Monday, July 19, 2010

The fight for freedom has no beginning or end

Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and The Kentucky Resolutions in 1798 (only ten years after the constitutional convention), proof that fighting for freedom and fighting to keep it are one in the same.

Our founding fathers knew the fight for freedom would require constant maintenance. We have let them down, let's pray it's not too late to repair the damage we have done. Please take a minute to read the information below to better understand why the U.S. Constitution and our country require allot more maintenance then we are providing.

In early 1798 Thomas Jefferson believed that the Alien and Sedition Acts were a Federal measure designed to introduce dictatorship or monarchy to the U.S. and so drafted what became known as the Kentucky Resolutions in order to oppose them. In the 8th Resolution he stated that:

Let him say what the government is, if it be not a tyranny, which the men of our choice have conferred on our President, and the President of our choice has assented to, and accepted over the friendly strangers to whom the mild spirit of our country and its laws have pledged hospitality and protection: that the men of our choice have more respected the bare suspicions of the President, than the solid right of innocence, the claims of justification, the sacred force of truth and the forms and substance of law and justice. In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.


The First Resolution:

Resolved, That the several states composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that by compact, under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each state to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: That to this compact each state acceded as a state, and is an integral party, its co-states forming as to itself, the other party: That the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions, as of the mode and measure of redress.

Click on the link below for the complete Kentucky Resolutions
http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1083&Itemid=264

Research information for this post available on the Liberty Library link to your right, under infosites.

1 comment:

Jan n Jer said...

Clearly our constitution needs to be more defined!