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They Signed Our Constitution or The Revenge of the Nerds!
They Signed Our Constitution or The Revenge of the Nerds!
They Signed Our Constitution or The Revenge of the Nerds!
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They Signed Our Constitution or The Revenge of the Nerds!

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The instant Barack Obama put his hand on a Koran to take the Presidential oath of office, I knew we had to start teaching our kids history again. Why don’t Americans know that Islam is a fatalistic nut group that’s out to kill us, and that a rogue president that’s one of them could quickly be fatal for our Country?
And how could I help more than by making my years of checked facts on the founders available to anyone interested in learning the story of our nation’s founding? So I put them in order for general information, use as a starting material for school papers, or to begin a dialog on the meaning of government with yourself.
And how better to start in relearning the story of our nation’s founding then by going back to the unvarnished truth bringing our founders to life that we might relive their experience.
Ever think of George Washington as an actor? Sort of a cross between Clint Eastwood and Gregory Peck? Big George was into power and respect, and made himself look the part, act the part, dress the part until he got the part—only to then realize he wasn’t up to playing the part he’d cast for himself. So others used him to do just that and this is their story. The story of how the intelligentsia of an era took control of the country to give an idiot public a government they were simpliy too stupid to know they needed. We may need to play that trick again.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 5, 2019
ISBN9780463858332
They Signed Our Constitution or The Revenge of the Nerds!

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    They Signed Our Constitution or The Revenge of the Nerds! - Arthur W. Ritchie

    PROLOG:

    "Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think."

    __________ George Bernard Shaw

    Few would agree more with GBS than our Founding Fathers

    attending the Constitutional Convention.

    "Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government."

    __________ George Washington

    Virginia Delegate

    "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%."

    __________ Thomas Jefferson

    Founder of the Democrat Party

    "... turbulent and changing masses seldom judge or determine right And something must permanently check the imprudence of democracy."

    __________ Alexander Hamilton

    New York Delegate

    Democracy is the, worst of all political evils.

    __________ Elbridge Gerry

    Massachusetts delegate

    ... the people have never ever been and ever will be unfit to retain the exercise of power in their own hands.

    __________ William Livingston

    New Jersey delegate

    The mass of men are neither wise nor good. ... The people who own the country ought to govern it.

    __________ John Jay

    First Chief Justice of the

    Supreme Court

    Between our Constitution’s being sent to the states for ratification and it becoming the law of the land, New York couldn’t even be shamed into paying their share of the cost of running the government under the Articles of Confederation.

    The Continental Congress, in its several guises, limped along during the Revolution, and was well on its way toward total collapse as the war ended. Americans—always at that time state oriented—saw little need to share their power with another central government. It was only the political leaders thinking of the nation’s future that had the clout to pull us together into a unified whole.

    1781

    October: An express rider brought Congress news of the surrender of an entire British Army at Yorktown! The war was practically won! And each delegate had to cough up a buck from their own pocket to pay the man because their treasury was literally empty.

    1782

    A year after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown and the year before the peace treaty was official, the states were assigned quotas needed by Congress to pay the soldiers who were about to head home. New Jersey’s share was $485,679. They sent $5,500. I only mention this because none of the other states sent a dime.

    1783

    September 3: The British signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolution and its arrival found Congress two states short of a quorum. They had to badger missing delegates to return that they might authorize their President’s signing the treaty officially ending the war. (a copy of the signed last page of the Treaty of Paris is in Appendix 5)

    Talk about smug! We had beaten England! Arguably the most powerful nation on earth! And, because English business men saw us as an extraordinarily profitable trading partner, the peace treaty gave us almost everything we’d hoped for! And a self-satisfied public saw no need to replace one powerful government that could tax and order them around with another that could do the same. But those in Congress trying to run the country saw it quite differently as one insoluble problem after another cropped up under their feeble powers to act. They believed we needed a central government that could create a national currency, eliminate tariffs between the states, establish nationwide water rights, and defend the country whether the people liked it or not. It was a time when the nation’s political intelligentsia were far ahead of the general public in knowing what had to be done if the country was to have a future. They also knew they had to await events to enlighten an ignorant public—and wait they did—and, slowly and inevitably, the events accumulated.

    1785

    The Mount Vernon Conference

    March 21–28: Two years into the peace, delegates from Virginia and Maryland signed the Mount Vernon Compact formalizing their respective rights to the Potomac and Pocomoke Rivers, and Chesapeake Bay that included such items as navigation, tolls, commercial regulations, fishing, debt collection and so on. And in a nation where many states were larger than most European nations—and in a nation that was wall to wall rivers, bays, shorelines and such—it brought into focus the need for a centralized government with the power to globally solve such issues. Unless, of course, the states wanted every problem solved in this narrow and obtuse way with no national standardization of rules and laws.

    1786

    ShaysRebellion #1

    August 29: Three years into the peace, Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays led thousands of armed farmers to protest alleged injustices around Springfield, Massachusetts. Most were behind in their mortgage or tax payments and were fearful of being jailed or dispossessed from their property and their goal was to shut down the courts that had the power to jail or evict them.

    The Annapolis Convention

    September 11–14: Twelve delegates from New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Virginia met to try and end the trade barriers between the states, for under the Articles of Confederation, each state was a sovereign nation perfectly capable of setting up tolls, duties and taxes as they saw fit. The convention was held in such low esteem that—even though Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and North Carolina appointed delegates, they didn’t even bother showing up. Likewise, Georgia, South Carolina, Maryland and Connecticut didn’t waste their time appointing delegates. The consensus of those attending was that a more extensive group should meet the following year to work on amending the Articles of Confederation . And attending delegate Alexander Hamilton saw to the paperwork to do just that.

    New Hampshire’s Paper Money Riot

    September 20: With all American paper money suspect and most practically worthless, most of the colonies had stopped printing more until they could find a way to sustain its value. But this lack of viable cash made paying for things tricky as bartering has always been problematic.

    Let’s say you want to buy a loaf of bread and all you have ready to pay for it is a book of Latin poetry, a pail of two-day old milk and a tired slave named Fred. See the problem? Although I guess I should mention that many places had been reduced to using bullets or nails as currency in purchasing small items. And while many suggest that tobacco was used as currency, who had a scale handy? Who could tell how much water was in that tobacco? Who could determine its quality?

    Anyway, a group calling themselves the Regulators—think Shay’s Rebellion types in a different state—believing that printing notes backed by public credit would somehow be different enough to maintain their value and stimulate the economy, demanded that New Hampshire start printing some NOW! Even after pointing out that more paper backed by nothing would only add to the already mountains of worthless paper in circulation, New Hampshire towns still drafted petitions to the legislature to get the presses going.

    The press’ remained idle, and armed Regulators marched. One group set fire to the courthouse at Grafton County, another headed for the state’s capitol at Exeter demanding that New Hampshire immediately start printing the you know whats. New Hampshire’s president calmed them down for the night while getting word to the surrounding towns to send their militias and around 2,000 arrived the following morning to drive the rebels off. But it was becoming more and more obvious that to create a stable currency we needed a central control over the national money supply, something the Articles Congress was not authorize to do.

    1787

    Shay’s Rebellion #2

    February 3: Shays’ mob attacked the U.S. Armory at Springfield, Massachusetts hoping to use its weapons to overthrow the government. And, as the armory was U.S. government property, it was Congress’ responsibility to defend it, but lacking the money to pay troops, the job fell to the Massachusetts State and local militias. It proved as few things could, just how impotent the Articles Congress was, or as George Washington put it, The Articles of Confederation bound the states together with a chain of sand.

    THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION!

    Or

    THE REVENGE OF THE NERDS!

    Believing it was a now-or-never moment, a select few of the Confederation Congress led by Alexander Hamilton, foisted the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people, the Philadelphia Convention, and let us thank God that they did!

    Called for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation, those setting it up knew perfectly well that this was a fraud, that its real purpose was to replace the Articles in spite of what the people wanted. But their planning and timing were perfect, for only one man in America had the respect to run both the convention and then the country, and that was Hamilton’s wartime boss, George Washington. And big George was all for ditching the Articles.

    "Influence is no government ... I predict the worst consequences from a half-starved limping government, always moving upon crutches and tottering at every step ... I do not conceive we can long exist as a nation without having lodged somewhere a power which will pervade the whole Union in as energetic a manner as the authority of the State Governments extend over the several states."

    __________ George Washington

    Delegate from Virginia

    As the delegates were pre-broken into the fix its and the replace its, the conference’s beginning was predictable: The weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation would be delineated then—quietly—imperceptibly—unknowingly—the delegates broke into two groups without even realizing it: Those using the Articles weaknesses as a starting point to fix them, and those using those same weaknesses as an excuse to ditch them.

    The Philadelphia Convention which we now call

    The Constitutional Convention

    May 25th - Sept. 17th 1787

    While scheduled to start on May 14th, only Virginia and Pennsylvania’s delegates were there on that day, so they sat around yacking and drinking for the next week and a half until a quorum was reached on the 25th, and that’s the day history gives us as the Convention’s beginning. And what’s the first thing they did when they gaveled in? They swore everyone to secrecy about what went on at the Convention of course. Now for some specifics:

    Rhode Island’s congressional delegation was living in Philadelphia, just blocks down the street from the convention, and they refused to send a delegate. The 12 states that were represented named 74 delegates to attend; of those 74, 55 showed up; and of those 55, no more than 30 stayed for the three and a fraction months before they finished their work. And from then on, even those staying were plagued with absentee problems. James Madison, their unofficial chronicler, boasted that, while he never left the proceedings for more than a casual fraction of an hour, his fellow delegates were far less fastidious in their attendance.

    New Hampshire’s delegation didn’t arrive until July. By then, the two New York delegates sent by Governor Clinton with strict orders to prevent the Articles from being replaced had already left in disgust leaving Alexander Hamilton as New York’s sole delegate. Washington would later write of the Constitution’s being signed by 11 states and Colonel Hamilton.

    Of the 55 delegates on and off participating in the Convention, 39 signed the document, 14 had already left town, Delaware’s John Dickinson, was down with a migraine and George Read signed it for him, and five delegates: Massachusetts’ Elbridge Gerry. Virginia’s Edmund Randolph, and George Mason, and New York’s Robert Yates and John Lansing Jr. simply refused to sign.

    Who went? Who didn’t? And Why?

    Jefferson called the Convention’s delegates an assembly of demigods, but he was in Europe and spoke from a published list without knowing who would actually attend or what they would do if they did.

    Jefferson and John Adams were both obvious first line choices, but serving the nation in Europe, they did not attend. But what of the heavy hitters that were invited but refused to attend? John Hancock? Sam Adams? Patrick Henry? All turned down invitations with Patrick Henry giving his reason as he smelt a rat. Then, there’s the question of the actions of the other significant attendees.

    Only three attendees had the clout to run such an event: Washington who really didn’t want to be there believing that, if it failed, it would besmirch his precious and ever pampered dignity. (His motto could have been, Familiarity breeds contempt which is why I avoid the hoi polloi) Benjamin Franklin, but he was 81 and far from the dashing iconoclast of old. His gout enfeebled him such that he had to be carried to the convention by convicts from the local jail in his French-made sedan chair, and when there, he almost never rose to speak. Then there was Robert Morris, the man who paid for the revolution out of his own pocket. But Morris immediately took himself out of the running by nominating Washington to chair the Convention, only to then sit back and do next to nothing. (His only other recorded act was to second one motion.) Washington accepted the chair only to then remain silent in all matters save those related to parliamentary procedures.

    Thoughts on Washington’s reticence to speak:

    Washington was a proud man with much to be proud of, and it’s my guess is that—because of the pain and inconvenience of his dentures, which I doubt he wore much at home with his family—here, he would be in public wearing them six days a week for 90 days of considerable pain, drooling, and speaking problems. So much of his silence might just have been to avoid the embarrassment of speaking oddly before so many he was meeting for the first time. For the pain he took Laudanum which is morphine dissolved in alcohol.

    Tooth loss became common everywhere cane sugar was introduced, and you had to be fairly rich to afford false teeth or partials. For most of his adult life he wore partials until 1789 when he had all but one of his remaining natural teeth removed and went to full dentures. A photo of the only known existing set of his dentures can be found in Appendix 5

    So for all practical purposes, The Great Constitutional Convention was a second-team run event. And who were those that distinguished themselves during these 90 working-meeting days?

    They met six days a week and took one 10 day break, so the convention lasted exactly 90 days.

    Madison’s convention notes have Gouverneur Morris’ 173 speeches as the record proving that the national womanizer with the wooden leg and palsied right forearm could truly dazzle you with his footwork.* Madison himself spoke 161 times followed by Pennsylvania’s Judge Wilson and then Connecticut’s Roger Sherman with 138 speeches.

    * He lost his left leg below the knee in a carriage accident in 1780 when he was 28. His arm problem was caused by his being scalded with boiling water as a child.

    Madison and Charles Pinkney were just two among many arriving with plans for a new government which they leaked out piecemeal to the annoyance of those hating change. And Madison would later commit any fraud he could think of to make himself look more important to history than he actually was; Judge James Wilson gave the third greatest number of speeches and was for the people voting for all the offices from the national executive on down which was immediately shot down by almost everyone as most of the delegates thought of John Q. Public as an ignoramus too stupid to vote for anything.

    William Blunt, an out and out crook was there as was Thomas Mifflin the town drunk. And let’s not forget that both Judge Wilson and Robert Morris would spend time in debtors’ prison for their incredible greed in doing anything to make a buck. In Morris’ case, he’d be in jail for 3½ years and then only getting out then when Congress passed our nation’s first bankruptcy act written specifically to spring him. Debtors prisons didn’t really close on this continent until about 1850.

    Why So Many Problems?

    The Continental Congress under its various guises had three insurmountable problems:

    First: Anything they did had to be agreed to by all 13 colonies / states and that proved to be nearly impossible. Even getting them to sign onto the Articles of Confederation—really just a codification of what they’d already been doing—took several years.

    Second: Even with an act’s unanimous approval, they had no mechanism to enforce it. But most importantly:

    Third: It could never be the English government they so universally admired: We lacked the regal line to rule, and noble class to moderate and were stuck with the passionate masses that few, if any, of the delegates trusted.

    Now—consistent with the above and having no faith in the intelligence of the average citizen—what type of government could they cobble together that would both work and last?

    Before the Revolution, the colonies had been led by executives chosen by the king or colonial proprietor. And while the people had elected the various legislatures, these had been overseen by the continentally appointed executive who could override their work. Even during the Revolution, no continental office in America had been elected by the people.

    Congress’ members had been appointed by the colonial legislatures, and unlike Parliament, had no executive, in the form of a president, governor or king with the power to enforce its decisions. And at the Congress, each colony / state, had one vote regardless of their physical size, population, or number of delegates. And all delegates were elected to one-year terms and were limited to serving no more than three years out of six, and all problems / questions coming before them were handled by ad hoc committees created on the spot. And now, for the first time, all of this was being questioned.

    A floor motion receiving the majority’s approval could create a committee for any purpose whatsoever. And committee members were nominated from the floor and the delegate receiving the most votes became its chairman. Committees tended to have between three and five members with almost exactly 77% of them having three. In its various guises, the Congress, which ran the 15 years from 1774 until 1789, created 3,294 committees: About 19 a month or roughly two every three of their working days.

    So the Convention’s major questions were: What kind of government would we have? Monarchy? Plutocracy? Republic? And forget Democracy, with the possible exception of Pennsylvania’s Judge Wilson, it’s doubtful even one delegate would have voted for it. Would we have an executive? Single or plural? For a term, or for life? Elected or appointed? Would decisions have to be unanimous? Two thirds? A majority? Questions like these might seem nonsensically simplistic today, but all were hot button items back then.

    Hamilton hung in for the royal prerogative: An executive selectedNOT elected—for life with absolute veto power. He thought the federal government should choose the state governors too. Franklin liked a plural executive, possibly three, and Ben didn’t want them to be paid either. Ben believed that, if you weren’t rich enough to serve free, why had you run for office in the first place?

    Do we keep our unicameral legislature or change it? And if so, to what? Do we create an executive with the power to enforce the laws that that legislature writes? Or should that be left to the committees writing them as in the past?

    House of Lords / Senate?

    Ancient Rome’s Senate was composed of the patriarchs of the nation’s leading families. England’s equivalent, the House of Lords, has always consisted of those ennobled by their sovereign, or the descendants of those so ennobled. America’s Congresses delegates were merely people sent by the colonial / state legislatures and could be extraordinarily rich, as the—in today’s money—billionaire Robert Morris, or the dirt-poor Sam Adams, a man so poor, the legislature sending him bought him new clothes and a wig that he might appear respectable. In England, such a pair sitting in the same house would be unthinkable at that time.

    Many wishing for a new government still believed that the states, regardless of size or population, should be equally represented by delegates selected by their legislatures and not the people. But a powerful argument existed that might never have even been openly articulated: Dare they ignore the fact that—ignorant and stupid though the people might be—if the people did not have a say in their government, that government might not last? So, with considerable reluctance, they created an ersatz House of Commons, the House of Representatives. Elected by the people, hoping that the commonality of its membership would be countered by the quasi-noble wisdom of those chosen by the state legislatures for the Senate. But even though this worked well, from day one moves were afoot to end the states’ control of the Senate. The people eventually won, but it took them 123 years to do it.

    What eventually turned the tide was the scandal of state legislators selling senate seats in states where mineral rights were worth a fortune. Think Idaho.

    1912

    May 13: With 31 states calling for a Constitutional amendment allowing the people to directly elect their senators, Congress passed the 17th amendment ordering just that.

    1913

    April 8: It became the law of the land when the 36th state, Connecticut. ratified it. It reduced our government to the populism the founders feared.

    Just as earlier, the Electoral College had descended from a list of local intellectuals chosen by the people to select their leader, to a collection of political hacks so obscure their names don’t even appear on the ballot, so now, with even senators elected by the people, we are at the mercy of the fickle public our founders feared would destroy the nation.

    Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.

    ____________ John Adams

    When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.

    ____________ Benjamin Franklin

    When a people shall have become incapable of governing themselves and fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what Quarter he comes.*

    ____________ George Washington

    * This is from a fascinating letter Washington wrote to Lafayette during April / May of 1788 while the states were contemplating ratifying the Constitution. It can be found in its entirety in Appendix 11

    And Where Has This Led?

    War, rumors of war, or national catastrophes keep people—even if only mildly—politically active. While lengthy periods of peace have led to an ennui destroying every civilization in history, and always for the same reason: When people aren’t keeping control of the local political clubs that control the names going on the ballots, the fanatics that have been patiently waiting decades to take over, do. And the candidates they chose are as crazy and fanatical as those choosing them leading to the questionability of the intelligence or sanity of so many of the candidates elected today—just as our founders predicted.

    Can you imagine London electing a Muslim mayor during the cold war of just decades ago? A man whose religion is basically founded on the principle that its followers are to kill all of those they cannot convert? Or were those voters ignorantly pulling the lever for the liberal candidate their corrupted party had selected for them without giving it a moment of thought?

    Can you imagine Canadians electing a Muslim Prime Minister knowing that the book he worships says 109 times that a true Muslim must murder all of those they cannot convert? Can you imagine America selecting a president whose first act as a candidate was to seal his private records so that we could never even be sure he was an American citizen?

    Or that in the year 2018 while fighting Islamic terrorists around the world, we would elect Muslims to Congress where they have access to our most secret data? Muslims whose whole belief system revolves around their killing non-believers of their faith? Remember Washington’s words:

    When a people shall have become incapable of governing themselves and fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what Quarter he comes.

    ____________ George Washington

    DEFINING TERMS RE THE ERA:

    This is about History where there are a lot of

    DATES:

    If some dates are given as Old Style v. New Style, blame it on Easter.

    A year is exactly 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 and a fraction seconds long, or 365.242190 days long. A much too sloppy number for making calendars that place fixed events on fixed dates every year. You see, between the longest day of the year in summer and the shortest day of the year in winter, there are two days of exactly the same length known as the spring and autumnal equinoxes, and determining the spring equinox is critical for two very different reasons:

    It is used by farmers to determine when to plant crops: As beans are planted X days after the equinox at this latitude, or corn is planted Y days after the equinox at that latitude etc.

    Christians locked the celebration of their most sacred holiday, Easter, into a formula based on the spring equinox. In the year 325 AD, the Council of Nicaea declared that Easter would be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first Full Moon occurring on or after the March equinox. But getting the spring equinox to fall on a constant date requires the calendar to consider the tiny extra fraction of a day in each and every year and that’s both tricky, and what these paragraphs are about.

    46 BC: Julius Caesar replaced the Roman’s lunar-based calendar with a more accurate solar based one. And, like its predecessor, it consisted of 12 months beginning on January 1st and ending on December 31st.

    4 AD: 50 years after acceptance of the Julian Calendar, the Emperor Augustus implemented the leap year concept by adding a leap day every four years. And, while stunningly accurate for its time, it was just a tiny bit overly generous in allotting those leap days meaning that every 128 years, an extra day crept into the calendar such that, by the middle of the 16th century, the spring equinox had crept forward 14 days and the Holy Roman Catholic Church decided it was time to fix the Julian calendar.

    HOW DID THEY KNOW THEIR CALENDAR WAS OFF?

    European cathedrals were built with a perfectly aligned north / south line etched into their floors. Then a tiny hole in exact alignment with that north / south floor line was drilled in their south wall allowing a beam of sunlight

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