35 Years of Founding Era History

The main ideas from this information are: - The colonists' reaction to the Stamp Act was not as immediate and unified as commonly believed. - Benjamin Franklin had a three-fold plan that would have increased central imperial control and benefited himself and his associates. - Many self-named federalists at the convention in Philadelphia had no problem with a monarchy as long as it benefited the wealthy. - Franklin's plan included colonial representation in parliament, an American council appointed by King George to levy taxes, and a centralized control of the British mercantile system. - Franklin and his friend Thomas Pownall presented their plan to parliament, but it was rejected and the Stamp Act was passed. - The Stamp Act imposed taxes on various documents and transactions, including court documents, licenses, leases, insurance policies, newspapers, playing cards, and advertisements. - The penalties for violating the Stamp Act were severe, and violations were to be tried only in Ad ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Well, anyway, let's look at it. How the Stamp Act was received in the colonies once they heard about it. Well, most were taught this caused almost everyone to immediately cease what they were doing and take to the streets in protest when actually this is not true. Just as the wonderful emotional stories they teach down at the communist gulag. You know, those places we call schools. Tenth plank of the communist manifesto, you know. Ironically many of those we would refer to today as founders actually accepted the idea of taxation as an inevitable occurrence and one of them in particular sought to use the tax as a way to not only line his pockets but the pockets of his friends and associates as well. You know how that wealthy aristocracy works. Well, I speak here of one Benjamin Franklin. Now Franklin concocted a three-fold plan to be offered to the crown. All three parts of his plans would yield to the power of taxation by the crown and each would have aggrandized central imperial control at the expense of any home rule that the colonists wanted or desired. History will prove as we move along with our lessons here that many of the so-called federalists, self-named federalists, who attended the convention in Philadelphia in 1787 had no problem whatsoever with a monarchy as long as it provided the affluent with the means to coerce riches from the common citizen. And as we move along and we study these letters between these people this fact will be proved beyond question. Well, let's look at Franklin's plan here. The first plan of Franklin's was to find a way to have colonial representation in parliament. Well, that sounds fair. This would have amounted to the colonists taxing themselves to favor the British. Very similar to the tyranny we try to survive under today in this country, isn't it? And then second, Franklin sought implementation of his failed Albany Plan of 1754 which would have established an American council appointed by King George which would levy taxes on the colonies but these also would go directly to the crown and of little benefit anywhere in the colonies. Pardon me. Third, Franklin called on parliament to establish one single loan office in America to issue colonial paper currency. Oh my goodness, a precursor to the Federal Reserve way back then. A portion of which would go directly to the crown which would constitute a form of hidden taxation which would also maintain the centralized control of the British mercantile system. Good old East India Company. Franklin and his friend, the former governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Pownall and I'll spell that for you, P-O-W-N-A-L-L would present this plan to a member of parliament with the recommendation that Franklin and Pownall would be the only parties allowed to print the money. Oh, how interesting. Franklin wanted to be in charge of printing the money. Hmm, okay. Pownall was an interesting character as well. His plan was to impose increased control by making each governor of the colonies and any other crown officials in the colonies independent of the electorate in these colonies as pertained to their salaries. Oh, that thing we got today, right? This would have made the colonists responsible for the salaries of each official surrendering control of the amount of those remunerations to the king and parliament. This act, in and of itself, would have established a new tax on the people in the various colonies. These plans by Franklin and Pownall were rejected by parliament and instead the Stamp Act was passed by the House of Commons and then the House of Lords and then it became law on November the 1st, 1764. So, as we look at this, we now have a little bit of background. But as we move forward and study the reaction of the colonists to the Stamp Act, the leaders who would emerge against the tax and the Federalist loyalists who would support it become quite obvious. And some interesting names will appear on both sides. Well, folks, if King George and Parliament had wanted to foment a revolution in these colonies, most likely nothing could have done it quite as well as the Stamp Act. The taxes associated with the Stamp Act reached to every level of society and business in the colonies. It had the unintended consequence of uniting the people against the crown. Little did they know that this would be that tripwire. While all were opposed, would there be peaceful submission or a unified resistance? You know, guys, we could ask ourselves that question today. With all of the tyranny and the despotism we're seeing from government, one thing after another, none of which are constitutional, will the people just sit back and take it in peaceful submission? Or will there actually form in this country a unified resistance? I think we're about to find out. I think it is coming very quickly. But there was a complete schedule in the Stamp Act. And people, we think of it as, oh, well, it's the Stamp Act. They're going to tax stamps. Yeah, easy for you to say, huh? So that part is misleading because it was much more than that. There were a complete schedule of taxes on every commercial and legal document and or transaction. Included were all court documents, licenses, leases, and any transfer of land, including mortgages, all insurance policies, ship movements from ports, pamphlets, all newspapers, and novelties such as playing cards or dice. You know, folks, kind of like today, well, probably not opposed as much by the common folk, the highest tax of all was on a license to practice law, which was set at 10 pounds, which is quite a bit of money, 1764-65. There was also a tax on all advertisements in any newspaper, which amounted to a 200% increase in tax for that. A one-half penny tax was also placed on each newspaper. Now, Benjamin Franklin himself predicted that such a tax, if passed, would destroy at least half of all newspapers operating at that time. And let's not forget that all of the taverns were taxed as well. Well, to just punch you right in the gut, all taxes would have to be paid in English sterling or an equivalent, which was placed at the optimum price per ounce of silver. Restrictions included in the Stamp Act were very oppressive. No newspaper or article could be published without bearing the name of the printer or the author. Since opposition to the Crown and published articles were almost exclusively written using an alias in order to protect the author from retribution or revenge from the government, it was seen as an obvious move to stop any public criticism of the King or Parliament. You know, kind of like John Adams did with the Sedition Act. You can't say anything bad about us or we'll get you, put you in prison, charge you money. Well, the penalties for violating any of these provisions were quite severe, actually. Evidence without the official stamp was inadmissible in any court. Stop and think about that. Violations of any provision of the Stamp Act were to be tried only in Admiralty Court and without any trial-by-jury provisions. The real kicker was government officials who were sued in any court for enforcing the Stamp Act would receive triple damages from anyone who sued them. Oh, how convenient. Well, so as you can see, this act was designed to tax almost everything in the colonies, much like the tax burden we are all saddled with today here in the good old USA. Good thing I can't sing. Well, the colonists were faced with a dilemma of huge proportions. They could comply and endure a burden of excessive proportions, simply cease to do business in any way that could be taxed, or resort to civil disobedience, noncompliance, or what we would call today an official narrative, nullification. But one consolation was the colonists had several months to decide on a course of action. Notification of the tax arrived in the colonies in the early spring, in most colonies it was April of 1765, with a scheduled implementation date of the first of the year, 1766. Well, if revolution was to be the answer in America, a leader had to emerge from the ranks of the people. Now, who would that be? Well, the first public opposition to the Stamp Act came from the Providence, Rhode Island Gazette, in an article on May the 11th, from an author who referred to himself as a plain yeoman. The Gazette was owned by the outgoing governor, Stephen Hopkins, and almost everyone believed that it was him who was writing under that nom de plume. The yeoman expressed the idea that the colonies were not dependent on England for their existence, and therefore were immune from taxation and interference by the king or parliament. Being taxed without representation was the inherent right of the colonists. What? Hmm, okay. The birthright of all of the king's free subjects without distinction was claimed by the public yeoman. One of the most unique challenges presented by the yeoman was to what we refer to today as legal precedent, which is the basic foundation for our present-day judicial system, and you will find it almost everywhere, folks. You just can't get by their precedent. Well, the yeoman attacked the proposition that a precedent establishes a legal point to be carried forward in all similar decisions, whether the precedent be footed on justice and reason or on whim and arbitrariness. In addition, the yeoman referred to the words of the old dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral himself, none other than Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift. He was a brilliant guy, and anyone would be remiss to not actually look at and consider Jonathan Swift's words on a legal precedent. And here they are, and I quote, It is a maxim among these men, lawyers, that whatever has been done before may legally be done again, and therefore they take special care to record all of their decisions formerly made, even those which have, through ignorance or corruption, contradicted the rules of common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities and thereby endeavor to justify the most iniquitous opinions. Unquote. Wow, folks. Just can't wait to hear some attorney argue that position before the Supreme Court. For in today's America, precedent is the majority of what is taught at law school, or to use the Latin term, stare decisis, the doctrine of following rules or principles established in previous legal decisions. And if we do that, if we go with precedent, we have to assume that they got it right. And the Supreme Court can't get it right themselves because they've only reversed themselves something over 230 times. So they know they can't get it right. Wow. Well, anyway, that is kind of a look at the Stamp Act and its origins and what it actually meant. And so now, let's look at something in this lesson that none other than Mr. Thomas Jefferson had to say. Now, I have kind of included this in the lesson simply because that I believe the words of Jefferson back then are something that everyone should know. We should have been taught this. We should know this. We should be able to see the similarities in history because I believe it was Mr. Santayana who said, those who fail to learn the lessons of history are destined to repeat its mistakes. And boy, have we done that in multitudes. But anyway, here's the question. I'm going to run this one by one. Once I run this by you with the official writings, it'll be the end of lesson number one. And I hope that you will be interested in continuing to listen to these lessons because I'm going to put forth as much effort as I can to counteract 235 years of lies about our founding era that we have been taught by the Marxists in our education system and our 501c3 churches and preachers and, of course, on that vaunted media. So here, Jefferson wrote to James Madison something that I have always thought was just absolutely spot on. Now, this is before Jefferson got infected with Lord Acton disease when he was president. But, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Unfortunately, it did to Mr. Jefferson as well. But here's the question. Can future obligations be held to actions of the past? In other words, people, can we make laws to govern people who are yet unborn? Can we make rules for people we don't even know? Isn't that what government does? Well, anyway, let's kind of, if you don't mind, I'm going to read Mr. Jefferson's words because I think it is very, very poignant even to today, beyond a shadow of a doubt. So here's, and I quote, I sit down to write to you without knowing by what occasion I shall send my letter. I do it because a subject comes into my head which I would wish to develop a little more than is practicable in the hurry of the moment of making up general dispatches. The question whether one generation of men has a right to bind another seems never to have been started either, it should be stated, I think, but he actually said started, either on this or our own side of the water. Yet it is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision but also among the fundamental principles of every government. The course of reflection in which we are immersed here on the elementary principles of society has presented this question to my mind and that no such obligation can be so transmitted, I think, very capable of proof. I set out on this ground which I suppose to be self-evident, that the earth belongs in infrastructure to the living, that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by an individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be and reverts to the society. If the society has formed no rules for the appropriation of its lands in severality, it will be taken by the first occupants. These will generally be the wife and children of the descendant. If they have formed rules of appropriation, these rules may give it to the wife and the children or to some one of them or to the legatee of the deceased. So they may give it to his creditor. But the child, the legatee or creditor, takes it not by any natural right but by the law of society of which they are members and to which they are subject. Then no man can, by natural right, oblige the lands he occupied or the persons who succeed him in that occupation to the payment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the usufruct and let me spell that word for you, u-s-u-f-r-u-c-t of the lands for several generations to come and then the lands would belong to the dead and not to the living, which would be the exact opposite of our principle. What is true of every member of society individually is true of them all collectively since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals. Folks, that is deep. Think about it. The rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals. To keep our ideas clear when applying them in a multitude, let us suppose a whole generation of men to be born on the same day, to attain mature age on the same day, and to die on the same day, leaving a succeeding generation in the moment of attaining their mature age altogether. Let the ripe age be supposed of twenty-one years, and their period of life thirty-four years more, that being the average term given by the bills of mortality to persons who have already attained twenty-one years of age. Each successive generation would, in this way, come on and go off the stage at a fixed moment as individuals do now. Then I say the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in their own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and encumbrances of the first, and the third, and the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead, and not the living generation. Then no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence. Folks, think about that. What if they told Congress, You can only tax as much as we can pay in a generation. You cannot tax more than that. Oh, well, there's no way they're going to allow that to ever happen, right? And I continue with Jefferson's work. He says, At twenty-one years of age, they may bind themselves in their lands for thirty-four years to come, at twenty-two for thirty-three, at twenty-three for thirty-two, and at fifty-four for one year only. Because these are the terms of life which remain to them at those respective epochs. But a material difference must be noted between the succession of an individual and that of a whole generation. Individuals are parts only of a society subject to the laws of the whole. These laws may appropriate the portion of land occupied by the descendant to his creditor rather than to any other, or to his child on condition he satisfies the creditor. But when a whole generation, that is, the whole society, dies, as in the case we have supposed, and another generation or society succeeds, this forms a whole, and there is no superior who can give their territory to a third society, who may have lent money to their predecessors beyond their faculties of paying. You think we may have borrowed more money in this country than our future generations can even begin to think about paying people? That is, to me, very crucial. Continuing with Jefferson's work here, what is true of a generation all arriving to self-government on the same day and dying all on the same day is true of those in a constant course of decay and renewal, with this only difference. A generation coming in and going out entire, as in the first case, would have a right in the first year of their self-dominion to contract a debt for 33 years, in the 10th for 24, in the 20th for 14, in the 30th for 4, whereas generations changing daily by daily deaths and births have one constant term, beginning at the date of their contract and ending when a majority of those of full age at that date shall be dead. The length of that term may be estimated from the tables of mortality corrected by the circumstances of climate, occupation, and peculiar to the country of the contractors. Take, for instance, the table of Mr. de Buffon, wherein he states 23,994 deaths and the ages at which they happened. Suppose a society in which 23,994 persons were born every year and lived to the ages stated in the table. The conditions of that society will be as follows. First, it will consist constantly of 617,703 persons of all ages, 21 years. Of those living at any one instant of time, one half will be dead in 24 years and 8 months. Thirdly, he goes into all these numbers and that may be boring to many. I can see why it would, but I think it was critical to provide enough of what Thomas Jefferson said in that letter to explain because it was a long letter. Jefferson loved to write and we could be on that subject for quite some time. But we will close today's lesson with that thought and with the can it, is it moral to leave the kind of debt, 30-some trillion dollars that we are leaving to our posterity? Where is the morality in that? Tough question, huh? Well, anyway, can't thank you folks enough for taking of your time to tune in here on Substack and to listen to my works at this time, which I am calling again 35 Years of Founding Era History from 1765 to 1800. The majority of this information which I am reading and which I will present from original source documents, I would believe that 90% or better of the people of this country have never, ever heard that. So, just wanted to kind of give you folks that kind of ideas or that kind of background on what I hope to accomplish here and appreciate again all of your support and your attention because I believe it is imperative that enough people know this history because it means so much, not to us so much anymore, but to our posterity, it means everything. I'll see you with Chapter 2 in a couple of days. God bless everyone. Have a wonderful day and a wonderful week. And just in case you might be wondering about what the subject of Chapter 2 will be, it will be a detailed description of one Mr. Patrick Henry and his appearance on his first election to the Virginia House of Burgesses where it is my belief completely that at this meeting of the Virginia House of Burgesses was when in 1765, in May of 1765, when Patrick Henry lit the fuse that became the American Revolution. Join us, please.