Time: Sat Mar 15 15:54:28 1997
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Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 15:40:32 -0800
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From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: SLS: essay on original 13th amendment (fwd)
>From: Patriotlad@aol.com
>Date: Wed, 12 Mar 1997 16:32:31 -0500 (EST)
>To: pmitch@primenet.com
>cc: ricbdan@worldnet.att.net
>Subject: Fwd: The New Essay, part one.
>
>Mr. Mitchell -- your comments or corrections would be valuable.
>
>Richard
<snip>
>The Original Thirteenth Amendment: Titles of Nobility and Honor
>
>
>"In a Republic, Luxury and Corruption of Morals are said to be the
>invariable precursors of national dissolution," said Samuel F. Jarvis,
>in an address to the members of Phi Beta Kappa in 1806. "It is no less
>true that the perversion of national taste, and the disrelish for the
>solid attainments of science evince a degeneracy in Learning, Morals and
Religion."
>
>Published by Oliver Steele & Company, of New Haven, Jarvis' oration is rather
>typical of the "federalist" thinking of the men of New England in this era,
>including both scholars and sailors who were prospering under the new
>Constitution. Jarvis was speaking on the thirtieth anniversary of the
>founding of Phi Beta Kappa, so his remarks must be viewed as having real
>weight among the intellectual leaders of the fast-growing United States.
> Seventeen states were now represented in Congress, and the frontier was at
>the border of Indiana Territory and Ohio, which had been admitted to the
>union in 1803. Both areas were settled by the veterans of the Revolutionary
>War (and their pioneering children), especially from Connecticut.
>
>So, too, the town green and the New England town meeting were being
>replicated widely in Ohio, as was the principle of "republicanism." Plain
>and simple manners, Bible-based education, and state governments drastically
>limited by local control and a profound concern for property rights, are the
>hallmarks of these frontier republicans.
>
>"The cause of learning is intimately connected to the cause of virtue," said
>Jarvis to the members of Phi Beta Kappa. That philosophy was carried forward
>into Ohio and Indiana by land-hungry pioneers and by itinerant preachers
>schooled at Yale, and Brown and Princeton -- and intent on setting up public
>education based on the common principles of Christian morality. At the end
>of 1806 all of the frontier was aflame with the reports
>of Aaron Burr's treachery. Burr, eloquent and dapper and extremely popular,
>was quite probably a sociopath. President Thomas Jefferson's proclamation of
>November 27th, elucidating the Burr conspiracy in general terms and calling
>upon the people at large to suppress any insurrection, was the beginning of a
>titanic political struggle.
>
>In March and April of 1807, judicial proceedings against Aaron Burr and
>several of his confederates, conducted by Chief Justice John Marshall,
>resulted in two of these conspirators being freed for a lack of evidence, and
>Burr freed on bail. This hardened the animosity between Marshall and
>Jefferson, which had been a-building for many years.
>When Marshall displayed a public sympathy with Burr and his lawyer it
>revealed, as Fawn Brodie writes, that "the trial took on for Jefferson a
>wholly new dimension, the judiciary had once more become, as in Adams' time,
>a tool of politics."
>
>As Fawn Brodie notes, in her biography of the third President, Jefferson
>"would see to it that an amendment to the Constitution was introduced in
>Congress in 1807 and 1808 making it possible for judges to be removed by a
>joint action of the president and both houses of Congress. In both instances
>it failed ...." The history of this era includes years of difficult
>conflicts over smuggling and the cross-border trade into Canada.
>
>What both the federalists of the northern states and the
>Democratic-Republicans of the south agreed upon -- as a result of their
>experiences in shaping the new government of the United States -- was a
>renewed concern over the meddling of wealthy European business agents, called
>"factors," and of the various adventurers, royalist agents and spies
>operating on behalf of Spain, and Bonapartist France. The new states were
>positively overwhelmed with schemers and financial hucksters, but wages were
>rising and growth was everywhere in evidence. The period 1800 to 1818 was
>one of rising expectations and massive immigration into the Americas, and of
>"republicanism" on the march with Simon Bolivar in the former Spanish
>colonies. It was a good time for the federalist opponents of the
>Jeffersonians, including James Madison and James Monroe.
>
>Louisiana, with its prized port of New Orleans, was being prepared for
>statehood and all parties were concerned with the political ambitions of
>Jerome Bonaparte. The new Territory of Mississippi was also generating great
>wealth and men of vision were building plantation empires in these two
>regions, while Alabama was following its own course of development. So much
>growth and change was worrisome to the established powers in New England,
>where a secessionist movement had swept the region in 1809, and who generally
>detested both Thomas Jefferson and all things French. Behind it all, British
>agents and smugglers were all too happy to roil the waters of these
>remarkably stable, productive new states of the American Republic.
>
>By 1810 James Madison was the new President, and the combined concerns of
>both New England federalists and southern Democrat-Republicans led to the
>formulation of the so-called Title of Nobility Amendment, otherwise known as
>the original or missing Thirteenth Amendment. Passed by a two-thirds vote of
>the Senate, and a vote of 87 to 3 in the House, the Eleventh Congress issued
>this proposed section or Amendment to the Constitution at the end of the
>Second Session, and it reads:
>
> "If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or
>retain any title of nobility or honor, or shall without the
>consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension,
>office, or emolument of any kind whatever, from any
>emperor, king, prince, or foreign power, such person shall
>cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be
>incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them,
>or either of them."
>
>No one can say with complete authority, who wrote this Amendment proposed in
>1810, but it is consistent with the language employed by James Madison during
>the Constitutional Convention, and the arguments for ratification published
>with Alexander Hamilton, as the Federalist Papers. John Gaillard was the
>President Pro Tempore of the Senate when this section was voted out. So
>urgent was the concern of the several states regarding this Title of Nobility
>Amendment, that the legislature of Maryland met on Christmas Day of 1810 and
>ratified it!
>
>By the end of 1812 a total of twelve of the seventeen states had approved
>this section, but then war with Great Britain intervened and the whole
>process ground to a halt. Here is the beginning of theories for the
>conspiracy-minded, as the War of 1812 never did settle the issues that seemed
>to be at the root of the conflict; the war revealed the weakness of the
>permanent military officer corps, and the courage of the armed citizenry or
>militia, especially the Washington Guards. It produced bitterness and
>division.
>
>After the war was over the factions produced by this conflict were even more
>divided
>than they had been in 1806 and '07. Connecticut's legislators put the
>Amendment on the agenda, but as of April 22, 1813 they failed to take
>definitive action. South Carolina moved the question of ratification in the
>Senate of its legislature but nothing definitive remains in evidence from
>that era, although research continues on this matter.
>
>Rhode Island -- which was itself in a state of agitation over its original
>English Charter and over precise definitions of who could vote -- took up the
>matter of the Title of Nobility and rejected the proposed Amendment on
>September 15, 1814.
>
>The whole history of this Amendment is fraught with these problems: missing
>letters, and contradictory documents; misleading statements made by public
>officials, both during the ratification process and in the forty years
>following; and confusion in the
>new Republic over just how the States were supposed to give notification when
>an Amendment was ratified. Covering the Amending process, Article V of the
>Constitution does not stipulate any method for doing that. That means the
>several States have total discretion, and the power to select whatever means
>of announcing a ratification vote that their sovereign legislatures see fit
>to enact by law. An important measure passed April 20th, 1818, establishes a
>duty belonging to the Secretary of State, who "shall publish and make known"
>the results of votes taken by the several States, and issue certificates of
>ratification. But this law, amended in 1820, cannot and does not impair the
>rights of the States to communicate their decisions by the means that they
>decide to be proper.
>
>A most crucial juncture was reached in 1815, when early in the year Congress
>voted to authorize a new edition of the Laws of the United States, from the
>first day of the first session through the 4th of March of that year. The
>money was appropriated and the firm of Bioren and Duane was retained to
>assemble and print these Laws, in five volumes, including the Constitution of
>the United States and all of its Amendments.
>
>With a caveat included in its introductory pages, that the status of the
>Thirteenth Article of Amendment was in doubt, the Bioren and Duane edition of
>the "Laws of the United States ...." was duly published and contained the
>Title of Nobility Amendment as issued in 1810, correct and proper to the last
>comma, and listed as Article 13. Its front page contains the words,
>"authorized by an Act of Congress."
>
>But, as many critics of this Amendment have noted, Article V of the
>Constitution does not require -- or, therefore, allow -- an authorized
>publication to establish the facts of ratification. Three-fourths of the
>states are required to approve any given Amendment -- three-fourths of the
>states who participate in the Article V drafting and approval process, as
>members of Congress. Nothing in Article V allows a state which enters the
>union after an Amendment is passed along and sent to the states -- to vote
>for or against such a proposed section! That state may make a pro forma
>ratification but such a vote cannot count toward the total of three-fourths
>required under Article V, three-fourths of the several States which issued
>the Amendment being needed for the approval.
>
>No one knows if this was done in anticipation of a favorable vote to come out
>of South Carolina, or whether the authorities of that day did not consider
>Rhode Island's state government by English Charter as qualified to ratify (as
>noted, they turned it down).
>All of the documents relating to those arguments and others made in that era
>were destroyed when the British Army sacked Washington in 1814, and burned
>the Library
>of Congress and other federal buildings.
>
>The Bioren and Duane was duly published, and issued to members of Congress
>and others in Washington City, and copies of it survive to this day, in the
>Law School at Yale and in that University's Beinecke Rare Book Library. The
>craftsmanship of those printers and the paper employed in 1815 were
>extraordinary, and of the highest quality. President James Monroe and his
>Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, conducted themselves in 1817 and '18
>as if the Thirteenth Amendment was properly ratified. Questions arose over
>the process, though, and at the request of the House the seventeen states in
>the union in 1810 were polled by Adams on the issue of ratification of this
>Amendment. This is a key and crucial matter!
>
>To understand the faulty arguments which have been made against the validity
>of this Amendment, the Titles of Nobility section (with its Draconian
>penalties for accepting foreign pensions or emoluments), it is necessary to
>understand which States were polled by John Quincy Adams. Careful and
>meticulous research conducted by Brian March, among others, has positively
>established that the three States entering the union after 1810 -- Louisiana,
>Indiana and Mississippi -- were not polled by Secretary Adams. Since they
>did not participate in voting on the Amendment as required under Article V,
>when it was issued to the States, these three new members of the union were
>not considered qualified to ratify or reject it.
>
>That is the most crucial factor in understanding what happened next, and to
>why the Amendment was properly ratified and announced as such in 1819. The
>planters' economy of Virginia was a mature one, by 1818, and many state banks
>had issued large loans. Men of property enjoyed high values for their land,
>massive numbers of English workingmen had begun migrating to the new states
>in 1816, seeking to escape from stagnating wages and to find opportunity, and
>speculation was rampant.
>
>But there were men of letters who warned against the corrupting influence of
>British and Dutch money, and the power of the bankers behind the East India
>Company:
>
>"Paper against Gold, the History and Mystery of the Bank of England," was
>published by William Cobbett in 1817.
>
>The seriousness of this issue became transparently clear in 1819, when a
>financial panic closed banks all over Virginia. W. Cary Nicholas, who was
>governor of Virginia in 1818 and the director of a Richmond bank "was dragged
>into ruin," as Fawn Brodie puts it. He died leaving Thomas Jefferson holding
>a co-signer's note for $20,000, which would end up costing him some $1200 per
>year in interest alone. In this environment of speculation and mass
>bankruptcy, the leaders of Virginia met to authorize a new and comprehensive
>version of their state's laws, including the United States Constitution.
>
>When it was published (authorized in 1819, and issued in 1820), it included
>the Title of Nobility Amendment as the valid Article 13, and a special
>printing of four thousand copies was produced. This was the manner chosen by
>the Virginia legislature to announce and publish their ratification of this
>Amendment. Recent research in the archives of Virginia has revealed that
>multiple copies of this edition, also known as VA2, were forwarded to the two
>houses of Congress in Washington, to the President and to the Secretary of
>State. Also one copy of Virginia's organic laws, including the Thirteenth
>Amendment as valid, was placed with the Library of Congress, where it remains
>to this day. For many years those who oppose recognition of this
>controversial and important section of our Constitution, have argued that
>because Virginia did not, apparently, send a "Letter" to then Secretary of
>State John Quincy Adams, the ratification vote was somehow nullified.
>
>Because Article V does not stipulate that any such "Letter" be sent, the
>authorized publication by the Virginia legislature, and the now-docmented
>transmission of VA2 to the House and Senate and Secretary of State, must
>stand as pure and undisputable evidence of ratification. Seventy-two times
>in the years between 1819 and 1868, state or territorial editions of their
>organic laws have included this Title of Nobility Amendment as the valid
>Article 13 -- and that is entirely too many independent publications to be
>blamed on the mistakes made in Bioren and Duane, 1815. Almost immediately,
>state editions of the organic laws (and including the current Constitution of
>the United States with Article 13 in place), and acts of the legislature were
>published. North Carolina and Georgia have editions from 1819, Rhode Island
>has one in 1822, and Massachusetts published the Amendment as being ratified
>in 1823; and -- Connecticut had four publications by 1839.
>
>Virginia had every right to issue its ratification notice in such a manner,
>it paid for
>the printing and thus the original Thirteenth Amendment, barring foreign
>princes and powers from meddling in our domestic political and business
>affairs was ratified by thirteen of the seventeen states in the union in 1810
>-- and is now and has been a lawful part of the United States Constitution,
>for 178 years.
>
>It has also been suppressed and nearly forgotten since 1876.
>
>Work to sabotage this Amendment began almost at once, upon its publication by
>Virginia, and gained speed and allies after 1828. Most predictably, whenever
>an independent researcher begins to dig into just who wanted this valid
>section of our Constitution squashed, the influence of British bankers and
>their hirelings in these United States -- mostly attorneys-at-law -- comes
>clearly into focus.
>
>A pattern develops, over time, and from the vantage point of the 1990s the
>careful observer can identify just how this great and vibrant Constitutional
>Republic has been sapped by its many allegiances with Britain; and certainly
>with that socialist dinosaur now controlled from behind and above by the
>family 'Windsor, the German princes who own the most land in England, and who
>dominate the Court of St. James. Most educated Americans know little of the
>true wealth of the crowned heads of Britain and the Netherlands, just as they
>know little of the competing business interests, trusts and triads --
>criminal organizations -- who masquerade as public institutions, non-profits,
>corporations and foundations.
>
>There is another history behind the "accepted" or given history taught in our
>public schools and academies, a history of influence-peddling, spies and
>assassinations and the attempted destruction of our precious Constitution.
> The great Buckminster Fuller, poet, architect and inventor of the geodesic
>dome, elaborated on these truths in his opus magnus, Critical Path in 1981.
> His reward for a life spent laboring for the good of all humanity -- after
>his death his works are ignored by almost every great college and university,
>his principles are not taught, and only a handful of his fans and the global
>access of the Internet keeps his teachings alive. He taught that the royal
>families of Europe were simply fronts for, and parties to, the superbly
>organized commercial houses founding in the days of the great sailing ships.
> They are now so thoroughly intertwined with banking and electronic commerce
>and the intelligence services of their "home nations," as to be
>indistinguishable. What you see on the surface is not what you get down
>below, and always, said Bucky Fuller, always the true powers are those who
>control sailing, shipping and navigation on the oceans.
>
>In the era 1800 to 1818, the greatest challenge to the hegemony of Great
>Britain and her seapower was coming not from France, which was invested
>mostly in land-based armies and in securing farmland and mines -- but from
>the new, upstart, democratic-republicans of the United States. Everything
>that happened here was of concern to those who controlled British commerce,
>its fleets, and the crown itself.
>
>Thus, as of March 12, 1819, thirteen of the seventeen states in the union
>when the Eleventh Congress issued this Amendment for consideration, had
>ratified it. The rejection by New York state one year earlier, in March of
>1818, of this section was thus made moot. Connecticut may still take up the
>matter and issue a ratification that would be a valid one, as may South
>Carolina (if ever its records from that era can be retrieved). Nothing done
>by stealth or artifice can remove the Title of Nobility Amendment from our
>Constitution, lawfully, even though no published edition now extant shows it
>to be valid.
>
>As James Madison said, in arguing for ratification before the New York State
>legislature when he and Hamilton presented the new Constitution to a
>skeptical bunch of Yankees:
>
>"The Constitution requires an adoption in toto and forever. It has been so
>adopted by the other States. Adoption for a limited time would be as
>defective as an adoption of some of the Articles only." That is why the
>States are bound by new Amendents even when they have rejected them, and it
>is certainly the basis for aruging that once a State has approved an
>Amendment, it surrenders jurisdiction over it and cannot subsequently
>repudiate it or over-turn the ratification vote. The questions which
>surround the validity of the so-called Fourteenth Amendment principally
>revolve around the imposition of military-occupation governments on States
>which had returned to the union after the rebellion and Civil War of 1861-65,
>and the refusal of Congress to seat any of their Representatives or Senators
>unless that independent state had approved the section.
>
>The original Thirteenth Amendment was "put to death" during the Civil War,
>and for reasons which remain obscure, our most beloved President, Abraham
>Lincoln, issued two different "new" Amendments entitled Article 13, one in
>1861 and the currently designated "Thirteenth" or anti-slavery amendment, in
>1865. Yet it lived on in Colorado after the war, appearing in the 1868
>organic laws of the Territory, and apparently was considered valid when this
>State came into the union in 1876. That year was also the year that Wyoming
>Territory published its organic laws and the U.S. Constitution, including the
>original Thirteenth as Article 13, the anti-slavery amendment as Article 14,
>and the civil rights amendment known as the Fifteenth Amendment, as Article
>15. For reasons that are also obscure, here, Wyoming's Territorial leaders
>refused to recognize the so-called Fourteenth Amendment in 1876. After 1890,
>when Wyoming became a State, the original Thirteenth was not heard from
>again.
>
>
>
> @@@@@@@@@@@ end of part one @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
>
>
>
>
>
========================================================================
Paul Andrew, Mitchell, B.A., M.S. : Counselor at Law, federal witness
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