Fight for Our Liberty Like It's 1787
The Press & the Pols Tried to Silence Dissidents Then. Don't Let Them Now.
Benjamin Franklin, the oldest delegate at the Constitutional Convention in that sweltering summer in Philadelphia in 1787, was asked by a woman afterward what the founders had chosen for the new nation’s governance. His reply may have been apocryphal but it is so telling it is still taught: “A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
I have been thinking much about that line lately. It seems as if our Republic has been hijacked — whether by Marxists intent on wresting power from the individual, or pedophiles keen to sexualize young children, or corrupt pols eager to balloon their warchests — is unclear. What is clear is that thanks to open borders and open jail doors, political persecutions and dishonest journalists, corporations bowing to the Woke Mob and professional athletes shaming their country, we are losing America.
Whatever slim chance we have in keeping the God-loving nation that Franklin and his fellow delegates bequeathed to us resides in the Bill of Rights. And we wouldn’t even have that if it hadn’t been for a group of dissidents who, in state convention after state convention, refused to vote for ratification of the Constitution without it.
For most of American history, these dissidents were dismissed as narrow-minded, rural bumpkins who failed to understand the grandeur of the new Republic’s founding. They were dismissed as ignorant Anti-Federalists who wanted to curb the powers vested in the majestic new government. One academic famously dismissed them as “men of little faith.” As Hillary Clinton might say, “Deplorables.”
But to their cheering section, then as now, they are Patriots. Like the Jan 6 prisoners, they were willing, as Patrick Henry put it during Virginia’s debate over ratifying the Constitution, to stand for liberty because “our privileges and rights are in danger.” And like the government’s reaction to Americans protesting election results on Jan 6, the crackdown on Shays’ Rebellion — led by farmers who had fought in the Revolution and were angry they were being taxed to pay for its debts — was brutal.
Men and women who remembered the blood and treasure shed during the Revolutionary War — including the brilliant Mercy Otis Warren, who as a woman wrote blistering commentaries under the pen name of A Columbian Patriot — vowed that the new government would not make a mockery of their sacrifices. Samuel Adams in Massachusetts, George Mason in Virginia, George Clinton in New York — all shared her view that a strong central government could smother individual rights.
If you read the debate at the ratifying conventions, the dissidents seem prescient. One delegate in Massachusetts was shocked that the new federal city was to be ten miles square. “Is not that a great space to give up to the uncontrolled discretion of the federal government, wherein it could wreak its tyrannical will without let or hindrance?” he asked. The District of Columbia is still constrained to those ten-square-mile limits – but of course the reach of the US government extends to every state where a federal agency has federal employees, who now number 9.1 million, the largest employer in the country. How horrified would that delegate be now.
Brigadier General Samuel Thompson, who had led Maine’s militia during the Revolutionary War, posed a central question during the debate in Massachusetts. “Where is the bill of rights,” he asked, “which shall check the power of this Congress; which will say, Thus far shall ye come, and no farther. The safety of the people depends on a bill of rights. If we build on a sandy foundation, is it likely we shall stand?”
Today’s woke universities dispute the idea that the American Revolution was waged as a campaign against tyranny, insisting instead it was fought for economic reasons alone, to retain the evil of slavery. The need to entice South Carolina and Virginia into the Union did force a compromise. The slave trade would continue until 1807, slavery itself until 1863. No question that is the original sin of our founding. But seeing history through the prism of economic determinism alone can deafen us to its ideological thunder – to the idea that freedom from Britain’s tyranny – by freed blacks, indentured whites and wealthy landowners alike – was a driving force for rebellion.
Today’s anti-historians also denigrate Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence as window-dressing written by a slave-holder, but in truth the sentiment that “all men are created equal” motivated slaves, Native Americans and women to proclaim their rights. One such slave, named Mum Bett by her slaveholding oppressors, went to the public square in Sheffield, MA in 1780 to hear a public reading of the new Massachusetts constitution. The first article caught her attention.
All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.
“Won’t the law give me my freedom?” she later asked Theodore Sedgwick, a white abolitionist lawyer, who agreed to take her case. She became the first enslaved African American to win a freedom suit in Massachusetts. Her husband had died fighting for the Revolution. Now, she was free. She changed her name to Elisabeth Freeman.
The other day a friend recommended I watch a round-table discussion on the Bible’s Book of Exodus. Jordan Peterson, who led the conversation, observed that Exodus is the essential spiritual narrative, a journey from tyranny, out of slavery, into the promised land. “Conscience will call you out of slavery into freedom even if it pulls you into the desert,” he observed. It comes down to “do you choose Pharaoh or God?”
That these citizens – acclaimed and ordinary — turned out to be right could not be more ironic. Two centuries later, as a cabal of socialist warriors ignore the very Constitution under which they were elected, as they steer our nation toward dictatorship, the Bill of Rights is the only fragile hope we have of saving the Republic.
Because of these dissidents, our Constitution – alone among all the nations of the industrialized West – has a First Amendment protecting free speech, assembly and religion. Without that First Amendment — and the Second — we would not have the literal and rhetorical weapons to fight back. In my view it is the Tenth Amendment that is our most direct gift from the anti-Federalists — a sort of a catchall, to preclude government overreach. It says: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Theirs is the fight, and the legacy, we now reclaim.
At a time when US government agencies spy on American parents, calling them domestic terrorists for asking about their children’s education, when federal agencies monitor our private conversations, dictate our personal medical decisions and silence our free speech protests, when the FBI imprisons Americans without rights of counsel, visitation or civil rights and public teachers’ unions instruct children in sexual dysfunction, it is time, it is way past time, to give these prescient and demeaned Americans a full-throated place in history. In many of their critiques of the proposed US constitution, they proved to be right. May their example save us yet.