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Title: The Founding Fathers' Economic Interests
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URL Source: http://theformofmoney.com.blogharbo ... rchives/2008/2/17/3530057.html
Published: Aug 22, 2009
Author: Charles A. Beard
Post Date: 2009-08-22 15:47:06 by AllTheKings'HorsesWontDoIt
Keywords: None
Views: 134
Comments: 3
The Founding Fathers' Economic Interests Constitution Series [photo at link] Propertied men who dressed well in wigs and petticoats who had a substantial economic interest in the drafting of the constitution. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles A. Beard, 1913, Edited Excerpts Having shown that four groups of property holders were adversely affected by the government under the Articles of Confederation, and that economic motives were behind the movement for a reconstruction of the system, it is now necessary to inquire whether the members of the Convention which drafted the Constitution represented their own property affiliations. In other words, did the men who formulated the fundamental law of the land possess the kinds of property which immediately and directly increased in value by the results of their labors at Philadelphia? Did they have money at interest? Did they own public securities? Did they hold western lands for appreciation? Were they interested in shipping and manufacturing? George Washington, of Virginia, was probably the richest man in the United States in his time. He possessed, in addition to his great estate on the Potomac, a large amount of fluid capital which he judiciously invested in western lands, from which he could reasonably expect a large appreciation with the establishment of stable government and the advance of the frontier. Washington was also a considerable money lender. If any one in the country had a just reason for being disgusted with the Confederation it was Washington. He had given the best years of life to the Revolutionary cause, and had refused all remuneration for his great services. A survey of the economic interests of the members of the Convention presents certain conclusions: A majority of the members were lawyers by profession. Most of the members came from towns, on or near the coast. Not one member represented in his immediate personal economic interests the small farming or mechanic classes. Public security interests were extensively represented in the Convention Investment in lands for speculation was represented by at least fourteen members. Money loaned at interest was represented by at least twenty-four members. Mercantile, manufacturing, and shipping lines were represented by at least eleven members. Slave-holders were represented by at least fifteen members. The overwhelming majority of the members were immediately, directly, and personally interested in the outcome of their labors at Philadelphia, and were economic beneficiaries from the adoption of the Constitution. It cannot be said that the members of the Convention were “disinterested.” On the contrary, we are forced to accept the profoundly significant conclusion that they knew through their personal experiences in economic affairs the precise results which the new government that they were setting up was designed to attain. A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, 1980 When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support. Poster Comment: Ezekiel 17:7-10/Matthew 15:13.
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YouTube - The U.S. Constitution Does Not Apply to You Short segment from Vyzygoth's 11-05-2007 interview with the Informer who opted out of the IRS system by petitioning the Vatican.Check out Vyzygoth's website. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG_JfjQbJaA excerpt: "...Pastor Chuck Baldwin says Christians should support the Constitutional government....Really?....Why should Christians support the BYLAWS OF A PRIVATE CORPORATION?....The Constitution deceived Christians who are supposed to HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE THEM, and THAT CONSTITUTION IS A GOD.....When the founding fathers, the elites, met in Philadelphia, and people of the states saw the Articles of Confederation were going to get hurled and they were going to get a "constitution", they knew immediately they were going to slip back into monarchical rule...."
"...as long as there..remain active enemies of the Christian church, we may hope to become Master of the World...the future Jewish King will never reign in the world before Christianity is overthrown - B'nai B'rith speech http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/luther.htm / http://bible.cc/psalms/83-4.htm
Never believe a leftist on anythng.
Whiskey Rebellion - Hamilton Pushes the Whiskey Tax by mammon on Sun 01 Jun 2008 The Whiskey Rebellion Series Hamilton’s goal for the domestic debt remained making reliable payments to creditors and inspiring confidence in federal bonds as articles of investment and trade. Funding the debt would spring-feed a pool of capital, from which the federal government could draw and draw again, in nurturing a growing nation. Wealth would be concentrated in the hands of moneyed investors. Their ambitions would fund the nation’s ambitions. In January of 1790, Hamilton filed his proposed plan, the Report on Public Credit. The report urged a three-part program: paying interest on, rather than paying off or voiding, the federal domestic debt; hugely expanding that debt by absorbing all the states’ debts; and raising revenues for interest payments on the expanded debt by adding to the customs laws new duties on imported wine and spirits, and imposing an excise tax on domestically distilled spirits. The product Hamilton proposed to tax, distilled spirits, was not, he said, a necessity but a luxury item consumed by those who could afford to pay the tax. Throughout debate, his allies had invited the House to see a whiskey tax as a public-health effort. Hamilton presented a letter for the Philadelphia College of Physicians, who said that domestic distilled spirits, the cheap drink of the laboring classes, had become a ravaging plague requiring immediate treatment. It was easy to see a federal excise tax on whiskey as an innocuous luxury tax, easily passed on by distillers to drinkers, surely nothing to tar and feather anyone over. This law would be a good thing for the country, Hamilton told Congress, because it made collection of public revenue dependent not on the goodwill of the taxed, as state revenue laws always had, but on the vigilance of federal officers. The people’s movement had always made itself arbiter of whether taxes could be collected. States hadn’t been lazy, Hamilton said, or weak; they’d been scared. Federal officers, he promised, wouldn’t be. This tax would be collected everywhere. The means to use force existed. March of 1791, the Whiskey Tax became law. The tax redistributed wealth by working itself deeply into rural people’s peculiar economic relationship with whiskey. Many of Hamilton’s congressional opponents wouldn’t have understood that relationship. Hamilton did. Alexander Hamilton knew that in getting the act passed was a very smart bomb on a target he’d been softening for years. The secretary of treasury was celebrating a victory, which some at the Forks had every intention of cutting short, in a long struggle over nothing les than the power of money in the lives of the American people. Passed by the first Congress of the United States in March 1791 heralded the first federal tax on an American product. theformofmoney.blogharbor...archives/2008/6/1/3711811 ========================= The Whiskey Rebellion Series Whiskey and the Frontier Whiskey came in vogue early in the eighteenth century with the influx of Scots-Irish settlers, who brought expertise in domestic distilling. The Scots-Irish were notably tough descendants of Protestant Scots peasantry, who had resettled in Ulster and then been forced, by exorbitant rents and English taxes, to migrate to North America. By the time of the revolution, domestic whiskey was gaining popularity and would replace rum as the country’s drink. Eighteenth-century Americans distilled whiskey just as their ancestors had, using a pot still. The good product was clear. Inhaling it would water the eyes and rustle nose hairs. Swallowed, it made a hard impact, then a glowing heat; in the end, the feeling was surprisingly smooth, and soon after recovery, another shot might seem to be in order. Barrel storage darkened the drink and brought out redolent grain, woodsmoke, sugar. Drunken raw or aging, whiskey abruptly makes the drinker and the world different. Many small farmers distilled seasonally. Whiskey was consumed by men, women, and children at all times of the day and every sort of gathering muster, church, election, work, dance, and fight. Often a community distiller kept pot stills going through the harvest, and farmers brought in their grain and took away the whiskey, paying the distiller in a portion of product. The best whiskey was known to come from the Forks of the Ohio, whose “Monongahela rye” possessed consistent strength and purity. The region achieved brand recognition. Its whiskey was known by name in Philadelphia and in New Orleans. More than a fourth of the stills in America were located at the Forks of the Ohio. Whiskey became currency in places where coin wasn’t seen. Barter paralyzed local economies, but whiskey was a true medium, always exchangeable for cash somewhere down the line, thus maintaining value against metal. A liquid commodity both literally and figuratively, the drink democratized local economies, offering even tenants and sharecroppers laborers a benefit. Tenants often wanted to pay rent, and laborers often got paid, in a portion of the grain they harvested. Community stills transformed, for a cut, such cumbersome forms of payment into something fungible. And while landlords often refused in-kind crops, or demanded them in extravagant quantities, they’d take whiskey for rent. theformofmoney.blogharbor...ves/2008/6/3/3711813.html ================================== Whiskey Rebellion - George Washington - Land Speculator by mammon on Sun 08 Jun 2008 The Whiskey Rebellion Series Washington felt he knew the Forks well. He’d been getting immensely frustrated with the major project of his life, western land speculation. In five decades, that speculation had given him a total of sixty thousand acres across the Appalachians. He’d deployed land scouts with instructions to break and get around laws limiting tract size. He’d threatened and bullied people who were eyeballing plots to which, by virtue of having eyeballed them first, he claimed title. When the royal proclamation of 1763 prohibited land purchases west of the mountains, he told his agent to buy there anyway. The War of Independence legitimized his titles by overturning royal injunctions. After the revolution, he showed no patience for illegal possession: he spent much energy bringing actions against squatters, disdaining their idea that title – or at least affordable rents – should be offered to those willing to live on and improve the land. He needed full rent. He had a constant need for cash. Making Mount Vernon pay for itself was always a problem, and his late mother had been a carping, ungrateful drain on his slim cash resources. He’d hoped to gain solvency through collections of western rents and then – when canals and roads were supported by the government and built by his own company, when Indians were suppressed by the United States Army, when regional government became what he called well toned – make a fortune by selling those lands. But his hopes for the west were growing dreary, his patience thin. The land was still squatted on; rents were uncollected The absence of cash in the west was well known to Washington: he had to accept grain and other barter as rent, which always sold, through his agents in the west, for less than he knew it was worth. The whole problem was becoming encapsulated for Washington in the western people’s resistance to the tax law, which hadn’t been enforced anywhere over the mountains, from Kentucky to the Northwest Territory. Failure to collect a national tax imposed an embarrassing limit on the national reach. Tax resistance weakened big creditors’ confidence in the financial stability of the United States, which had promised to pay bondholders interest derived from excise revenues. To make up the shortfall, Hamilton had been forced to propose new federal taxes: excises on snuff, sugar, and carriages, as well as stamp taxes and new import duties. Because such taxes shifted burdens back to eastern merchants and creditors, now even federalists were worried about excessive taxation. The western land bubble would soon burst for everybody if lands appeared not to be under effective control of the United States. theformofmoney.blogharbor...ves/2008/6/8/3724612.html ======================== Whiskey Rebellion - The Militia Act by mammon on Tue 10 Jun 2008 The Whiskey Rebellion Series The Militia Law Act, as well as certain parts of the Constitution itself, had been constructed for the very purpose of allowing troops to police citizens. The militia could “enforce the law,” “cause the laws to be duly executed,” and “suppress combinations,” all of which must mean, Hamilton said, that the militia can also break up meetings and assemblies that exist simply for the purpose of noncompliance with the law, when such meetings are supported by violence that baffles ordinary law enforcement. The federal commissioners threatened the entry of troops into the Forks area and implied strongly that military incursion could be avoided it total submission were demonstrated by all people in the region. Repeal of the excise tax law was out of the question. Members of the entire Parkinson’s Ferry committee of sixty must unanimously declare their determination to submit to the laws of the United States and to refrain from obstructing the operation of the excise law. Two-fifths of the Parkinson’s Ferry committee preferred civil war. The fate of males eighteen and older would depend on their signing, on September 11, and not a day later, an oath of submission to federal law. Those who signed on time, did not resist the troops in any way, and complied with the law in the future could count on an amnesty for past crimes. Anyone else, regardless of anything he’d done or not done during the insurgency, would be fair game for arrest by the troops. The federal marshal for Pennsylvania was sent to serve summons to the people on the list. The writs required defendants to appear in court in August; courts were closed then. The rebels moved instantly to shut down all tax offices and punish not only officials but also civilian collaborators. Under the Militia Act, the president of the United States was now empowered to call out an army against them. And with Congress in recess, the president would be empowered by the new militia law to call out the largest possible force on his own discretion. Hamilton and Knox were arguing for moving immediately, with an overwhelming force of at least twelve thousand men, bigger than any American army to date, more than had beaten the British at Yorktown. The question of delay was somewhat academic anyway: Troops would need time to mobilize. Negotiations would meanwhile fail, revealing rebels as intractable. Eastern newspapers railed against the insurgency; the officer classes in city militias were gung ho to march for glory. The seaboard cities filled with patriotic fervor, expressed hatred for the rebels, and wondered why the president hadn’t already moved against them. The troops could now move with impunity. Hamilton began ordering arms and supplies and sending work to Henry Lee of Virginia, who would serve under Washington as commander of the whole force. Troops from New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia began marching west. On September 30, Washington and Hamilton stepped into a presidential coach and rode together down Market Street, leaving Philadelphia to join the army at Carlisle. Washington had always excelled at military administration, and Hamilton was enjoying a new one as secretary of war. theformofmoney.blogharbor...rchives/2008/6/10/3724618 ======================= The Whiskey Rebellion by William Hodgeland, 2006, Edited Excerpts That struggle had financial, political, and spiritual aspects. In the most literal sense it was about paying the revolution’s debt. The whiskey rebels weren't against paying taxes. They were against what they called unequal taxation, which redistributed wealth to a few holders of federal bonds and kept small farms and businesses commercially paralyzed. Farmers and artisans, facing daily anxiety over debt foreclosure and tax imprisonment, feared becoming landless laborers, their businesses bought cheaply by the very men in whose mills and factories they would then be forced to toil. They saw resisting the whiskey tax as a last, desperate hope for justice in a decades-long fight over economic inequality. Alexander Hamilton and his allies, whose dreams had long been obstructed by ordinary people’s tactics for influencing public finance policy, saw enforcing the whiskey tax as a way of resolving that fight in favor of a moneyed class with the power to spur industrial progress. The national crisis came to be known as the Whiskey Rebellion, a scene of climatic moments in the lives of famous founders like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton began in the fall of 1791, when gangs on the western frontier started attacking collectors of the first federal tax on an American product, hard liquor. Colonial Americans had forged an alliance condemning the Stamp Act. With independence won, a U.S. Congress’s imposing the hated excise tax would seem the ultimate in ideological betrayal. The Whiskey Rebellion Series The People's Movement Revolutionary War Debt Manipulating a Mutinous Army Constitution Ratified Hamilton Pushes the Whiskey Tax Whiskey and the Frontier Mechanics of the Whiskey Tax Mingo Creek Association George Washington – Land Speculator The Militia Act The Army – Officers and Draftees The Dreadful Night Rebellion Defeated theformofmoney.blogharbor...rchives/2008/5/25/3711794 ====================================== The Militia Act of 1792, ..Second Congress, Session I. Chapter XXVIII Passed May 2, 1792, providing for the authority of the President to call out the Militia http://www.constitution.org/mil/mil_act_1792.htm ".... Sec. 2. And be it further enacted, That whenever the laws of the United States shall be opposed or the execution thereof obstructed, in any state, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by this act, the same being notified to the President of the United States, by an associate justice or the district judge, it shall be lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia of such state to suppress such combinations, and to cause the laws to be duly executed. And if the militia of a state, where such combinations may happen, shall refuse, or be insufficient to suppress the same, it shall be lawful for the President, if the legislature of the United States be not in session, to call forth and employ such numbers of the militia of any other state or states most convenient thereto, as may be necessary, and the use of militia, so to be called forth, may be continued, if necessary, until the expiration of thirty days after the commencement of the ensuing session. Sec. 3. Provided always, and be it further enacted, That whenever it may be necessary, in the judgment of the President, to use the military force hereby directed to be called forth, the President shall forthwith, and previous thereto, by proclamation, command such insurgents to disperse, and retire peaceably to their respective abodes, within a limited time...... The Militia Act of 1792, Passed May 8, 1792, providing federal standards for the organization of the Militia. An ACT more effectually to provide for the National Defence, by establishing an Uniform Militia throughout the United States. I. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia, by the Captain or Commanding Officer of the company, within whose bounds such citizen shall reside, and that within twelve months after the passing of this Act. And it shall at all time hereafter be the duty of every such Captain or Commanding Officer of a company, to enroll every such citizen as aforesaid, and also those who shall, from time to time, arrive at the age of 18 years, or being at the age of 18 years, and under the age of 45 years (except as before excepted) shall come to reside within his bounds; and shall without delay notify such citizen of the said enrollment, by the proper non-commissioned Officer of the company, by whom such notice may be proved. That every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack. That the commissioned Officers shall severally be armed with a sword or hanger, and espontoon; and that from and after five years from the passing of this Act, all muskets from arming the militia as is herein required, shall be of bores sufficient for balls of the eighteenth part of a pound; and every citizen so enrolled, and providing himself with the arms, ammunition and accoutrements, required as aforesaid, shall hold the same exempted from all suits, distresses, executions or sales, for debt or for the payment of taxes. II. And be it further enacted, That the Vice-President of the United States, the Officers, judicial and executives, of the government of the United States; the members of both houses of Congress, and their respective officers; all custom house officers, with the clerks; all post officers, and stage-drivers who are employed in the care and conveyance of the mail of the post office of the United States; all Ferrymen employed at any ferry on the post road; all inspectors of exports; all pilots, all mariners actually employed in the sea service of any citizen or merchant within the United States; and all persons who now are or may be hereafter exempted by the laws of the respective states, shall be and are hereby exempted from militia duty, notwithstanding their being above the age of eighteen and under the age of forty-five years......." =================== We didn't dump the king...we just began calling him "Mr. President".
"...as long as there..remain active enemies of the Christian church, we may hope to become Master of the World...the future Jewish King will never reign in the world before Christianity is overthrown - B'nai B'rith speech http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/luther.htm / http://bible.cc/psalms/83-4.htm
Ezekiel 17:7-10/Matthew 15:13.
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There's no place better thanTurtle Island.
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(Edited)
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