Editor’s Note: Samuel Adams, American Patriot and Revolutionary Leader, was born on September 27, 1722. In celebration of his birth, the following are excerpts from one of his most famous speeches – in support of Independence on August 1, 1776.

Men who content themselves with the semblance of truth, and a display of words, talk much of our obligations to Great Britain for protection! Let us not be so amused with words: the extension of her commerce was her object. When she defended our coasts, she fought for her customers, and convoyed our ships loaded with wealth, which we had acquired for her by our industry. She has treated us as beasts of burden.

Let us also inquire against whom she has protected us? Against her own enemies with whom we had no quarrel, or only on her account, and against whom we always readily exerted our wealth and strength when they were required.

But what purpose can arguments of this kind answer? Did the protection we received annul our rights, and lay us under an obligation of being miserable?

Who among you would claim authority to make your child a slave because you had nourished him in his infancy?

It is a strange species of generosity which requires a return infinitely more valuable than anything it could have bestowed: that demands as a reward for a defense of our property, a surrender of those inestimable privileges, to the arbitrary will of vindictive tyrants.

Courage, then, my countrymen! Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth, for civil and religious liberty?

From the day on which an accommodation takes place between England and America, on any other terms than as independent States, I shall date the ruin of this country.

When the spirit of liberty which now animates our hearts and gives success to our arms is extinct, our numbers will accelerate our ruin, and render us easier victims to tyranny.

If we love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude, than the animating contest of freedom—go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

To unite the supremacy of Great Britain and the liberty of America, is utterly impossible. So vast a continent and of such a distance from the seat of empire will every day grow more unmanageable. The motion of so unwieldy a body cannot be directed with any dispatch and uniformity, without committing to the Parliament of Great Britain powers inconsistent with our freedom. The authority and force which would be absolutely necessary for the preservation of the peace and good order of this continent, would put all our valuable rights within the reach of that nation.

As the administration of government requires firmer and more numerous supports in proportion to its extent, the burdens imposed on us would be excessive, and we should have the melancholy prospect of their increasing on our posterity.

If our posterity retain any spark of patriotism, they can never tamely submit to such burdens.

Other nations have received their laws from conquerors: some are indebted for a constitution to the sufferings of their ancestors through revolving centuries. The people of this country, alone, have formally and deliberately chosen a Government for themselves, and with open and uninfluenced consent, bound themselves into a social compact.

Thus by the beneficence of Providence, we shall behold our empire arising, founded on justice and the voluntary consent of the people, and giving full scope to the exercise of those faculties and rights which most ennoble our species.

Our Union is now complete; our constitution composed, established, and approved. You are now the guardians of your own liberties. We may justly address you, as the Decemviri did the Romans, and say— ”Nothing that we propose can pass into a law without your consent. Be yourselves, O Americans, the authors of those laws on which your happiness depends.”

If I have a wish dearer to my soul, than that my ashes may be mingled with those of a Warren and Montgomery—it is—that these American States may never cease to be free and independent!

The American Revolution was waged against a highly centralized, nationalistic governmental tyranny run by a king, namely, the British Empire. The king enriched himself and his regime through the economic institution of mercantilism, defined by Murray Rothbard as “a system of statism which employed economic fallacy to build up a structure of imperial state power, as well as special subsidy and monopolistic privilege to individuals or groups favored by the state.” This system impoverished the average Englishman but was a perpetual source of power and riches for the king and his political allies. That is why the system lasted so long (at least two centuries) despite the fact that it was so harmful to the average citizen.

After the Seven Years War with France the king of England needed to pay off his war debts, so he stepped up the application of the corrupt mercantilist system to the American colonists. He did so with numerous taxes and interferences with international trade that benefited British businesses and the British state while treating the colonists like tax serfs. The “train of abuses” delineated in the Declaration of Independence were mostly abuses of the colonists for the purpose of plundering them with the British mercantilist system.

There was always a group of men in American politics who were not opposed to the evil mercantilist system in principle. They recognized it as a wonderful system for accumulating power and wealth as long as they could be in charge of it. Being victimized by it was another matter. These men, led by Alexander Hamilton and his fellow Federalists, strived to implement an American version of British mercantilism as soon as the Revolution was over. In doing so they were traitors to the American Revolution and the worst kind of corrupt, power-seeking political scoundrels.

America’s would-be economic dictators strived mightily to “justify” their corrupt scheme by rewriting the history of the American founding. They made the bizarre argument that, having just fought a revolution against a highly centralized tyranny, the founders at the constitutional convention supposedly embraced the same kind of tyranny in the form of a highly centralized or national government.

The Virginia statesman John Taylor of Caroline smoked out these political scoundrels in an 1823 book entitled New Views of the Constitution of the United States (reprinted in 2005 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd, of Union, New Jersey). Making extensive use of the recently published Secret Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention by Robert Yates, who attended the constitutional convention, Taylor shredded the false notions of “nationalists” like Hamilton (and later, Clay and Lincoln).

Focusing on Hamilton as the chief culprit, Taylor explained how the “nationalists” did try at the constitutional convention to create a completely centralized government, but failed. For example, he quotes Hamilton himself at the convention as proposing a form of government such that “All laws of the particular states, contrary to the constitution or laws of the United States [government], to be utterly void. And the better to prevent such laws being passed, the governor . . . of each state shall be appointed by the general government, and shall have a negative upon the laws about to be passed in the state of which he is governor.”

Hamilton’s scheme was rejected, of course, and Taylor correctly commented that “this project comprised a national government, nearly conforming to that of England . . .” (p. 27). “By Colonel Hamilton’s project, the states were fairly and openly to be restored to the rank of provinces, and to be made as dependent upon a supreme national government, as they had been upon a supreme British government” (p. 28). Moreover, under Hamilton’s scheme “A power in the supreme federal court to declare all state laws and judgments void” would be “a supremacy exactly the same with that exercised by the British king and his council over the same provincial departments” (p. 28). Thankfully, Hamilton’s plan was rejected.

Quoting Yates’s journal, Taylor also noted that on June 25, 1787 “it was proposed and seconded to erase the word national, and substitute the words United States [in the plural] in the fourth resolution, which passed in the affirmative” (p. 29). “Thus,” Taylor wrote, “we see an opinion expressed at the convention, that the phrase “United States” did not mean ‘a consolidated American people or nation,’ and all the inferences in favour of a national government . . . are overthrown” (p. 29).

Taylor understood that the reason why Hamilton and other Federalists wanted a centralized or consolidated government was that states’ rights would forever stand in the way of their accumulation of power and wealth through the mercantilist system that they hoped to impose on America. Therefore, states’ rights must be crushed, in the eyes of Hamilton and his followers (despite occasional lip service paid to the notion of states’ rights).

Relying again on Yates’s notes, Taylor wrote of how the Hamiltonians proposed to empower the Congress to engage in a variety of economic interventions, including “the promotion of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures” (p. 29). A “monopoly in currency” by the central government was another of Hamilton’s schemes that alarmed the senator from Virginia. This was their plan for bringing British mercantilism to America: First, consolidate political power in the central government and destroy any semblance of divided sovereignty; then, use that power to replicate the mercantilist British monarchy hidden behind the rhetorical fog of American “democracy.” As Taylor described it, it was “Monarchy, its hand-maiden consolidation, and its other hand-maid, ambition, all dressed in popular disguises . . .” (p. 45). And, “National splendor, national strength, and a national government, were the arguments they [the Hamiltonians] used; but personal considerations, suggested by the prominence of their stations, or the hopes suggested by their talents, really forged their opinions” (p. 46). The “pretended national prosperity, was only a pretext of ambition and monopoly . . . intended to feed avarice, gratify ambition, and make one portion of the nation tributary to another” (p. 46).

But the nationalists failed in their endeavor; the Constitution created a confederacy of states that delegated only a few enumerated powers to the central government, which was to act as their agent, and for their benefit. All other powers were reserved to the people or the states. It was a federal, not a “national” government. Subsequently, “Colonel Hamilton . . . seems to have quitted the convention in despair, soon after the failure of his project” (p. 32).

Yates’s notes on the convention prove definitively that “the whole people” never had anything whatsoever to do with the ratification of the Constitution, which was done by state conventions. There was never any national election that created a national government. As his journal states, quoted by Taylor (p. 32): “that the constitution was transmitted to Congress, and by it to the state legislatures; that these legislatures, by separate laws, appointed state conventions for the consideration of the constitution; and that it was ratified by the delegates of the people of each state.”

Thus, “every step in its progress,” writes Taylor, “from beginning to end, defines [the Constitution] to be a federal and not a national act. . . . It was ratified by each state, because each state was sovereign and independent” (p. 32, emphasis added). Furthermore, “no negative upon state laws was delegated to the federal government, or any department thereof, and the absence of such a power had been enforced by its rejection.”

What motivated Taylor to write New Views of the Constitution of the United States was the alarming fact that, by the 1820s, the men in American politics who still dreamed of reigning over a mercantilist empire began mis-educating the public about the true history of the founding. They did so by repeating Hamilton’s arguments, which were so thoroughly rejected by the convention. As Taylor described it, the public was being told that “the devil, thus repeatedly exorcized, still remains in the church” (p. 36). The “devil,” of course, was the notion that the states were not sovereign over the central government that they had created as their agent. The truth, as Taylor explained, was that “by the constitution, the states may take away all the powers of the federal government, whilst that government is prohibited from taking away a single power reserved to the states” (p. 36).

It was assumed that state sovereignty included a right of secession from the constitutional compact. “In the creation of the federal government, the states exercised the highest act of sovereignty, and they may, if they please, repeat the proof of their sovereignty, by its annihilation” (p. 37). The states “could never have conceived that they had, by their union, relinquished their sovereignties; created a supreme negative power over their laws; or established a national government . . .” (p. 37). In fact, according to Yates’s journal, the states were described at the convention as essentially being independent nations. So much so that the journal stated: “It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the state governments will, in all possible contingencies, afford complete security against invasions of the publick liberty by the national authority” (Taylor, p. 70, emphasis added).

Yates’s journal further states: “Each state, in ratifying the constitution, is considered to be a sovereign body independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new constitution will be a federal and not a national constitution” (Taylor, p. 83). This means that any one state would have the right to secede from the constitutional compact. It would have been considered an absurdity to argue that the right of secession only existed by the permission of other states (which was Lincoln’s argument).

But why all the secrecy? Why did the framers of the constitution take an oath not to reveal to the public what they were up to until after they were all dead? (Madison’s notes were not published until after his death). In a recent LRC article entitled “The Most Successful Fraud in American History” Gary North suggested that “the perpetrators [of any fraud] must be bound by an oath of non-disclosure, which all of them keep until they die, yet which leaves no trail of paper for historians to discuss.” John Taylor would agree. It was all kept secret so that “the vindicators of a federal construction of the constitution are deprived of a great mass of light, and the consolidating school have gotten rid of a great mass of detection” (p. 41). Thus, “it was necessary to keep the people in the dark” so that “the people should be worked as puppets” (p. 41).

Taylor also dissects and ridicules the “paradoxical arguments” of the Hamiltonians of his day (who would soon form the Whig Party of Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln). The advocates of “consolidated sovereignties,” Taylor noted, contend that

The greater the [government] revenue the richer are the people; that frugality in the government is an evil; in the people a good; that local partialities are blessings; that monopolies and exclusive privileges are general welfare; that a division of sovereignty will raise up a class of wicked, intriguing, self-interested politicians in the states; and that human nature will be cleansed of these propensities by a sovereignty consolidated in one government.

Taylor was being excessively polite when he labeled these absurdities as merely “paradoxical.”

Taylor also provides a clear explanation of the so-called “supremacy clause” of the Constitution, which many contemporary commentators (especially Lincoln worshipping neocons) insist gives the federal government the power to do whatever it wants to the citizens of the states. The truth is that the language in the Constitution about it being “the supreme law of the land” only applies to the seventeen specific powers enumerated to the central government in Article I, Section 8. Nothing more. The states remain the ultimate sovereigns by the Constitution. “The constitutional laws of the states are equally supreme with those of the federal government” (p. 78).

John Taylor issued his warning that “the devil is in the church” in 1823. In the coming years the new generation of “consolidationists,” led by the likes of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, were hard at work repeating Hamilton’s “paradoxical” arguments in the apparent belief that a gullible public would come to believe such arguments if they are repeated enough. They never achieved much success, however, thanks to the strength of the Jeffersonian, states’ rights tradition in America, which was the nation’s true political tradition.

The Constitution was essentially a failed attempt to overthrow the decentralized, federalist system that was created by America’s first Constitution, the Articles of Confederation. The delegates to the constitutional convention were only instructed to revise the Articles, not replace them. The first thing they did was to ignore the instructions they were given and write an entirely new constitution. But as Yates’s journal and Taylor’s book reveal, they failed. They only managed to get the citizens of the states to delegate a few enumerated powers to the central government, not to create a national government. They succeeded in replacing the Articles, but not with their ideal, monopolistic system.

It would require a brutal, uncompromising dictator to overthrow the federal system and adopt a British-style consolidated, mercantilist empire. As Taylor wrote (p. 237): “It seems to be nature’s law, that every species of concentrated sovereignty over extensive territories, whether monarchical, aristocratical, democratical, or mixed, must be despotick. In no case has a concentrated power over great territories been sustained, except by mercenary armies; and whenever power is thus sustained, despotism is the consequence.” Furthermore, “the ignorance and partiality of a concentrated form of government, can only be enforced by armies; and the peculiar ability of the states to resist, promises that resistance would be violent; so that a national government must be either precarious or despotick” (p. 238).

Yates’s notes quote James Madison as warning at the constitutional convention that “the great danger to our federal government, is the great northern and southern interests of the continent being opposed to each other” (Taylor, p. 248). Taylor quotes Madison to predict the War for Southern Independence, which would occur almost four decades later. If northern, southern, or western interests are in sharp conflict, he wrote, and “if either can acquire local advantages from a national supremacy, it will aggravate the geographical danger apprehended by a Mr. Madison, a perpetual warfare of intrigues will ensue, and a dissolution of the union will result” (p. 249).

This is where the role of the brutal, uncompromising dictator enters into American political history. The crusade for a consolidated, monopolistic government began as soon as the Revolution ended. Some seventy-five years later Taylor’s worst fear was realized: a consolidated, mercantilist empire was finally cemented into place, and it did require “a mercenary army” to succeed. Lincoln’s army included literally hundreds of thousands of conscripts and European mercenaries who finally snuffed out the Jeffersonian, federalist system of states’ rights with the bloodiest war in human history up to that point.

The New England Yankees and their Midwestern brethren continued to rewrite history in the ensuing decades so that books like Robert Yates’s journal of the constitutional convention and John Taylor’s book on the Constitution are virtually unheard of in America. The whitewash of American history has been very thorough indeed.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe andHow Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.

Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com

The most radical experiment in history is the Constitution of the United States of America. Throughout history, people had accepted the commonly held notion that government’s powers over the citizenry were supreme. In 1787, however, for the first time ever, the American people announced to the world that the liberties of the people were supreme and that the powers of government were limited. Governments throughout the world were startled, stunned, and appalled at such an audacious suggestion.

To understand fully the thinking that formed the Constitution, however, it is necessary to go back 11 years — to the Declaration of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776. The revolutionary nature of the thoughts expressed in that document would later be reflected in the Constitution.

Keep in mind that prior to July 4, 1776, there was no United States of America and there were no Americans. The people living in New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, and the other colonies in the New World were Englishmen. The British government was their government, just as the U.S. government today is the government of the American people. These were British citizens living abroad on lands under the jurisdiction of the English crown. In other words, men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Samuel Adams were as British as you and I are American.

Thus, on July 4, 1776, in the eyes of their own government officials, those men were not heroes. By taking up arms against their own government officials and waging war against British soldiers, the Founding Fathers were traitors to their own government. If the revolution had failed, they would have been hanged.

To catch a glimpse of what the revolutionaries faced, imagine today that one-third of the American people, fed up with high taxes, excessive regulations, arbitrary confiscations of property, and unjust killings of citizens, took up arms against their own government and began ambushing and killing U.S. troops. How many federal government officials would view these revolutionaries as heroes? How many would suggest that statues and monuments be built in their honor?

The government would do whatever was necessary to smash the insurrection and the names of the insurrectionists would be remembered, if at all, in shame in every history book in every public school across America. But if the revolutionaries won, the monuments and statues would be erected, and they would go down in history as great heroes.

Not all the British colonists took up arms and tried to kill their own governmental officials. It has been estimated that one-third joined the revolution, one-third sided with their government, and one-third stayed neutral during the war. But the only reason that the Founding Fathers are as revered as they are is that they ultimately won the military battles against the troops of their own government. They are patriots, not traitors, because they were victorious.

The revolutionary nature of what happened on July 4, however, was not the courage that our Founding Fathers displayed in taking on what was arguably the most powerful government on earth. Instead, the real revolution was reflected by the ideas that Jefferson expressed in the Declaration of Independence. It has been said that as far as the colonists were concerned, Jefferson did not express anything new or novel but rather the widely held sentiments of the populace.

The origin of rights

Throughout history, people believed that their rights came from government. The king had the power to conscript them and send them into war to fight for him and his government, even in faraway lands. The king had the power to confiscate their property and holdings. The king had the power to arrest and incarcerate them. Sometimes a king was kind and other times not. But everyone accepted the notion that the king could do with him as he wished. After all, he was the king, and they were his subjects.

In one fell swoop, Jefferson and the English colonists rejected that long-held notion. Jefferson said that rights preexist government and that government was simply a servant whose purpose was the protection of those preexisting rights.

This was a revolutionary notion and not one with which kings and governments would be enamored.

Where do the people’s rights come from? Jefferson said that they come from man’s Creator. In other words, my life was not created by government. It came into existence independent of government. I don’t have to be beholden or thankful to government for the fact that I exist.

As Jefferson pointed out, life is indeed one of these preexisting rights of man. Others include liberty and the pursuit of happiness. By using the word “among,” Jefferson was indicating that man’s fundamental rights were not limited to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” but included others as well. He had taken the phrase from the English philosopher John Locke, who had described “life, liberty, and property” as fundamental, God-given rights.

But what do they mean? They mean that your life is your life. You were born with certain talents, abilities, handicaps, and disabilities. As Roger Williams pointed out many years ago in his remarkable book, You Are Extraordinary, everything about you is different from everybody else. Not just fingeprints. Also hair texture, skin color, voice, personality, face, and figure. Even the shape of your kidneys is different from everyone else’s.

You use your talents as a way to sustain your life. If you are a person with farming abilities, you grow food that you can eat. But if you are a person with singing talents, you don’t grow your food; instead you sing in return for pay and use the proceeds to buy excess food from the farmer.

Thus, liberty entails the right to live your life the way you choose (as long as your conduct is peaceful), the right to use your talents and abilities to engage in enterprise freely (“free enterprise”), the right to engage in mutually beneficial trades with others (“freedom of trade”), and the right to accumulate the fruits of those trades (“property”).

Do kings or other government officials have the right to regulate or control these activities? Under what moral authority? These are fundamental rights that preexist kings or governments. Governmental officials have no more right to regulate or control these activities than they have to control how many children a family is to have.

Why government?

So, why do we need government then? Why not simply do away with kings, princes, princesses, presidents, parliaments, congresses, bureaucracies, and the like? (Stop cheering!) Because as Jefferson points out in the Declaration, governments are necessary to secure the exercise of the fundamental rights of man.

Secure it from what? From violent, anti-social people who would deny other people their rights to live their lives as they choose. In other words, suppose there is a society of peaceful people, all of whom are engaging in free enterprise, entering into trades with one another, and accumulating wealth. Standards of living are slowly increasing for everyone in society. So far, no problems.

But all of a sudden, along comes a person who murders someone and steals his property. How does society protect itself from the murderers, rapists, robbers, trespassers, and other violent people? Government is instituted for the primary purpose of protecting people from those who would initiate force against others.

What happens, however, if government itself becomes more destructive than what the situation would be in the absence of government? In other words, let’s say that in the absence of government, thieves would steal about 10 percent of people’s property and murderers would kill 1 percent of the populace. What happens if a corrupt element takes control over the reins of government and uses governmental force to steal 40 percent of people’s property and kill 2 percent of the populace?

Jefferson provided the answer to this problem in the Declaration of Independence. He said that when this happens, it is the right of people to alter or abolish their government, even if force is necessary, and institute new government designed to protect, not destroy, the preexisting rights of the people.

Here are the exact words that Thomas Jefferson used to express these revolutionary thoughts in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Eleven years later, after the Revolution had been won by the colonists, the revolutionary principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence were the backdrop for the formation of the most radical political experiment in history — the Constitution of the United States of America.

Jacob Hornberger [send him mail] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.