So, I am studying for a project I am working on and I came across a disturbing factoid concerning the AntiFederalist, Patrick Henry. It appears to me now, the whole, Give me Liberty, or death thing was just for show. He didnt mean it. Soon after that famous speech, he sided with the Federalist, particularly Washington and Adams, and wrote in opposition to the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, placing himself against the republican principles he one eloquently wrote about and Thomas Jefferson. Henry wrote: Virginia had quit the sphere in which she had been placed by the Constitution, and, in daring to pronounce upon the validity of federal laws, had gone out of her jurisdiction in a manner not warranted by any authority, and in the highest degree alarming to every considerate man; that such opposition, on the part of Virginia, to the acts of the general government, must beget their enforcement by military power; that this would probably produce civil war, civil war foreign alliances, and that foreign alliances must necessarily end in subjugation to the powers called in. So, in other words, somehow the wise and liberty loving Patrick Henry, concluded, the created is superior to the creator. This is an attack on the law of nations which says, in Book 1, § 10. Of states forming a federal republic. Finally, several sovereign and independent states may unite themselves together by a perpetual confederacy, without ceasing to be, each individually, a perfect state. They will together constitute a federal republic: their joint deliberations will not impair the sovereignty of each member, though they may, in certain respects, put some restraint on the exercise of it, in virtue of voluntary engagements. A person does not cease to be free and independent, when he is obliged to fulfil engagements which he has voluntarily contracted.
Posted on: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 17:35:21 +0000
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