Right Minded Online

(The following column first appeared in the Lebanon Democrat on July 1, 2005. It’s a story that’s well worth repeating.)

On July 4, 1776, fifty-six men from each of the original thirteen colonies signed the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration is a relatively brief document that was drafted by Thomas Jefferson. It formally marked the dissolution of ties between the colonies and King George III, and lists twenty-seven separate grievances against the British monarchy.

What about the signers? Most of us know about John Hancock and his famous signature. Some of the signers, such as John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, are still household names in American history. Others are more obscure.

Nine of the signers were immigrants, two were brothers, and two were cousins. One was an orphan. The average age of the signers was 45. Benjamin Franklin was the oldest delegate at 70. The youngest was Thomas Lynch, Jr. of South Carolina at 27.

Eighteen of the signers were merchants or businessmen, fourteen were farmers, and four were doctors. Twenty-two were attorneys — although William Hooper of North Carolina was disbarred when he spoke out against the King of England — and nine were judges. Stephen Hopkins had been the governor of Rhode Island. Forty-two signers had served in their colonial legislatures.

John Witherspoon of New Jersey was the only active clergyman to attend. Almost all the signers were Protestants. Charles Carroll of Maryland was the sole Catholic.

Seven of the signers were educated at Harvard, four at Yale, four at William & Mary, and three at Princeton. Witherspoon was the president of Princeton, and George Wythe was a professor at William & Mary. His students included the Declaration’s drafter, Thomas Jefferson.

Seventeen signers fought in the American Revolution. Thomas Nelson was a colonel in the Second Virginia Regiment, then commanded Virginia military forces at the Battle of Yorktown. William Whipple served with the New Hampshire militia and was a commanding officer at Saratoga. Oliver Wolcott led the Connecticut regiments sent for the defense of New York, and commanded a brigade of militia that took part in the defeat of General John Burgoyne at Saratoga. Caesar Rodney was a major general in the Delaware militia. John Hancock held the same rank in the Massachusetts militia.

The British captured five signers during the war. Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, and Arthur Middleton were captured at the Battle of Charleston in 1780. George Walton was wounded and captured at the Battle of Savannah. Richard Stockton of New Jersey never recovered from his incarceration at the hands of British Loyalists. After his capture, Stockton renounced the revolution and signed an allegiance to King George III, thereby becoming the only signer of the Declaration to betray the cause. He died in 1781.

Thomas McKean of Delaware wrote John Adams that he was “hunted like a fox by the enemy — compelled to remove my family five times in a few months.” Abraham Clark of New Jersey had two of his sons captured by the British during the war.

Eleven signers had their homes and property destroyed. The home of Francis Lewis of New York was destroyed and his wife taken prisoner. John Hart’s farm and mills were also destroyed when the British invaded New Jersey, and his health was irrevocably damaged while fleeing capture. Carter Braxton and Nelson, both of Virginia, lent large sums of their personal fortunes to support the war effort, and were never repaid.

Fifteen of the signers participated in their state constitutional conventions, and six (Roger Sherman, Robert Morris, Franklin, George Clymer, James Wilson, and George Reed) signed the U.S. Constitution.

After the Revolution, thirteen signers went on to become governors. Eighteen served in their state legislatures. Sixteen became state and federal judges. Seven became members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Six were elected to the U.S. Senate. James Wilson and Samuel Chase became Supreme Court justices. Jefferson, Adams, and Elbridge Gerry each became vice president. Adams and Jefferson later became president.

Five signers played major roles in establishing colleges and universities: Franklin (University of Pennsylvania), Jefferson (University of Virginia), Benjamin Rush (Dickinson College), Lewis Morris (New York University), and George Walton (University of Georgia).

Adams, Jefferson, and Carroll were the longest surviving signers. In one of the greatest ironies in American history, Adams and Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Carroll was the last signer to die (in 1832, at the age of 95).

As an aside, there’s no doubt that if the Declaration of Independence were written today, it would be declared unconstitutional by the secular left. Consider that our founding document contains the following phrases: “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world,” and “firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”

Indeed, if a court can declare the phrase “under God” unconstitutional, what would it say of our founding document?

Regardless, the United States of America is a free and sovereign nation because of the courage and sacrifice of a relatively small group of mostly Christian men, their families, and those who fought and won a seemingly impossible war to secure an independence that we have preserved for 229 years.

ESPN and MLB are giving heavy coverage today, the 70th anniversary of the retirement of Lou Gehrig and his famous “luckiest man” speech.

Michelle Malkin posted a letter written 233 years ago today by John Adams to his wife Abigail on the even of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Here’s an excerpt:

You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. — I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. — Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

Adams Electronic Archive : Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams , 3 July 1776 , “Had a Declaration…”

The Tennessee Historical Commission has put together a very nice brochure detailing Tennessee’s Civil War history, noting several landmarks statewide that played a role (both major and minor) in the War of Northern Aggression. I picked up a paper copy several months ago when I went to get my Tennessee Historical Marker book, and just did a search and found a .pdf copy of the brochure and an accompanying virtual tour on the Internet.

TN Historical Commission – A Path Divided.

…there was the pseudo-scientific theory of eugenics that proved to be a costly hoax.

Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out.

This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.

I don’t mean global warming. I’m talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago.

MichaelCrichton.com | This Essay Breaks the Law.

Normally I hate shoddy work. This is not the best picture in the world, but I had to shoot it from a distance, and so the result is rather grainy. But it is readable. I guess a grainy historical marker is better than no historical marker at all.

Intersection of Highways 411 & 441 in Sevierville, Tennessee

I stumbled across this just after exiting I-40 at the Smoky Mountain Parkway earlier this afternoon. There were a couple of other historical markers I saw after this that I had to pass up. The rest of the Rose family doesn’t share my obsession of historical markers, and so I try not to subject them to the sudden stops and swerves that are inherent in historical marker hunting. So I’ll have to be happy with this one for now.

Highway 66 at exit 407 on Interstate 40, Sevier County, Tennessee

Back in April, while making a stop in Turkey during one of his World Apology Tours, President Obama remarked that we Americans “do not consider ourselves a Christian nation, or a Muslim nation, but rather, a nation of citizens who are, uh, bound by a set of values.”

This was not the first time Barack Obama has denied America’s Christian heritage, nor is President Obama the first leftist to do so. Civil libertarians (ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State) routinely deny the prominent role Christianity played during our founding and throughout our history. Playing down our Christian heritage helps them advance the myth of separation of church and state, as civil libertarians routinely comb the countryside looking for vestiges of Christianity to declare unconstitutional and scrub clean.

In response, Congressman J. Randy Forbes (R-VA) has introduced H.Res. 397, which affirms our Christian heritage. The bill contains considerable documentation on the importance Christianity has played in our development as a nation. It would also establish the first week of May as America’s Spiritual Heritage Week.

Here are few excerpts from the text of H.Res. 397:

Political scientists have documented that the most frequently cited source in the political period known as The Founding Era was the Bible.

The first act of America’s first Congress in 1774 was to ask a minister to open with prayer and to lead Congress in the reading of 4 chapters of the Bible.

Congress regularly attended church and Divine service together en masse.

Throughout the American Founding, Congress frequently appropriated money for missionaries and for religious instruction, a practice that Congress repeated for decades after the passage of the Constitution and the First Amendment.

In 1776, Congress approved the Declaration of Independence with its 4 direct religious acknowledgments referring to God as the Creator, the Lawgiver, the Judge, and the Protector.

Upon approving the Declaration of Independence, John Adams declared that the Fourth of July “ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.”

Four days after approving the Declaration, the Liberty Bell was rung. The Liberty Bell was named for the Biblical inscription from Leviticus 25:10 emblazoned around it: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof.”

In 1777, Congress, facing a National shortage of “Bibles for our schools, and families, and for the public worship of God in our churches,” announced that they “desired to have a Bible printed under their care & by their encouragement” and therefore ordered 20,000 copies of the Bible to be imported “into the different ports of the States of the Union.”

In 1782, Congress pursued a plan to print a Bible that would be “a neat edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools” and therefore approved the production of the first English language Bible printed in America that contained the congressional endorsement that “the United States in Congress assembled…recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States.”

Also in 1782, Congress adopted (and has reaffirmed on numerous subsequent occasions) the National Seal with its Latin motto “Annuit Coeptis,” meaning “God has favored our undertakings,” along with the eye of Providence in a triangle over a pyramid. The eye and the motto “allude to the many signal interpositions of Providence in favor of the American cause.”

The 1783 Treaty of Paris that officially ended the Revolution and established America as an independent nation begins with the appellation “In the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity.”

In 1787, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin declared, “God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? … Without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel.”

The delegates to the Constitutional Convention concluded their work by in effect placing a religious punctuation mark at the end of the Constitution in the Attestation Clause, noting not only that they had completed the work with “the unanimous consent of the States present” but they had done so “in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven.”

James Madison declared that he saw the finished Constitution as a product of “the finger of that Almighty Hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the Revolution.” George Washington viewed it as “little short of a miracle.” Benjamin Franklin believed that its writing had been “influenced, guided, and governed by that omnipotent, omnipresent, and beneficent Ruler, in Whom all inferior spirits live, and move, and have their being.”

From 1787 to 1788, State conventions to ratify the United States Constitution not only began with prayer but even met in church buildings.

In 1795, during construction of the Capitol, a practice was instituted whereby “public worship is now regularly administered at the Capitol, every Sunday morning, at 11 o’clock.”

In 1789, the first U.S. Congress, the Congress that framed the Bill of Rights (including the First Amendment), appropriated federal funds to pay chaplains to pray at the opening of all sessions, a practice that has continued to this day, with Congress not only funding its congressional chaplains but also the salaries and operations of more than 4,500 military chaplains.

In 1789, Congress, in the midst of framing the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment, passed the first federal law regarding education, declaring that “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

In 1789, on the same day that Congress finished drafting the First Amendment, it requested President Washington to declare a national day of prayer and thanksgiving, resulting in the first federal official Thanksgiving proclamation that declared “it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.”

These are just a smattering of the examples set forth in H.Res. 397 that attest to our Christian heritage. To proclaim otherwise is to simply ignore the history of the United States, and to deny the hand of Divine Providence that has enabled us to blossom into the freest, wealthiest, and most generous collection of individuals ever to exist.

During his European trip, President Obama gave a speech after visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp. During his speech, the President remarked:

“These sites have not lost their horror with the passage of time,” Obama said after seeing crematory ovens, barbed-wire fences, guard towers and the clock set at 3:15, marking the camp’s liberation in the afternoon of April 11, 1945. “More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished.”

Buchenwald “teaches us that we must be ever-vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others’ suffering is not our problem, and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests,” Obama said.

He is exactly right. And that is why we pro-lifers fight for the unborn.

Obama arrives in Paris after visiting German camp – Yahoo! News.

Congressman J. Randy Forbes (R-VA) has introduced H.Res. 397, which affirms the religious heritage of the people of the United States. The bill contains considerable documentation of the importance of spirituality, specifically the Bible, from the Founding Era all the way into the 20th century. This is an important piece of legislation given that civil libertarians would deny our religious heritage, and routinely scour the countryside looking for vestiges of Christianity to declare unconstitutional and scrub clean. Here’s the opening few paragraphs of the text of H.Res. 397:

Affirming the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation’s founding and subsequent history and expressing support for designation of the first week in May as `America’s Spiritual Heritage Week’ for the appreciation of and education on America’s history of religious faith.

Whereas religious faith was not only important in official American life during the periods of discovery, exploration, colonization, and growth but has also been acknowledged and incorporated into all 3 branches of the Federal Government from their very beginning;

Whereas the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed this self-evident fact in a unanimous ruling declaring `This is a religious people . . . From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation’;

Whereas political scientists have documented that the most frequently cited source in the political period known as The Founding Era was the Bible;

Whereas the first act of America’s first Congress in 1774 was to ask a minister to open with prayer and to lead Congress in the reading of 4 chapters of the Bible;

Whereas Congress regularly attended church and Divine service together en masse;

Whereas throughout the American Founding, Congress frequently appropriated money for missionaries and for religious instruction, a practice that Congress repeated for decades after the passage of the Constitution and the First Amendment;

Whereas in 1776, Congress approved the Declaration of Independence with its 4 direct religious acknowledgments referring to God as the Creator (`All people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’), the Lawgiver (`the laws of nature and nature’s God’), the Judge (`appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world’), and the Protector (`with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence’);

Whereas upon approving the Declaration of Independence, John Adams declared that the Fourth of July `ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty’;

Whereas 4 days after approving the Declaration, the Liberty Bell was rung;

Whereas the Liberty Bell was named for the Biblical inscription from Leviticus 25:10 emblazoned around it: `Proclaim liberty throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof’;

Search Results – THOMAS (Library of Congress).

Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP presidential candidate, is credited with launching the modern conservative movement with his candidacy that year. Even though Goldwater lost the election, an up-and-coming politician named Ronald Reagan began shaping those conservative ideas into the platform that launched him to high office 16 years later.

But the ideas espoused by conservatives are not that new. Simply stated, conservatism is rooted in the concept of individual liberty. A full half-century before Goldwater’s unsuccessful run for president, a Massachusetts politician named Calvin Coolidge articulated those ideas in a speech “Have Faith in Massachusetts” that he delivered on January 7, 1914.

Even though the term “conservatism” didn’t really exist back then, you can trace the concepts of conservatism all the way back to the Declaration of Independence, which states that we are endowed by our Creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thus, if you’ve ever wondered (or hoped) that conservatism might go the way of the Edsel, not to worry. As long as the ideals of our founding document remain a part of the American culture, conservatism will remain alive and well.

With that in mind, here’s some of what Calvin Coolidge had to say 95 years ago: “The suspension of one man’s dividends is the suspension of another man’s pay envelope.”

This is more or less a definition of trickle-down economics that provided the basis for the Reagan tax cuts that sparked a sustained period of economic growth in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Coolidge also observed that “Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness.”

The future president also noted that “Courts are established, not to determine the popularity of a cause, but to adjudicate and enforce rights.”

This is completely opposite the view held by many on the left today that courts exist to adjudicate causes such as abortion and same-sex marriage, rather than make objective rulings based on the Constitution.

Coolidge further articulated that “The people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act or resolve.”

He similarly observed “Government cannot relieve from toil. It can provide no substitute for the rewards of service. It can, of course, care for the defective and recognize distinguished merit. The normal must care for themselves. Self government means self support.”

Indeed, the message we hear today from the Democrat Party is completely opposite, that we should look to government to solve our problems, ensure our livelihood, and guarantee our happiness.

Coolidge: “Ultimately, property rights and personal rights are the same thing. The one cannot be preserved if the other be violated.” “…[I]t may be that the fostering and protection of large aggregations of wealth are the only foundation on which to build the prosperity of the whole people. Large profits mean large pay rolls. But profits must be the result of service performed. In no land are there so many and such large aggregations of wealth as here; in no land do they perform larger service; in no land will the work of a day bring so large a reward in material and spiritual welfare.”

We instead live in an age today where government has replaced the concept of equal opportunty with equal outcome. Politicians seek equal outcome by pillaging aggregations of wealth through punative, confiscatory taxation, such as the ”windfall profits tax” Democrats have threatened to impose on oil companies.

Coolidge: “Do the day’s work. If it be to protect the rights of the weak, whoever objects, do it. If it be to help a powerful corporation better to serve the people, whatever the opposition, do that.”

Compare this to Michelle Obama, who, a year ago, instructed a group of women in Zanesville, Ohio “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do. Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.”

Calvin Coolidge wisely instructed his audience “Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.”

And, finally, “Recognize the immortal worth and dignity of man.”

You won’t find a major party candidate, at least on a national level, who is willing to articulate conservatism the way Calvin Coolidge articulated it nearly a hundred years ago. It’s not that conservatism has gone out of style. As long as the concept of individual liberty remains alive, conservatism will be relevant. Unfortunately, politicians today pander to the American voter, promising government largess and government solutions to almost every problem imaginable.

The Holocaust fascinates me, and for a number of reasons, not the least of which is man’s innate will to survive, even when staring evil in the face.

Sixty-five years ago Waclaw Sobczak hid a message in a bottle between the bricks of a wall in a building of the Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, a last sign of life as he prepared to die.

“I put the bottle in the wall,” Sobczak, 84, who survived Auschwitz but still bears the ID number — 145664 — the Nazis tattooed on his forearm, told AFP via telephone from his home in Wrabczyn, western Poland.

“It was an attempt to leave a trace of our existence as we thought we were going to die,” said Sobczak, sent to Auschwitz in 1943 as a slave labourer.

Mystery of message in a bottle found at Auschwitz solved – Yahoo! News.