We Err Because We Don’t Really Know Our Own History

I recently watched a short video, over five years old now, by Walter Williams, a Professor at George Mason University. Professor Williams has probably forgotten more real history than most folks will ever know.

            His comments went into the Treaty of Paris in 1783, where Great Britain signed a peace treaty that listed the thirteen states as being thirteen sovereign nations, not one huge “union.”  Most people do not realize this. They have been conditioned by what passes for “history” books today that they think this country originated as one gigantic union. It didn’t! We started out as thirteen sovereign countries.

            And when those sovereign countries ratified the Constitution, in which they made the federal government their agent not their master, something some of us have contended was not the wisest of moves, there were three states, New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia, that had in their ratification ordinances, language that allowed them to secede from this new union if things occurred that were detrimental to the benefit of their states.

            No one spoke out against the secession language in the ratification ordinances of those three states. And that was because the idea of seceding, or leaving the new union of states was not treasonous! Try to wrap your minds around that one fact if you get nothing else out of this article.

            So when the Southern states seceded in 1860-61 they were not committing treason, they were exercising a right that most regarded as sacred up to that point, including very many in the North. Professor Thomas DiLorenzo recently did an article on this that appeared on the Lew Rockwell site and he was right on the money with his observations in that article.

            He noted that the definition of treason consisted of levying war against them, or adhering to their Enemies and he noted that the important words here, the key words, were them and their which tells us, if we stop long enough to think, that the united States were plural, meaning free and independent states “not something called the United States government in Washington, D.C.

            DiLorenzo noted that treason was defined this way as an attempt to make sure that the power of the federal government “would not be used against them by means of a military invasion. Levying war on any of the free and independent states is the ‘only’ definition of treason in the U.S. Constitution.”

            DiLorenzo then observed that “…when Lincoln ordered the first 75,000 man invasion of the Southern states he, and all of his political associates, committed treason as defined by the Constitution.” Lots of Republicans today don’t want to hear that, but they need to. They need to realize the Republican Party was never the conservative bastion they were taught to think it was.

            If you want to learn a bit about the real foundations of the Republican Party you can check two books I have mentioned on numerous occasions–To the Victors go the Myths and Monuments by Arthur R. Thompson and Lincoln’s Marxists by Donnie Kennedy and myself. Both books contain history the Republican Establishment won’t like, but it is history, and you need to be aware of it to truly understand much of what is going on in this country in our day.