While Thomas Jefferson got so many things right, as a human, we all have our blind-spots. Maybe at times he was just hopeful that things would work out, that the pendulum would come back from the extremes and allow the people the natural rights and freedoms that their Creator had intended for them in the best of times.
A key point of reflection is discussed in this latest blog post by Brion McClanahan, where Jefferson is challenged in his thought processes by Jon Taylor of Caroline.
It seems that in June of 1798, at the peak of the Federalist’s power move that launched atrocities like the Alien and Sedition Act that made it a crime to be critical of the government (only 20 years after all the American Colonies publicly were critical of the British government), John Taylor wrote that the union seemed to be on the verge of dissolving. It was most obvious by this point that party power had already prompted the rush to use general government for the good of one region of the united States so young in its journey.
Thomas Jefferson quickly penned back a response that admitted that the New England states were seeing the South as something that could be tapped:
… that they ride us very hard, cruelly insulting our feelings as well as exhausting our strength and substance. their natural friends, the three other Eastern states, join them from a sort of family pride, and they have the art to divide certain other parts of the Union, so as to make use of them to govern the whole.
However, Jefferson claimed this would soon be corrected by voting.
Brion explains:
They would only suffer so long under the heel of these petty tyrants, and he insisted that a “scission” of the Union would do little to arrest the problems of political division, what Jefferson considered to be a natural occurrence in a “deliberating” society. If New England were removed from the Union, Jefferson argued that a division between Virginia and Pennsylvania would soon rise and that would be met by another round of division until the entire Union would be torn asunder for even the Southern States would feel the sting of partisanship and division.
Jefferson continued:
I had rather keep our New-England associates for that purpose, than to see our bickerings transferred to others. they are circumscribed within such narrow limits, & their population so full, that their numbers will ever be the minority ..
Well, at this point, history has proven that John Taylor’s viewpoint was correct, and he articulated it in a rather long letter back to Jefferson. In summary Brion shares:
Taylor considered the partisanship of New England to be a byproduct of both geography and “interest,” and unlike Jefferson he did not think that party divisions were natural occurrences. He cited Connecticut as an example of a fairly unanimous electorate and thought that the rigid—almost religious—belief in “checks and balances” failed to fully arrest the sword of despotism in the United States. In other words, the Constitution was doomed from the beginning .. liberty had to be the direct end of government and if the Union failed to protect liberty, then it was a worthless bond of oppression.
John Taylor did not believe that party politics could fix the “unequally yoked” union between regions that had very different interests and principles. He also pinpointed the key part of the Constitution that resulted in a nationalist central government that is prone to pillaging:
Taxes are the subsistence of party. As the miasma of marshes contaminate the human body, those of taxes corrupt and putrify the body politic. Taxation transfers wealth from a mass to a selection. It destroys the political Equality, which alone can save liberty; and yet no constitution, whilst devising checks upon power, has devised checks sufficiently strong upon the means which create it. Government, endowed with a right to transfer, bestow, and monopolise wealth in perpetuity is in fact, unlimited. It soon becomes a feudal lord over a nation in villenage.
John Taylor, over 200 years ago predicted our situation as it stands today:
But since government is getting [sic] into the habit of peeping into private letters, and is manufacturing a law, which may even make it criminal to pray to God for better times, I shall be careful not to repeat so dangerous a liberty.—I hope it may not be criminal to add a supplication [sic] for an individual—not—for I will be cautious—as a republican, but as a man.
Edward Snowden revealed that this aspect of a dysfunctional government that is only interested in perpetuating itself at all costs makes us neither free or brave!
Voting better is something politicians and public education imprints into our brains, for they know it is week and ineffective so that their agenda as a massive tax collecting parasite can continue.
Once the states were stripped of their power to nullify and secede, nothing stood in the way of total central control by the moneyed elites in this land.
-SF1