ERROR: Account closed.

James L Westrich II westrich at miser.umass.edu
Wed Jun 2 05:35:23 PDT 1999



>> Margaret wrote:
>> > ...but seen in the context of their time, the Founders in general
>> > were quite radical.
>>
>> So you think that the participants in Shay's Rebellion were just a bunch
>> of ruffians. And seen in the context of their times they also were precisely
>> what Dr. Johnson called them, a bunch of slavedrivers.
>> And if the Bill of Rights was so radical
>> Carrol


>actually, in the context of their time, the framers (who, specifially, do
>people mean when they refer to Founders?) of the constitution were not
>radical...and one doesn't need to rely on the likes of Herbert Aptheker,
>Staughton Lynd, or Michael Parenti to arrive at this conclusion...a
>contemporary republican (note lower case r) like historian Gordon Wood
>(_The Radicalism of the American Revolution_) has pointed out that the
>writers of the constitution were the conservative wing of the American
>Revolution...as Wood notes about the revolution, one class did not
>overthrow another nor did the poor supplant the rich, and the
>constitution was intended to insure against such happening...Madison, the
>'father (perhaps that should be 'godfather') of the constitution, became
>so frustrated at one point about the 'democratic excesses' of the 1780s
>that he opined about the need to restore the good parts of the British
>monarchy...


>as for Daniel Shay and others like him, the framers of the constitution
>did think he/they were ruffians...Shay's Rebellion was only the most
>famous of a number of popular insurrections in the 1780s...most were
>about preventing foreclosure of farms by creditors and so-called
>'force' laws requiring creditors to accept paper money issued by the
>state, measures already adopted in Rhode Island...RI, which also
>expropriated/redistributed land of large estates and imposed heavy
>progressive taxation on inheritance, sent no delegates to the 1787
>consitutional convention...it is not a coincidence that the writers
>of the document empowered the national gov't to 'suppress
>insurrections' (Art. I, Sec. 8), restricted states economic powers
>(Art. I, Sec. 10), established extradition (Art. IV, Sec. 2) and
>empowered the national gov't to protect states against 'domestic
>violence' (Art IU, Sec 4)...they wanted no more of the likes of
>Daniel Shays, they wanted no more rebellions, they wanted no more
>egalitarianism of the likes of Rhode Island...


>still, the constitution did include (in historical context) progressive
>features - monarchy and arbitrary/autocratic rule were rejected,
>federal officeholders were not subjected to property requirements or
>religious tests (both common among states at the time), regular
>elections eliminated lifetime tenure in federal office holding), and
>bills of attainder and ex post facto laws were prohibited...


>a bill of rights (often violated in practice) establishing substantive
>& procedural limits upon the national gov't was added as a concession
>to secure ratification...bill of rights did not apply to states until
>US Supreme Court initiated process of 'selective incorporation' in
>*Gitlow v NY* (1925)... Michael Hoover



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