1783-1865: UNITED STATES. The U.S. Constitution is approved. Amongst other things, this fabulous instrument of freedom carries a provision preventing Congress from banning the importation of slaves. But, most significantly, the authors of the Constitution were very careful to ensure that it validated slavery by means of a so-called "positive" law embedded in Article 4, Section 2: "No person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up; on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due." In plain English, there was no escape for slaves in the land of the free and the U.S. Constitution made damned sure of it.
Although it varied from state to state, the property qualification which opened the doors to participation in the new demockracy was as much as $4000, an astronomical sum in the eighteenth century, equal to millions of dollars today.
The right to vote and hold office and all political and economic power in the new demockracy was, of course, held by a tiny handful of what would later come to be known as fascists, a small fraction of one percent of the population, the ultra-wealthy, white, male, Protestant, slave-owning, land speculating, terrorist, thoroughly unscrupulous elite; a self-appointed aristocracy of hypocrisy which looked down in open contempt upon most of their fellow human beings including ordinary Americans of all races.
Depend upon it, sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation, as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters. There will be no end of it. New claims will arise. Women will demand a vote. Lads from twelve to twenty one will think their rights not enough attended to, and every man, who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks, to one common level. John Adams.Imagine that, equality in the land of the free! Can't be havin' none of that.
Those who refused to swear allegiance to the newly installed dictatorship of the ultra-wealthy were denied virtually all civil liberties, were jailed, murdered or forced into exile and their property stolen.
The “three-fifths” clause of the Constitution counted each slave owned as three-fifths of a person for the sake of apportionment of electoral districts although the slaves themselves were not, of course, allowed to vote. The effect was to give slave-owners a hugely disproportionate share of political power amongst the tiny minority of Americans who had any at all. The slave-owners had about a third more seats in Congress and a third more electoral votes than they would otherwise have had.
The desire to keep control of the country in the hands of the slave-owners also stood behind the creation of the Electoral College. Votes in the Electoral College, which “elects” the president, neatly sidestepping direct election, were apportioned using the same three-fifths rule. Thanks to the three-fifths clause, slave-owners dominated the government of the United States until 1865. For most of the period, slave-owners occupied the presidency, the chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Speaker’s chair. During the same period, eighteen of thirty one justices of the Supreme Court, that great protector of human rights and dignity, were slave-owners.
The much propagandized first president, George Washington, was an elitist snob who considered ordinary Americans no better than cattle. He called the white citizens of the new country over which he lorded “the grazing multitude”. Washington was a slave owner and a land speculator.The great freedom lover owned about two hundred and fifty slaves, dressed them in rags, auctioned off their children for yet more cash, of which he could never, apparently, acquire enough, and had them viciously whipped for “disobedience”. Among Washington’s many business "enterprises" was the construction of a canal through the Great Dismal Swamp in the Carolinas. The canal was hand-dug by slaves through steaming, mosquito-infested swamp. The slaves were worked to death in appalling conditions so that Washington, already the wealthiest man in the United States, could grow even richer.
Aside from his desire to maintain slavery, Washington, as a leading land speculator, was particularly anxious to gain control of the government because the British had signed a treaty with the Cherokee Nation and other Indian nations which prevented him stealing their ancestral land for profit. As President, Washington, in his fervor to steal the maximum possible amount of Indian land, was also a mass murderer of considerable accomplishment; the country's leading early practitioner of the ethnic cleansing of native Americans. According to Washington, native Americans were "wolves and beasts" who deserved nothing from the whites but "total ruin."The second president, John Adams, had no higher opinion of ordinary white Americans than Washington. They were, he said, the “common herd” and had “no idea of learning, eloquence and genius” and were “locked within vulgar, rustic imaginations”.
1780: UNITED STATES. Captain Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, fought at Saratoga, Bunker Hill and Lexington and was wounded in action. A poor farmer, he, like thousands of others, was not paid by the ruling class which had forced colonists by threat and violence into the Revolutionary armies. He returned to his hometown of Pelham, Massachusetts, where he, like many others, was promptly imprisoned for unpaid taxes by the new regime.Although he had had to fight for “democracy” and was assessed taxes he could not afford to pay, Shays was not permitted to vote or hold office in new demockracy. To Shays and the vast majority of people in the new United States, the slave-owners’ propaganda slogan, “no taxation without representation” was simply a sick joke of the wealthy hypocrites who now completely controlled the country.
Revolutionary “hero” Sam Adams, staunch hypocrite and liar, safely installed as one of the ruling class sitting in the Massachusetts State Council, achieved new but unsurprising heights of hypocrisy when he proposed to hang Shays and anyone else resorting to civil disobedience in an attempt to bring genuine democracy and liberty or even something as simple as "no taxation without representation" to the United States.
The Massachusetts Riot Act of 1786 ordered the killing of any rebellious farmer and instituted a property seizure law. Rebellious farmers were to "forfeit all their lands, goods and chattels to the Commonwealth." Massachussetts also suspended habeas corpus meaning that citizens could be imprisoned indefinitely by the ruling junta without charge or trial. Freedom of speech in Massachussetts was banned if it was "to the prejudice of the government." The chief sponsor of all this fascist oppression? None other than the great freedom fighter Sam Adams. Vermont went down the same road, enacting The Riot Act which authorized county sheriffs to shoot rebellious farmers on sight
Petitions were made to the regime for an honest monetary system, lower taxes and a fair judicial system. The petitions were ignored and, in desperation, groups of farmers occupied the courthouses in Northampton, Worcester, Concord, Taunton and Great Barrington, Massachusetts in an attempt to stop the ongoing jailing of those who could not afford to pay the taxes assessed by the regime.
The Supreme Judicial Court, sitting in Springfield, indicted eleven leaders of the uprising for “sedition”. Upon his release from jail, Shays lead a ragtag army of fifteen hundred ex-soldiers, wearing the uniform of the Revolutionary army which had betrayed them, to occupy the Courthouse. Later, Shays lead two thousand farmers in an assault on the Federal Arsenal in Springfield.
Shays’ Rebellion, the real American revolution for liberty and equality (for white people at least), for no taxation without representation and for some semblance of democracy, was ruthlessly crushed by overwhelming military force, leaving the United States firmly in the hands of the slave-owning ruling class. Shays and thirteen others were condemned to death for “treason” against the elitist dictatorship. Ultimately, twelve of the fourteen were pardoned by the newly-installed governor of Massachusetts. Two were executed. Shays, one of the few true heroes of the era, died in poverty.
1782: UNITED STATES. A raiding party of one hundred and fifty Pennsylvania militiamen under Lieutenant Colonel David Williamson rounds up a group of Munsee Indians near Gnadenhutten, Ohio. Even though the Indians are unarmed non-combatants who have converted to Christianity, they are falsely accused of taking part in raids into Pennsylvania. In true democratic fashion, the militiamen vote to slaughter the Indians anyway and inform the Munsee of their fate.The Munsees spend the night praying and singing hymns. The following morning, they are slaughtered as they kneel, praying, their skulls crushed with mallets. Twenty eight men, twenty nine women and thirty nine children are murdered and then scalped by the forces of freedom. The corpses are then heaped into nearby Christian mission buildings and the entire town burned to the ground. Other towns nearby are burned as well. Two Munsee boys, one of whom had been scalped, survived to tell of the massacre. Slave-owner and land speculator General George Washington's reaction to the massacre was not to punish the murderers but to order that no American soldier allow himself to be taken alive by Indians for fear of retribution for the massacre.
1783-present: UNITED STATES. The new regime immediately allows the land speculators who had been instrumental in the planning and execution of the Revolution to seize Indian land, abrogating treaties and carrying out a relentless program of genocide and ethnic cleansing against native Americans which will last for more than a century. Millions of American Indians are killed outright or die as a result of deliberately-induced disease and starvation. Virtually all Indian land, consisting of the vast majority of the land west of the Mississippi River, is stolen. Of course, this will all be presented to Americans of later generations as valiant pioneers taming the wilderness.White Americans have the most rancorous antipathy
to the whole race of Indians;
nothing is more common than to hear them talk
of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth,
men, women and children.
to the whole race of Indians;
nothing is more common than to hear them talk
of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth,
men, women and children.
A British visitor to America, 1784
1789-1797: UNITED STATES. Slave-owner, land speculator, ethnic cleanser and mass murder cover-up-artist George Washington becomes the first President of the United States, an office to which he was “elected”, unanimously, by his fellow land speculators and slave-owners in the Electoral College, dispensing with even the merest pretence of democracy.
A great proponent of liberty, Washington takes eight of his slaves to the executive mansion in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania had outlawed slavery but Washington, a straight shootin' guy as we all know, got around the law by declaring that he was a Virginia resident only temporarily staying in what was then the capitol.
In 2002, the National Park Service will build a new pavilion to house the Liberty Bell. Visitors to the $12 million piece of propaganda will doubtless remain blithely unaware that they are walking over George Washington's slave quarters.
Once he gets his slaves settled in, Washington gets down to work, spending eighty percent of the budget of the new nation on ethnic cleansing; exterminating native Americans and stealing their land, something very dear to his own heart and bank account.
1791-1794: UNITED STATES. The new U.S. government, with an unelected president and voting for other offices restricted to wealthy, white, Protestant males, continues to explore the limits of hypocrisy by broadening its policy of taxation without representation. The federal government imposes a new tax on distilled spirits. Naturally, the rate is fifty percent higher on small farms than on large commercial producers. Because they often lacked any way of getting their grain to market, distilling liquor, thereby making a compact, easily transported commodity, was, for many small farmers, the only way of making any money at all from their crop.Bitterly opposing such taxation without representation, farmers harass tax collectors and stage sometimes violent protests in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia in the so-called Whiskey Rebellion. As in the case of Shay's Rebellion, the fine new "democratic" government of the United States uses overwhelming violence to suppress dissent by American citizens and to enforce the policy of taxation without representation. Slave-owner and ethnic cleanser cum unelected President George Washington invokes martial law and assembles a force of 13,000 troops, about the same size as the entire American army in the Revolutionary War. He personally leads the troops against the citizens of the United States in order to enforce obedience to his regime's dictates and its policy of taxation without representation.
Ultimately, twenty residents of the new demockracy are arrested and imprisoned. One dies in captivity. Two are convicted of treason and sentenced to death by hanging.
1793: UNITED STATES. Congress passes the Fugitive Slave Act which mandates the return of escaped slaves to their "owners" from anywhere in the U.S. Blacks fleeing slavery no longer just have to get to a state which has abandoned slavery but have to escape completely from the "land of the free” to British territory in Canada or elsewhere in order to find freedom.
1798: DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. U.S. Marines invade the Dominican Republic and seize a French vessel in the city of Puerto Plata.
1798: UNITED STATES. There is just so dang much freedom and liberty in these here United States it makes a fella proud. Just seven years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment to the Constitution goes right down the toilet when the Sedition Act of 1798 makes it a crime to, gasp, criticize the government. Can't be havin' none of that in the world's greatest demockracy, can we now bubba?There were numerous indictments, prosecutions and convictions under the act, the best known of which was the prison sentence given to Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont. Taking the first Amendment a bit too literally for the tastes of the ruling class, Lyon had a few harsh words for President John Adams saying that Adams is "swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice." Lyon is duly thrown to the "Christians".