The U.S. "Founding Fathers" Were Enemies of "We the People"

They created a government to oppress us, not serve us

[Click here to read "U.S. Constitution: Help or Hindrance?"]

[Read here how the Founding Fathers made a counter-revolution to put wealth in property over We the People]​

Instead of relying on what we were taught in school about the Founding Fathers, I suggest reading--to start with, at least--three excellent academic (meaning based on real documentary evidence) history books:

​1. Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle, by Leonard L. Richards

2. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, by Charles A. Beard

3. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution, by Thomas P. Slaughter

If you read these history books you will learn things you were not taught in school:​

Shays's Rebellion

George Washington (read about his IMMENSE wealth, aside from his slaves, in footnote *; read about his slaves here) and the 'Founding Fathers' wanted to rule what became the United States instead of allowing King George III to rule it. In order to mobilize an army to fight King George's British military force and achieve "American independence" George Washington told the subsistence farmers, whom he needed to join his "Revolutionary Army," that the "War for Independence" was a war for equality and for things like "no taxation without representation" democracy. The subsistence farmers (who made up the vast majority of the population) were inspired by Washington's noble rhetoric and joined the Revolutionary Army in huge numbers.

These small farmers made a huge economic sacrifice when they joined the army because it meant not planting and harvesting the crops that they relied on to earn any money. General George Washington paid these farmer/soldiers with pieces of paper that promised that the United States government would "pay to the bearer" an indicated number of dollars, plus accrued interest, in the future when the new United States government was independent. Essentially these pieces of paper were IOUs, sometimes referred to as "securities."

After the Revolutionary War when independence had been won, the former soliders--now extremely poor and financially desperate small farmers--hoped that they would finally be paid for their "service to their country." But no! The Founding Fathers said the government had no money to pay the debt on those IOUs.​

Guess what happened then? The small farmers realized that their IOUs were essentially worthless.

And guess what happened next? Rich people (many of the Founding Fathers like George Washington who was a big time slave and land owner and their upper class friends) said to the desperate farmers, "I'll buy your IOUs."

And guess how much the rich people offered to pay for those IOUs?

Practically nothing.

But "practically nothing" was more than nothing, so the desperate farmers sold their IOUs to the rich people and tried to make a life as a small farmer as best they could.

But you'll NEVER guess what happened next (if you've only been "educated" by the American ruling class's school system and mass media). What happened next is mind-boggling awful.​

The rich people and their Founding Father buddies came up with a brilliant idea. (It was apparently Alexander Hamilton's idea, God bless him, although somehow the Broadway play, Hamilton, curiously neglected to include this deed among all the deeds for which it praises the man to such wonderful music!)​

What was Hamilton's brilliant idea?

Like all brilliant ideas, it was simplicity itself. Here we go. Fasten your seat belt.

Have the state government of Massachusetts (at first; later they used the new national government) TAX the poor farmers to get the money to pay back the IOU debts to the "bearers" of those IOUs (who just happened, now, to be the rich buddies of the Founding Fathers.)

But wait! There's more! Have the government pay the bearers of the IOUs not only the amount of dollars specified on the IOU, but ALSO the accrued interest for the years since the end of the Revolutionary war until the present.

Guess how the poor farmers felt about this? "Furious!" would be an understatement.​

In central Massachusetts the farmers refused to pay the tax, and when the Massachusetts state government tried to collect the tax, the farmers organized a military rebellion in 1786-7 against the state goverment that came very close to seizing the state's armory at Springfield and thereby overthrowing the government of the rich. This rebellion is named after one of the several leaders of it, a man named Shays: Shays's Rebellion.

The Shays's Rebellion consisted of small farmers and included the better-off small farmers in their ranks. Of note, the renowned poet, Emily Dickinson's great-grandfather was one of the leaders in the rebellion, joined by many other Dickinson family members at the time, and the Dickinson's--though only small farmers--were the leading family in Amherst, Massachusetts at the time.​

While you're enjoying that Sam Adams beer you might want to pause between gulps to think about this. Sam Adams called for the Shays's rebels to be hanged! Oh the Founding Fathers--gotta love em, uh?​

George Washington helped mobilize a private army of rich people and mercenaries to attack the Shays's Rebellion farmers, and--due in large part to chance--it defeated the Rebellion. But history is written by the victors. The Founding Fathers and their descendants have declared that the Shays's Rebellion rebels were just a bunch of low-lifes who refused to "pay their debts." (Who says that G.W. Bush's WMD lie was the biggest lie ever told by rich Americans?)​

George Washington, the "Father of our country," was the first president (after the Constitutional Convention) selected (oh come on now, hardly any poor people could vote then!) under the new Constitution. That Constitution was, to those who actually read it, obviously designed to make sure that ordinary people would never prevail against the very rich.

“[Thomas] Paine called Washington ‘an apostate or an impostor,’34 the choice of term depending on whether it was felt that Washington had either abandoned good principles—or that he ever had any in the first place.” [source: Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance, by Peter Linebaugh. Footnote 34 reads: “Thomas Paine, “Letter to George Washington,” July 30, 1796.”]

The Constitutional Convention consisted of men who were, and who in their correspondence admitted to being, terribly frightened by the fact that just a few months before the Convention the Shays's Rebellion damn near overthrew the rich in the state of Massachusetts, and the rebellion was sparked by a tax designed to make poor farmers suffer so that the richest Americans--like the guys at the Constitutional Convention--could get even richer. To cover up the thoroughly anti-democratic essence of the new Constitution one of the convention delegates had a great idea, "Let's give it a preamble saying, 'We the People, in order to' bla bla bla." And the rest is history.

Anybody who thinks that President Trump, with his use of federal armed thugs against BLM protesters, is somehow acting fundamentally differently from the supposedly good George Washington is simply not informed about the historical truth. A very rich upper class has been running the United States, using whatever violence is necessary to suppress ordinary people, since the very beginning.

So please, let's not use phrases such as "Our democracy is at risk" that wrongly imply we ever had a genuine democracy, OK? We have always had a dictatorship of the rich. We need to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.

The U.S. Constitution

When the Founding Fathers gathered to write the U.S. Constitution (to replace the Articles of Confederation) guess what dominated their concern, as evidenced by their correspondence?

Fear!

Fear that the Articles of Confederation did not give the national government the power it needed to suppress future Shays's Rebellions. The new U.S. Constitution was largely a response to the Shays's Rebellion that occurred just before the Constitutional Convention. The Founding Fathers stuck that famous "We the People" line in the preface to the Constitution to cover up the reality that it was a document designed by and for "We the Rich People." Read more about the Constitution here.

One of the most important Founding Fathers when it came to the writing of the Constitution was James Madison. Madison and Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, writing as "The Federalist," wrote a series of published essays about what the Constitution needed to do. In The Federalist No. 10, Madison made it very clear that the Constitution needed to prevent the majority from depriving a minority of its rights. Specifically, Madison's concern was quite clearly to prevent the majority who were not owners of a lot of property from depriving the minority of large property owners of their right to possess much more wealth than ordinary people--the "right of property."

Richard Kreitner, in his Boston Globe article (December 13, 2015) titled, "The Constitution requires inequality," explains what Madison wrote this way:

“Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens,” Madison writes near the beginning of the essay, gesturing, as he does throughout The Federalist, to the fallout from Shays’ Rebellion, “that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”

That majority, it slowly becomes clear, are the debtors and small landowners, those more recently designated the 99 percent. “The diversity in the faculties of men,” Madison explains, leads to different “rights of property,” and this difference represents “an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests” in the political community. “The protection of these faculties is the first object of government,” he adds.

The main purpose of the new Constitution, then, was to preserve inequalities among individuals and the inequalities in the distribution of property among them. “Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society,” Madison observes. Ever had it been, and ever under the Constitution would it be. The division of wealth and political power, between the haves and the have-nots, between (as the new Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan has put it) the makers and the takers, was to be carefully maintained. For Madison, in Federalist No. 10, the question was how to do so while at least nominally “preserv[ing] the spirit and the form of popular government.”

The Whiskey Rebellion

After the rich Americans had their new strengthened national government and George Washington was its president, another tax--this time national--was levied against the poor farmers in states south of Massachusetts that included the Appalachian mountains. These poor farmers could only obtain money for their crops by distilling some of it into whiskey and selling the whiskey. The U.S. government, in order to pay back the interest on loans made to it by rich people, decided in its infinite wisdom (again, largely the wisdom of Mr. Alexander Hamilton) to get the money by taxing this whiskey.

This led to the Whiskey Rebellion, which forced George Washington to suppress it with another private army of rich people and mercenaries that he organized--an army of "12,950 militiamen...an army approximating in size the Continental force that followed him during the Revolution" against King George III! Washington just happened to own ten thousand acres of prime land in these western regions, in addition to the land back east where he owned slaves. But never mind--poor farmers, not the likes of George Washington, would have to pay the rich the interest on their loans to a government of, by and for the rich.​

The Whiskey Rebellion broke out in 1794 in western Pennsylvania. It was a rebellion of the poorest people against a federal tax that was destroying their ability to live, a tax that aimed to further enrich the richest Americans.​

"At one point 7,000 western Pennsylvanians advanced against the town of Pittsburgh, threatened its [rich] residents, feigned an attack on Fort Pitt and the federal arsenal there, banished seven members of the community, and destroyed the property of several others. Violence spread to western Maryland, where a Hagerstown crowd joined in, raised liberty poles, and began a march on the arsenal at Frederick. At about the same time, sympathetic 'friends of liberty' arose in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and back-country regions of Virginia and Kentucky. Reports reached the federal government in Philadelphia that the western country was ablaze and that rebels were negotiating with representatives of Great Britain and Spain, two of the nation's most formidable European competitors, for aid in a frontier-wide separatist movement."

In response, what did President George Washington do?

"President Washington nationalized 12,950 militiamen from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia--an army approximating in size the Continental force that followed him during the Revolution--and personally led the 'Watermelon Army' west to shatter the insurgency." [Quotations are from the book about the Whiskey Rebellion cited above.]

The Whiskey Rebellion rebels understood perfectly that the rhetoric about equality and no taxation without representation was just rhetoric, and that the new rulers of the "independent" American government did not intend to honor that rhetoric at all.

This is the real history of We the People. Read these books and you'll learn how the United States has been a dictatorship of the rich right from the beginning. When people ask, "When did we lose our democracy?," the answer is that we never really had it.

John Adams?

John Adams was on the side of the rich upper class and was an enemy of ordinary people--the have-nots. You can see that this is so by looking at these two website articles about him:

1. Regarding his opposition to Shays's Rebellion (he spelled it "Chaises") and to the Whiskey Rebellion (both of which rebellions were by the have-nots against the haves): "John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 30 June 1813" at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-06-02-0216 .

2. Regarding his opposition to allowing non-wealthy people to vote: "John Adams Explains Why People Without Property Should Not Be Able to Vote" at https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1645 .

Thomas Jefferson versus The Haitian Slave Rebellion/Revolution

In 1804 the slaves of Haiti succeeded in their revolution and achieved independence. As Wikipedia writes of this slave revolution, "It was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery, and ruled by non-whites and former captives." Thomas "All men are created equal" Jefferson was president from 1801 to 1809, so he had enormous ability to help the newly freed slaves in Haiti, or harm them. What did he do? The same Wikipedia article says this:​

"The American President Thomas Jefferson—who was a slaveholder himself—refused to establish diplomatic relations with Haiti (the United States did not recognize Haiti until 1862) and imposed an economic embargo on trade with Haiti that also lasted until 1862 in an attempt to ensure the economic failure of the new republic as Jefferson wanted Haiti to fail, regarding a successful slave revolt in the West Indies as a dangerous example for American slaves.[131]"

With friends like this, We the People don't need enemies!​

Regarding slavery, ditch the totally false idea we’ve been taught that the Founding Fathers were all about being against monarchical tyranny and just happened to be slave-owners (or slave merchants) at a time when nobody thought slavery was wrong.

If you read a history of the decades leading up to the 1776 declaration of independence, about why the upper class colonists (the Founding Fathers and their like) were so angry at the “Crown” (as the British government was called), then you will learn that the main reason for this anger was that the upper class colonists, who were getting fabulously rich from slave labor, feared that the Crown was moving towards abolishing slavery, especially when it did in fact abolish slavery in England (not elsewhere) in 1772.

I’m going to provide some quotations from a history book about this period by Gerald Horne. What one learns from this book is that the colonists were making a fortune from slave labor but were also frightened to death by those very same slaves because the slaves had been rising up over and over again and killing their slave masters with knives and guns and fire and poison.

At the same time, the Crown saw that the extremely brutal chattel slavery that was enriching the colonists was also endangering the British Empire. Here’s why. Britain’s fierce imperial enemies were Spain and France, both of which treated Africans much better than the colonists did, and the slaves all knew this. Escaped slaves always tried to get to places controlled by Spain or France. Spain and France held territory in North America adjacent to British held territory and they were able to attack the British with the huge advantage that they could promise the slaves freedom if they joined the Spanish (or French) military attack on the British. Furthermore, Spain and France mobilized lots of Africans in their armies. The colonists, in contrast, feared arming any Africans because they knew the Africans would likely turn on them, their hated masters. For these reasons (as well as some moral opposition to slavery itself by some in England), the Crown came to be feared by the colonists as an abolitionist force.

What really escalated this fear was the edict by the Royal governor of Virginia in 1775, Lord Dunmore. Dunmore, in response to colonial opposition to royal policies (such as the Stamp Act, etc.), declared that he would free and arm enslaved Africans in order to squash the anti-colonial (anti-Crown) revolt.

Horne reports:

Janet Schaw was passing through North Carolina then and noted that an edict of the Crown on 12 June 1775 had offered a pardon to all rebelling settlers who sought conciliation—but somehow, this was not what they heard. Instead, she recalled, they were told London “was ordering the Tories to murder the Whigs and promising every Negro that would murder his Master and family that he should have his Master’s plantation”—and, she said, somehow the Africans believed this to be true, which meant that a heavy “price” would be paid.

She was stunned to ascertain that “an insurrection was hourly expected. There had been a great number of them,” meaning Africans, “discovered in the adjoining woods the night before, most of them with arms.” This had forged a remarkably high level of solidarity among settlers—and terror against Africans. She was told that this Negro-phobic “artifice” was a wily “trick intended in the first place to inflame the minds of the populace and in the next place to get those who had not before taken up arms to do it now and form an association for the safety of the town,” even though by this juncture she found it likely that “the Negroes will revolt.”123

Whatever the case, a signal factor in instigating presumed loyal subjects to become fire-breathing radicals was the very idea that London was stirring a dreaded “servile revolt.”124 Convincing settlers that Africans would rise and murder them all was a charge that did not seem far-fetched in light of [the violent slave revolts that Horne earlier has described] Manhattan 1712, Antigua 1736, Stono 1739, Manhattan 1741, Jamaican Maroons, and all the rest.

That London seemed to be moving toward abolition in 1772, which had been preceded by arming Africans to fight in the Caribbean, gave ballast to the claims made against [Royal] Governor Martin. Settlers in North Carolina already were rattled when an enslaved African named Sanders was found guilty of having shot a colonist; the defendant, though worth a considerable eighty pounds, was accorded a wrenching verdict: “burn the said Negro alive.”125

Such alarms were consistent with what James Madison thought he knew, for it was in January 1775 that he was informed of a plan by London to emulate [Royal governors] Martin and Dunmore by arming the enslaved to squash his revolt.126

A few months later, the future president [our esteemed Founding Father] shakily referred to “tampering with the slaves,” as he alluded to Dunmore’s plan “to make great use of them” in case of escalating conflict. The “truth” was, said this diminutive and bookish Virginian, that Dunmore was meddling in the “only part in which this Colony is vulnerable; if we should be subdued,” he warned gravely, “we shall fall like Achilles by the hand of one that knows that secret.”127

Horne reports elsewhere:

Intentionally or not, Lord Dunmore had poked a stick into a hornet’s nest. One historian has observed that as early as the 1760s in Virginia it was “likely” that “every white person in the eastern counties knew of a free person who had been killed by a slave”; thus, “individual whites had nightmares about waking up amid slaves or feeling the first spasms of a stomach contorted by poison.” They had just endured a remarkable spate of slave plots driven by the flux brought by the Seven Years’ War22—and now it was being suggested that Africans armed by the state were going to be unleashed. Colonists had endured actual poisonings by the enslaved, had to squash slave revolts instigated by Spaniards, and now confronted Africans armed by London. It is little wonder that the settlers rose as one to oust London’s rule.

As for the absurd notion that the Founding Fathers just happened to be making a fortune from slavery but this really had nothing to do with their revolt against the Crown, and that anyway nobody back then knew slavery was wrong, there’s this, reported by Horne:

Like many Africans, the exiled Thomas Hutchinson, the last [Royal] colonial governor of Massachusetts, found Jefferson’s Declaration [of Independence] to be the epitome of casuistry. If the rights enumerated were so “absolutely inalienable,” he asked querulously, how could the august delegates reconcile depriving so many Africans “of their rights to liberty”?30 One astonished resident in Bristol, England, remarked after reading the Declaration that “one would imagine that the Parliament of Great Britain … had treated” the rebels “with as great cruelty and as much injustice as they [rebels] … treat their Negro slaves.”31

The point is this. Our Founding Fathers were the BAD GUYS of their day! They were the cruelest of the slave-masters. They feared anything that might lead to the end of slavery and their absolute power over the slaves including their power to burn even a free African alive. And LOTS of people “of their time” (not to mention the slaves!) knew very well that slavery was wrong.

Our Founding Fathers feared the entire working class, slave and non-slave. In order to persuade the non-slave working class to enlist in Washington’s army against the Crown, the Founding Fathers used the rhetoric of “liberty” and “We the People”; it was just rhetoric, ignored as soon as it was no longer necessary.

These Founding Fathers did not invent a better form of government than monarchy, just a different form, a form that enabled the rich to dominate and oppress the have-nots, as I discuss in detail here and also here.

What Now?

Let's pick up where We the People left off back in the days of the Shays's and Whiskey Rebellions.

To read some ideas about how we can do that, please visit www.PDRBoston.org .

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* “During the 1760s and 1770s Washington mounted a campaign for land on the frontier more impressive than any he ever executed as a general—and more successful. He had an acquisitive genius and was a ruthless exploiter of advantage. Governor Dinwiddie had offered a 200,000-acre bounty to encourage enlistments for the war. After the fighting ended, however, it took some persuasion to convince the House of Burgesses to finance the governor’s promise. By the time that the militia’s leader—George Washington—got around to petitioning and persuading the new governor and House of Burgesses to deliver on the bounty, he had accumulated claims to more than 20,000 of those frontier acres for himself.

"Between the years 1754 and 1769 Washington purchased rights from soldiers too poor, too cynical, or too naïve to bank on the word of an ex-governor. Some gladly surrendered their apparently ephemeral claims; others declined Washington’s offers of £ 10 for each 2000 acres. Some men suspected that he labored disingenuously in behalf of the grantees in order to force them into capitulation to his offers. Why, they asked in retrospect, did it take their commander a decade and a half to draw up the petition and exert his influence within the House of Burgesses? Some men even refused to sell to Washington, while agreeing to identical terms offered by others. So Washington took his investment scheme underground and engaged his brother Charles to find out “(in a joking way, rather than in earnest, at first)” what value the militiamen put on their rights. Once he had cajoled this information from the men, Charles was to purchase 15,000 acres in his own name. “Do not,” George insisted, “let it be known that I have any concern therein.” If the truth were known, prices would rise, resentment would rekindle, and the scheme for vast acquisitions would founder on the shoals of Washington’s unpopularity with the men. 11

"Once Washington succeeded, the grant materialized during the next session of the assembly. There is no evidence to substantiate the militiamen’s accusations that the timing was more than a coincidence, but it is clear that Washington lied about the openness of his accumulation of rights. There is no doubt that some of his comrades-in-arms were furious at him for his machinations. He broke a Virginia law limiting the size of surveyed tracts. Contrary to another law he secured an additional personal grant of 5000 acres. He engrossed the best soil for himself at the expense of fellow officers and men who trusted their commander to make a fair survey and distribution. The whole process was not, as Washington averred, “a lottery only.” 12

"The Virginian’s lust for frontier soil did not end here, though. In 1773 he was still charting claims and entreating a western Pennsylvania agent to scout out more land “that you would increase my quantity to fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five thousand acres” in that district alone. Eventually, Washington would own over 63,000 acres of trans-Appalachia, becoming one of the largest absentee landlords the western country knew during his day. Settlers who based their counter-claims on deeds or on proto-Lockeian arguments of superior right to ground they tilled, both fell before Washington’s assaults. Indians, the laws of Pennsylvania, and edicts by the monarch of the British Empire proved mere annoyances crushed by the superior force of Washington’s determination to own ever more land. 13”

— The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution by Thomas P. Slaughter

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