printTHOMAS JEFFERSON. “The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate—has been mocked out of meaning. To be fair to the liberal Establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.
Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked ‘through the night’ to set the full text on ‘a handsome folio sheet,’ recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in Liberty And Freedom. And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the “people be universally informed.”
Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it ‘an expression of the American Mind.’ An examination of Jefferson’s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of a Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, or the collective mentality of the liberal establishment, ‘American’ in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig—an American Whig whose roots were in the English Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. …
… Jefferson’s muse for the ‘American Mind’ is even older.
The Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England’s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated. …
Naturally, Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.”
The original Independence-Day column in its entirety is “A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition.”
The late Joe Sobran observed:
The role of government in Jefferson’s views was to “secure our rights” (which were negative rights – e.g. the rights of individuals to take care of themselves).
That part of the Declaration has been perverted to the role of government to makes us all “equal” – not in rights but de facto equal – as in equal medical care, affirmative action, and other such silliness. Of course, if one points out the perversion over the original Declaration, then the old “slavery canard” comes up – as if the institution of human ownership of other humans was central to the Jeffersonian concepts in the Declaration itself.
I find it almost universal nowadays that people who wish to stand for principals of liberty (“negative rights”) are being attacked (past and present) by statists for “hypocrisy” whether it is Jefferson owning slaves or say Walter Block traveling on a government road or some 70 year old libertarian receiving Socialist Insecurity after having paid involuntarily into the system for over 40 years. I can’t say that I accept this statist criticism – admittedly, men and institutions are often flawed but that does not make the ideals wrong! Life Liberty Property and Happiness can be appreciated even by imperfect people!