4.2 America Was Founded On Two Rivers part 2

“There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,” he said. “Repeat it if you please.”

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Repeated Winston obediently.

“Who controls the present controls the past,” said O’Brien nodding his head with a slow approval. “Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?”

***     ***     ***     *** 

“…I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place of solid objects, where the past is still happening?”

“No.”

“Then where does the past exist, if at all?”

“In records. And –––?

“In the mind. In human memories.”

“In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?”

George Orwell,1984

The Patriotic Myth fills American classrooms. The questions are: “Who is selling it and why?”

The history of American liberties is complicated. Rather than explain that history, the “1776 Report” and “Project 2025” craft a simplistic, incomplete story to justify the political and economic inequality currently surrounding us. As wonderful as Ken Burn’s “The Civil War” is, it overwhelmingly focused on the Patriotic Revolutionary War (1775-1783). It focused on the battles and leaders. The American Revolution, the Great American Experiment began years before the War. The Revolution grew from the writings of Locke, Rousseau, and other political philosophers. The Revolution and War struggled with ideas of independence, freedom, and limits of government. Their histories still struggle.

What, exactly, were they rebelling against? We look back to explain history using modern understandings. We look back to verify what we have been told is there, and told what to accept that it means. Told by whom? “The 1776 Report” and “Project 2025”. Why do they want their version of the story in the classrooms?

Enlightenment appeared in 1660 and Burke invented modern conservatism in 1790. In 1774, before Lexington, 25% of men were Loyalists, 25% were Patriots, and 50% disinterested. So what daily concerns inspired Colonial thought? What inspired the Revolution and enlisted common folk in the War?

The Stamp Act, tea taxes, and political representation provided justifications, but not pressing reasons for 75% of the population. Wealthy Patriots wanted independence from British rule. That would free them, for example, from the Royal Proclamation of 1763 prohibiting colonists from settling in indigenous lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. Wealthy, slave holding, tobacco and cotton growers wanted that land to replace the fields their cash crops had depleted.

The distinction between the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War is in what they wanted. Conservative political philosophy did not exist. Patriots wanted a new ruler, not a new system of government. Hobbes accepted Filmer’s defense of an absolute monarch. They disagreed on whether God or the people put the monarch on the throne. The founding Fathers accepted aristocracy’s right to rule (the Great Chain of Being) they just saw themselves as the “natural aristocracy”.

Patriots had a problem: there were not enough of them for a war for independence from British rule. Where Patriots read Locke or Plato, too few commoners could read. Locke didn’t inspire the common man. Nor could commoners see how Patriots cherrypicked their ideas. What, then, could entice commoners to enter eight years of death and suffering just to trade one master for another?

Not a new king or the Constitutions of Carolina.

The liberation of the Patriots from British rule was an outcome. The common man had a simpler goal, one that conflicted with the Patriots’ idea of liberation. The common man fought for personal freedom.

Thomas Pain’s Common Sense attacked monarch and aristocrat. Britain and King George III were the situational targets, but Common Sense attacked rule by class interests. He began, like Locke, writing “Mankind being originally equals in the order of creations, the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance.” Then he identifies two ancient tyrannies.

First. The remains of monarchical tyranny in the person of the king.

Secondly. The remains of aristocratical tyranny in the person of the peers.

He continued (retaining the misogyny of “men”) to criticize rule over others by wealth or status.

For all men being originally equals, no ONE by BIRTH could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever, and though himself might deserve SOME decent degree of honors of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far to unworthy to inherit them.

As though writing for today he continued:

Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected for the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.

How do we show that the Patriot’s War for independence was separate from the commoner’s Revolution for individual freedom? We examine what the Founders did with their victory? We can examine every choice they made. Debating Original Intent, however, is suspect because we debate using modern sensibilities, and, 1984, the record Project 2025 would have us find find is equal parts myth, justification, and rationalization. Regardless of their intent, when we know Founders’ knowledge was simply wrong, it is absurd to accept their conclusions and perpetuate their error because it was their original (sin) intent.

Once the Founderd were in power and could create a new government, what did they do? Here are three lines from an 1814 poem. It introduces the next post distinguishing independence and freedom.

Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave

From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,

Recognize it?