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Time for the Redstate Resolves?

By: nessa (Diary)  |  February 24th, 2010 at 11:08 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

In 1775, a group of patriots gathered in a North Carolina town known as Cross Creek. Now part of Fayetteville, North Carolina, the spot where the tavern they gathered in is only a few miles from my home. These men gathered at the tavern not for a night out with the boys, but to sign a document known as the Liberty Point Resolves. Their gathering was in reaction to the then recent events a Lexington and Concord in the colony of Massachusetts. The text of their document is…

Resolved, That the following Association stand as the Association of this Committee, and that it be recommended to the inhabitants of this District to sign the same as speedily as possible.

THE ASSOCIATION.

The actual commencement of hostilities against the Continent by the British Troops, in the bloody scene on the nineteenth of April last, near Boston; the increase of arbitrary impositions, from a wicked and despotick Ministry; and the dread of instigated insurrections in the Colonies, are causes sufficient to drive an oppressed People to the use of arms: We, therefore, the subscribers of Cumberland County, holding ourselves bound by that most sacred of all obligations, the duty of good citizens towards an injured Country, and thoroughly convinced that under our distressed circumstances we shall be justified before you in resisting force by force; do unite ourselves under every tie of religion and honour, and associate as a band in her defence against every foe; hereby solemnly engaging, that whenever our Continental or Provincial Councils shall decree it necessary, we will go forth and be ready to sacrifice our lives and fortunes to secure her freedom and safety. This obligation to continue in full force until, a reconciliation shall take place between Great Britain and America, upon constitutional principles, an event we most ardently desire. And we will hold all those persons inimical to the liberty of the Colonies who shall refuse to subscribe to this Association; and we will in all things follow the advice of our General Committee, respecting the purposes aforesaid, the preservation of peace and good order, and the safety of individual and private property.

By 1775 this was merely another in the long list of documents and pledges that had already been approved, signed, published and sent to King George.

The first was the Virginia Resolves, pushed through the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1765 by the newly elected Patrick Henry. He accomplished this with truly impressive oration and without the use of a teleprompter. As described by u-s-history.com:

On May 30, Henry gave his maiden speech in the assembly and defended his resolutions. He expanded the scope of his criticism to include not only Parliament, but the king as well. Speaking of George III, he stated that, “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell and George the Third — .” At that point he was interrupted by cries of “Treason!” from delegates who easily recognized the reference to assassinated leaders. Henry paused briefly, and then calmly finished his sentence: “…may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.”(emphasis mine)

This was Henry’s first speech as a member of the House of Burgesses, one that I consider a true classic and resulted in the passing and signing of the Virginia Resolves in reaction to the Stamp Act of 1765. These Resolves read:

Resolved, That the first adventurers and settlers of this His Majesty’s Colony and Dominion of Virginia brought with them, and transmitted to their posterity, and all other of His Majesty’s subjects since inhabiting this His Majesty’s said Colony, all the liberties, privileges, franchises, and immunities, that have at any time been held, enjoyed, and possessed, by the people of Great Britain.

Resolved, That by two royal charters, granted by King James the First, the colonists aforesaid are declared entitled to all liberties, privileges, and immunities of denizens and natural subjects, to all intents and purposes, as if they had been abiding and born within the realm of England.

Resolved, That the taxation of the people by themselves, or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them, who can only know what taxes the people are able to bear, or the easiest method of raising them, and must themselves be affected by every tax laid on the people, is the only security against a burthensome taxation, and the distinguishing characteristick of British freedom, without which the ancient constitution cannot exist.

Resolved, That His Majesty’s liege people of this his most ancient and loyal Colony have without interruption enjoyed the inestimable right of being governed by such laws, respecting their internal polity and taxation, as are derived from their own consent, with the approbation of their sovereign, or his substitute; and that the same hath never been forfeited or yielded up, but hath been constantly recognized by the kings and people of Great Britain.

Resolved therefore, That the General Assembly of this Colony have the only and sole exclusive right and power to lay taxes and impositions upon the inhabitants of this Colony, and that every attempt to vest such power in any person or persons whatsoever other than the General Assembly aforesaid has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as American freedom.

Resolved, That His Majesty’s liege people, the inhabitants of this Colony are not bound to yield obediance to any law or ordinance whatever, designed to impose any taxation whatsoever upon them other than the laws or ordinances of the General Assembly aforesaid.

Resolved, That any person who shall, by speaking or writing, assert or maintain that any person or persons other than the General Assembly of this Colony, have any right or power to impose or lay any taxation on the people here, shall be deemed an enemy to His Majesty’s Colony.

The Virginia Resolves were the first and the Liberty Point Resolves were 10 years later but they did not stand alone. The Virginia Resolves were followed by Declaration of Rights and Grievances (October 1765), An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies (1766), Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767), Massachusetts Circular Letter (February 1768), Boston Pamphlet (1772), Sheffield Declaration (January 1773), Chestertown Resolves (May 1774), Bush River Resolution (March 1775), Suffolk Resolves (September 1774), Orangetown Resolutions (July 1774), Mecklenburg Resolves (May 1775), Liberty Point Resolves (June 1775), Tryon Resolves (August 1775), Halifax Resolves (April 1776), Fairfax Resolves (July 1774), Hanover Resolves (July 1774), Fincastle Resolutions (January 1775), Virginia Declaration of Rights, (June 1776).

Every group of dissatisfied citizens across the Colonies had something to say about what they wanted for their colony and their soon to be, and in many cases unthought-of, Nation. The two examples I posted above each had portions that should ring familiar to Americans even today. Many of the thoughts and desires of the colonials who wrote and signed these many and varied “Resolves” and “Declarations” found their way into our founding documents.

So today, when many find fault with the “Mount Vernon Statement” it should not disqualify the statement as a viable and foundational document. It took 19 documents to state the desires and beliefs of somewhat over a million colonists in 1775. I have no idea how many it will take to state the beliefs and desires of 300 million Americans today. The “Mount Vernon Statement” is but one of the many which should and must follow. Every Tea Party and 9-12 group should write and sign their own, reflecting their own local values. Then hold their local politicians feet to the fire. As our political consciousness is flooded with these Resolves, we can map our path to a new found dedication to the documents which “opened all eyes to the rights of man.”

COMMENTS

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  • discerningconservative

    Highly reco’ed

  • Viet71

    Many thanks, nessa.

  • redneck_hippie

    You will love this. I know I do.

    Hannan announces a tea party. In Brighton.

    via hotair headlines

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100027366/british-tea-party-movement-to-launch-on-saturday/

    Worth a glance at comments, too. One comment bewails “tax and waste.”

  • mikerazar

    the influence of Virginians in founding our nation. It is also hard to believe that any of them were really pro-slavery. Does anyone know of a historical source to explain this paradox?

    Four score and seven years later there were two million casualties in a war to free four million slaves. Surely there is no more selfless sacrifice in all of history.

    Just wondering…

    • Achance

      looking at the past with the eyes of the present. Being bound to an estate or a master was a fact of life for non-landowning European and British peasants. Most of the early settlers of Virginia (and other colonies) came as indentured servants or as apprentices, a state removed from slavery only by the fact that it was for a specific term. There really was little opportunity for the indentured servants once their term expired and they became the driving force in developing the frontier, much to the distaste of the colonial governments, the Crown, and the large landholders of the Tidewater. The tension between the Tidewater aristocracy and the landless “squatters” of the Piedmont and Mountain regions of Virginia culminated in Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. The “idea” of America and the drive to the frontier owes far more to the sons and daughters of indenture seeking a place for themselves in the unsettled and at the time less attractive places than it does to the coastal aristocracy, and that is true in all of the original colonies. The colonial governments had trouble with both the Indians and their own citizens on the frontiers and the frontiersmen developed a healthy dislike and distrust of the settled aristocracy.

      There had been some African indenture or slavery almost from the beginning, but actually they were more costly than European or British indentured servants in that they had to be both purchased and cared for. The indentured servant did not have to be purchased but rather more or less voluntarily contracted to servitude for a term of years in exchange for passage and upkeep and some even procured their own passage for the opportunity. In any event, Bacon’s Rebellion sounded the death knell for indentured sevitude for British citizens. The “civil rights” as they were understood then of a British citizen were just incompatible with indenture and the frontier was filling up with “escaped” indentured sevants who had become dangerous to their masters and former masters.

      In the early days even African slavery wasn’t consider either a race-based or lifetime matter, though there is no doubt that virtually all White Europeans and British would have considered themselves legally and morally superior to any Aftrican. Nonetheless, imported African labor in some state of slavery began to replace White indentured sevants in the Tidewater regions and expecially in the rich tobacco, indigo, and rice plantations of the Tidewater. While life as an agricultural bondsman was not easy, particularly in the rice plantations, it was a far more benign circumstance that that of the slave laborer in the commercial cotton plantations of the Lower South in the second quarter of the ’19th Century.

      At the time of the Founding there were less than 400,000 slaves in America and they were mostly in the declining agricultural regions of the Tidewater. These lands had been in continuos production for almost two centuries and tobacco particularly was very hard on the land. The uplands were the province of the small-holder and there was almost no slavery there. Anyone in a leadership position in the last quarter of the 18th Century would have presumed that there would be little need for further importation of slaves and that slavery would decline with the decline of the Tidewater agriculture that relied on it. And then and young tutor from Yale teaching on Gen. Nathaniel Green’s Georgia plantation, Eli Whitney, invented the cotton gin and made short staple upland cotton economically viable. Consequently, by the time of the Civil War, there were almost 4 Million slaves in America, the population growth mostly by natural increase. Importation was banned in 1808, but some smuggling persisted. The worn out tobacco plantations of Virginia became quite literally slave farms to feed the burgeoning demand for agricultural labor on the commercial cotton plantations that went from east to west across The South like a swarm of locusts. Little tending of the land was done beyond that necessary to get a few years production. The land was then abandoned to taxes and the cotton speculators moved west in an orgy of land speculation and fraud.

      The Southern mythology of the time of King Cotton is of stability and heritage going bact to time immemorial, but King Cotton only ruled from about 1800 to 1865. Once you left the Tidewater regions and the larger rivers, plantations like Tara didn’t exist until the commercial cotton boom of the early 19th Century. While there were short staple cotton farmers with white columned mansions, the odds were pretty good that if father wasn’t an immigrant then grandfather was either an immigrant or a younger son who had to move on from the old home place in the Tidewater. Much of that cotton that made the South rich was produced on land acquired in the various Indian cessions, in lotteries, or by outright fraud and was owned by groups of speculators finance by Northern banks. They cleared the land, moved in their slaves into poorly built temporary quarters, installed overseers, and collected their earings from afar. The commercial plantations run by overseers were the land of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and life for the slaves was often brutish. There was no hope of escape from these farms in the deep South and punishment for attempted escape was brutal. The old saw about how slaves don’t rebel but rather half-free men do was especially true of American slavery. The slaves who escaped to The North were mostly from the more benign older areas and often were able to escape solely because they were trusted not to.

      Anyway, before this gets any longer. No one at the Founding really believed that African slavery would be a lasting institution because Tidewater agriculture was in decline. They couldn’t reach an agreement that would free many millions of dollars worth of legally owned property but the Founders, including those who were slaveholders or who represented slaveholding states did resolve to recognize that slavery was in decline and Constitutionally banned importation twenty years hence. Nobody foresaw the invention of the cotton gin a mere four years after the Constitution and the transformation of Southern agriculture. I must say I have had ample cause to wish my ancestors had picked their own d#$ned cotton however.

      • http://andrightlyso.com/ civil_truth

        That puts a totally different moral hue on the Founding Fathers.

        It would then seem that the culpability comes from decades of Federal legislatures kicking the slavery can down the road while the North (mostly) profiteered and slavery evolved to the brutal institution that it became.

        But in today’s revision, it’s all the fault of evil Southerners, painted with a broad brush. And now we see punishment via attainder with the incessant renewals of the Voting Rights Act because it serves partisan interests.

        Today, we’ve got the debt can being kicked down the road by the Federal government and too many state legislatures. History will record the outcome, but it’s not likely to end up much better than it did in the 1860s – though probably with more foreign actors this time.

        • Achance

          The irony is that all those rich New Yawk, Massachuestts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island liberals live off trust funds and other investments based on money gg/ or ggg/grandaddy made in the Triangle Trade based on importing, more likely smuggling, rum and slaves to the Colonies. There’s a good reason for all that stuff in the Constitution about search and siezure, lots of our notables were notorious smgglers; they just weren’t much on paying those British taxes.

      • mikerazar

        I take your comment title is meant as hyperbole; surely worse crimes have been committed.

        In any case, there is ample evidence that they knew better. In his early writings Jefferson was quite the young abolitionist. This fervor was tempered in his middle years with a paternal feeling of obligation to current slaves. As the debate raged, he never really became pro-slavery, but chose preservation of the Union as the higher imperative at least forty years before the Civil War.

        No doubt, there was a range of views among citizens and politicians. The banning of the slave trade in 1808, both here and in Europe, certainly says a lot about the moral underpinnings of the “peculiar institution”. In 1833, slavery was effectively ended in the British Empire. How ironic that must have seemed to Black Americans whose fathers fought for Independence.

        Most historians attribute the thriving of slavery to the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Twenty years later cotton production had risen around 50000% (not a typo). Hardly the first time in history when morality as it was understood then took a back seat to immoral wealth transfers. This should never be confused with true capitalism, anymore than the current leaders on Wall Street who cheated their own shareholders and then got the government to ratify their actions are true capitalists.

        The founding fathers were great men. Challenging their decision to compromise on slavery for the good of the union is certainly presentism. But don’t say that they didn’t know they were compromising.

        In my original comment in this thread, I meant to narrow in on the Virginians. I remain puzzled as to why they sided with their southern neighbors.

        • http://dreamsfrommyforefathers.com RoguePolitics
          • mikerazar

            Should we be let off the hook by later generations because we didn’t know any better?

          • http://dreamsfrommyforefathers.com RoguePolitics

            People are a product of their times though.
            We know better, they knew better, even the Hitler youth knew better.
            In the case of the founders they undoubtedly knew no slavery, no union. So they punted that issue.

            Personally some owned slaves and that seems uncalled for. I read in Jefferson’s case debt literally prevented his emancipating them. Washington? I don’t know.

            I trust God will judge them by a perfect standard. Me as well.

      • hickorystick

        A couple teachers did give lessons on this when I was in Public School, but I would guess thats been expunged from the textbooks and lesson plans now.
        “The tension between the Tidewater aristocracy and the landless

    • redneck_hippie

      I stumbled on an author while viewing the Hillsdale College Constitution Townhall tonight, Session III.

      The prof mentions Don Fehrenbacher, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the definitive work on the Dred Scott Case. Fehrenbacher’s last work, The Slaveholding Republic also sounds interesting.

      The prof stated that Fehrenbacher concluded in his Dred Scott Case book, that Lincoln was closer to the truth than Judge Taney’s opinion in the case. The prof referred to Basler Edition of Lincoln’s Collected Works in the lecture and the Lincoln Douglas debates, as well as Lincoln’s Peoria speech in a discussion of the meaning of the phrase, all men are created equal.

  • streiff

    on Hay Street?

    the spot where the tavern they gathered in is only a few miles from my home.

    • nessa

      The city of Fayetteville has been rebuilding Hay Street for several years now. No more strip joints, no more “Fayett-nam” now there are office buildings, the Airborne and Special Operations Museum is there as well. The marker for the Liberty Point Resolves stands across the street from it in a very nice park. That was the location of the Tax Day Tea Party in Fayetteville.

  • redneck_hippie

    I’d take a blood oath with my online brethren. Something militant, like defend the constitution against all enemies inside the beltway and those who haven’t yet bought their way in.

  • jayburd

    “It supports America

  • http://beaglescout.wordpress.com Beaglescout

    What to add?

  • YankeeConservative

    Good historical work.