just for appearances. But later it was embarrassing that Irish, central European and Mediterranean region farm labor could wind their way through Ellis Island to take up work in a steel mill, but would live to see their grandsons return to that little Slovak village they came from and build a library. The America success story was manifest, for all to see, and the resulting gall for for all to see in Europe, as those grandchildren passed out gift for the stay-behinds. (That is not so about the world’s colonial empires in Latin America and Africa, the Catholic Church playing a bigger part in this as you might imagine, by supporting their command-and-control form of governments.)
None of these events, genuine natural law events, were ever foreseen at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. The overriding outcome they did see was that if they did not ‘shelve” slavery for a later date, there would be no United States of America as we have come to know it. And so it was that America’s Civil War was “outcomed” the way it did because 6 million young men burst forth from their farms and small towns and enlisted, all because some preacher had ranted from the pulpit in Ohio, Maine, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana, only not for a few weeks, but for a few hundred years.
That’s right, this sort of righteous voluntarism, to risk one’s life for people they had never seen not even in a photograph, or on the streets of their home town, had never happened, in the history of the world!
And over 350,000 of them died.
And it has even happened a few more times since, also led by those same crazy Americans who had never even read Alfred Lord Tennyson. Or ever been acquainted with a brandy snifter.
This is principal Natural Law understandings of “How Things Work”, should anyone wish to debate.
So, if you are looking for how things are to break out, you may consider the hidden armies who, to date, have said nothing, or shown little interest in what may soon be said. You just likely won’t find them on Substack. I’m not suggesting you join anything, not even a church, but do look for people who can ‘splain how things work, and how they work inside natural law. Bill Gates will have no say in it, anymore than Chairman Mao did. All Mao got was a poster.
Not one of these men ever got a whiff of the Tree of Liberty.
Yer looking in the wrong places.
So, back to the beginning, it won’t be a “civil war” but shooting may be involved. A revolution? Well, maybe, but they would have to play other cards they have not yet shown.
I’ll continue with this.
