AUTHOR’S NOTE: my journey into learning US history is a series for paid subscribers. The first entry is not paywalled, and will give you an example of what the series will be like. If you’d like to subscribe and read them all, as well as gain the ability to comment, I’ve put annual subscriptions 10% off at this link. As always, if you can’t afford a paid subscription, email and I’ll give you a free year. hollymathnerd at gmail dot com.
I told a friend about this project, who said, “This will either grow your Substack or kill it, and I really have no idea which, though I suspect it may be the latter.” He may be right (gulp). We’ll see. But I’m enjoying this more than I’ve enjoyed anything in a long time, so I’m hooked.
READING LIST: someone asked for the reading list I’ve compiled (with the help of many commenters and emailers). I will put that out as a paid-subs-only post (no preview to free subscribers, as I typically publish) later this week.
In part 1, we ended just before the introduction to, and listing of, the crimes of the King.
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
This sentence is startling on several levels. In 2023, anything that even remotely hints at “throwing off” the Government, even if it occurs only in speculative words and never gets near action, is synonymous with being a conspiracy-theorist-nutjob-who-should-be-on-a-government-watch-list.
The Founders not only saw such notions differently than we do, they went far beyond tolerance. They explicitly call the notion of throwing off abusive government both a right and a duty.
This is staggering. I’m on my seventh or eighth reading, as I write this, and I’m still amazed by this. Men who said goodbye to their wives and children and headed off to war against a thousand year old monarchy were performing, in their minds, a duty. A copy of an 1828 dictionary will be delivered to me soon, and in the future I’ll be looking up words in that one, but here’s the currently available definition:
A moral obligation. A responsibility.
The Founders didn’t see throwing off an abusive government as a fever dream of lunatics who should be regarded as dangerous. They saw it as a moral obligation.
This puts a lot of the last three years into perspective: who was considered an “anti-government nutjob” and who wasn’t; who was or was not regarded as a reasonable person concerned with their fellow citizens.
Abusive government?
Being more than nineteen months old, I am old enough to remember when the President insisted that everyone who wanted to remain employed, whose job was within his purview, had to submit to having their bodies penetrated with the injection of his choosing.