Was Frankenstein Really Uncle Sam? Vol X: Notes on the Meaning of the Declaration of Independence

By Richard J. Rolwin

This is one of the ten volumes on the Declaration. The first four volumes of this series contain each 365 essays. These last six contain about 36 essays each.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 30, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462809936

Book preview

Was Frankenstein

Really Uncle Sam?

Vol. X

Notes on the Meaning of the

Declaration of Independence

Richard J. Rolwing

President of

THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR THE

STUDY OF THE DECLARATION OF

INDEPENDENCE

Columbus, Ohio

Copyright © 2008 by Richard J. Rolwing.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

The Basis

Scams

Frankenstein

Under God

Supreme Court Acknowledgements of the Declaration

The Resolution

Talbot V. Commanders/Owners of Three Brigs

Some Less Significant Cases

Chisholm v. Georgia

Ware v. Hylton, 3 U.S. 199 (1796)

19th Century Cases

An Integralist

The Constitution’s Dependence on the Declaration

James Madison

The Declaration’s Charges Classified

Answers to a Difficulty

A Saint’s Proof for God

Limited Government

Political Authority

A Breather

Another Jewel from Harry Jaffa

A Typical Reaction to our Work

The Unmentionable

H. L. Mencken

Christianity and Myth

Christian Philosophy

Monotheism

Was Original America Religious?

The Declaration’s Constitutional Relevance

Islam’s Human Rights

President Bush and God

Teacher’s Guide

The Speech of the Unknown

Sacrilization versus Secularization

Endnotes

The Basis

Chief Justice John Marshall, whose giant statue is the most prominent piece of art in the majestic U.S. Supreme Court Building, in his most famous decision, Marbury v. Madison (1803), said: "That the people have an original right to establish, for their future government, such principles as, in their opinion, shall most conduce to their own happiness, is the basis, on which the whole American fabric has been erected… ¹

"This original and supreme will organizes the government, and assigns, to different departments, their respective powers… From these, and many other selections which might be made, that the framers of the Constitution contemplated that instrument, as a rule for the government of courts, as well as legislatures…

"Thus, the particular phraseology of the Constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the Constitution is void, and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument."

The first paragraph says the basis of the American government is the Declaration’s principle that people have an original right to establish their government. Yet we have seen many constitutional scholars claim that the Declaration was not at all relevant for the Constitution originally, and also claim that since 1787 it has not been relevant, is not now, and should not be, or become, relevant to our Constitution and to the legal system, above all our courts, derived from, and dependent upon, that Federal Constitution as their basis.

The second paragraph above detailed the exercise of that right in forming the Federal Government. That exercise was of an original and [so] supreme will. He is elaborating the meaning of the Declaration’s principle (of original right) as the basis of our government.

The third paragraph applies the significance of that principle for courts and legislatures. He says there are other reasons for his teaching that the framers (and that would then include the ratifiers) meant the Constitution to be the Supreme law expressive of the original will of the people which was supreme. He does not refer to the executive authority or power, because the case is about a conflict between legislative and judicial actions. Both depend for their authority and their power upon the Constitution whose supremacy was and remains based upon the Declaration’s philosophy.

The fourth paragraph says that the Declaration’s principle is applicable to all written constitutions in all nations and states. Here he says all government departments are bound by the Constitution. If not, the Declaration’s philosophy of government is only hot air, as so many contemporary thinkers today say.

Marshall did not push his position to the utmost possible by giving also the basis of the people’s original supreme right to form their own constitutional government. The Declaration did that by claiming that right came from God who endowed all men with it. He could have backed up his position better, and he should have, for if a judge can appeal to the Declaration, he can certainly appeal to what the Declaration appealed. That he never went all the way set a bad precedent for his successors.

In President George Washington’s famous 1796 farewell address, he said: The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. That right pre-exists constitutions and governments. Where did that conviction come from? The Declaration of Independence. Where did the right come from? The Declaration declares it. Our political system, including our Constitution, is based upon that right we declared in our Basic Charter as God-given.

Washington himself might have said this more explicitly, though he did say more than Marshall did later: "But the Constitution which at any time exists till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people is sacredly [emphasis added] obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government."²

Washington saw that the Declaration’s teaching about rights was in no sense whatsoever any derogation or diminishment of the co-existence of man’s duties. Duties go hand-in-hand with rights. He insisted that our duties to respect the Constitution as the expression of the people’s rights were as sacred as the rights themselves. They were, and are, as sacred, God-based.

To violate them goes against God. However, instead of getting explicitly theological, Washington turned to a pragmatic consideration which was only implicitly theological inasmuch as it was implicitly moral.

If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.

Historical records contain plenty of statements which evidence that for Washington morality necessarily involved a relation to God. Here we primarily point out that for him, the Constitution depended upon the Declaration, and in accordance with the Basic Charter, our duties to respect God-given rights are themselves God-given and sacred.

Scams

A scam is an elaborate swindle, usually involving many people, multiple dimensions, numerous levels, sophisticated explanations, deceitful motivations, outright lies, enormous damages and serious injuries to all those taken in by it, even those taken into it to become agents of it.

Marxism was a scam. Over its 140 year span its promoters published thousands of books and even more thousands of articles about every possible subject seen from inside the scam’s view. If any view was ever a comprehensive view, it was Marxism. We said was. For no one promotes it any more intellectually outside China. It floats dead in the water. No non-Marxist sympathizer of it pushes any of its ideas and projects under that name, Marxism, any more.

It was the ideology of the one of the planet’s great empires. It included, even focused on, detailed practical aspects. Its goal was not really to explain things but change them for the better. It only sought to explain why what it thought was better was better. Despite all of that, it was never very persuasive. That is obviously why from its very beginning it had to be coercive.

Millions were taken in, taken over, and taken out, by it. Millions suffered and died or were killed in the scam’s working. Its fundamental position was that the world’s process and humanity’s history are completely explainable without God. It was organized atheism on a massive scale backed up with nuclear weapons. The very first principle of the scam was do away with religion. Forget God. All the intellectual disciplines, all the practical disciplines, and all the artistic skills will progress unimaginably better if God is taken out back and buried.

Not a few scholars of different disciplines have also called Freudianism a gigantic scam, and Freud himself a great fraud. His scheme, too, has been left behind by most psychologists and psychiatrists, no longer compelling or even adequate, and also miserably ineffective, even if lucrative for practitioners.

Of course, there are uncountable other scams by moderns of lesser stature than Marx and Freud. Uncountable? Our Declaration would call any science, any attempt to explain nature, without God, a scam. It would call any (discipline of) humanity, any attempt to explain human history or human society, without God a scam. It would call any legal system, any political theory, any philosophy, any ethics, with no place for God a scam. It would call any effort to concoct any theory that must be deliberately non-comprehensive a scam.

Metaphysics is the presupposition of physics, and God is the presupposition of metaphysics, even if a physics professor need not be a metaphysician, nor a metaphysician a theologian or a divine. Metaphysics is also the presupposition of ethics which is a presupposition of politics. And God is a presupposition of metaphysics.

You can no more fully understand and explain political realities, human realities, without God than you can understand and explain subhuman realities, biological or astronomical, without God. According to the Declaration, it would be even easier to understand and explain physical nature and subhuman agents without God than it would be to understand and explain human beings without God, for these latter bear some feature specially touched by God. God and man are communicable, for two of the references of the Declaration to God are prayerful.

So all the sciences, natural and social, all the humanities, including philosophy and religion, and all the practical disciplines, the arts of medicine, music, engineering, and business, need to investigate how the Declaration’s God can be permitted to come out of the closet, and enlighten their professors, students, and practitioners. They all need to question contemporary intellectuals’ Theo-phobia, and ask why the mass of great educational institutions and agencies continually sound as if they are pretending that no God exists. For He is their ultimate unmentionable, the most politically incorrect word imaginable.³

Indisputably, most of the soldiers of our revolutionary army would have called them all traitors or disloyal aliens who should abandon our ship of state. Many thousands of colonials were just that, and did just that. Supporters of the Declaration had recognized the danger to the new nation of Loyalists to Britain. Abiding within but opposed to it, they were like termites whose tiny eatings will finally destroy the structure and its tailings altogether.

If the Declaration was our political foundation, then our political termites of today who repudiate the Declaration have already heavily eaten away Uncle Sam’s base. He totters.

Frankenstein

Frankenstein was a human construct, although his makers used natural products. Those products were either non-living chemicals or pieces of dead corpses. None of his parts were transplants from willing living people. Even when some kind of electric shock woke Frankenstein up, or alive, he was still not human, or at least, not fully human. He was definitely a freak. He was a human product and yet an inhuman product. Although humans have been responsible for uncountable inhuman phenomena throughout human history, this manufactured man was no son of Adam, no descendant of Abraham, no brother to any Christian, no reincarnated soul. He was a creature without any history behind him, neither fallen nor grace-able, unencumbered with any relations to any human being, and the most perfectly isolated individual monad imaginable.⁴ He was certainly not one of those whom the Declaration said were created equal. He was not endowed with any natural rights by any creator, since he was never created, only manufactured, little different from a mechanized robot.

Yet he was precisely the kind of being that so many modern men want to be, claim they are, insist everyone else is, and are bent on reproducing.⁵ People who claim the freedom and the right to clone human embryos, even human duplicates, even for organ farming, do not operate under the Declaration’s God.

Frankenstein represents human power to make of everything exactly what we want it to be regardless of any natural law. The modern liberal secularist temper seeks to make marriage, the absolutely fundamental social union and contract, only what we want it to be. He thinks we can and should make a new up-to-date polity only what we want it to be, and he wants to rewrite a new Constitution or to exploit, without amending, and merely by judicial decree, our old one according to contemporary secular opinion.

Why should we, that temper cries, respect the dead hand of the past, which is only the opinions and values of dead white European males? How can they bind us continuously? If we are free, we are free to do what they did, just concoct a new political framework that we prefer out of the same thin air which they did, since the thin air of their Enlightenment is all fogged up. After all, the public and the courts have permitted the Federal Government to grow to gigantic size with the accumulation of multitudinous institutions and agencies for promoting and controlling many aspects of our national life for which there are no justifications inside our Constitution. We have been making over our Constitution anew progressively for many generations just because we want to, with no regard for natural law’s principle of the rule of law that requires submission to our fundamental positive law, our Constitution.⁶

Stalin wanted his scientists to create a new tribe of men he could use as simply unpaid and unfed military fodder. Marxism always spoke of its bringing forth the new man, as well as the utterly new society with no state or government. Nazism tried to produce a new type of man, a perfected species that would outlast all survival struggles with others. The eugenics of Margaret Sanger and all her followers sought to purify the human race of characters who were less interested in developing their culture than in reproducing their kind.

Our contemporary scientists want to use the latest microscopic biology to produce new offspring whose features and qualities we can and will prescribe ahead of time. Despite the fact that the scientist who initiated sex changes and led their spread for a generation or two has since repudiated the practice, many of our contemporaries have undergone (truly illusory) sex changes, making themselves, they think, only the sex and/or gender they want to be.

The very repudiation of the Declaration by our social leaders repudiates the natural law, the laws of nature and of nature’s God, precisely so that we can do with our bodies as we will, unencumbered by any built-in necessities or imperatives. Frankenstein never really died; he just was a deficient case of what we want to make of ourselves. He was nearly a perfect example of the Nietzschean will to power on the part of his makers, contemptuous of all realities and truths given to man for his map of life. In fact, nothing modern secular man has received is a gift to be grateful for and treasured. And that includes the Declaration of Independence.

Under God

While the Declaration never explicitly uses this precise phrase, we have said that if you wanted to compress the entire Declaration down to two words, they would be the Pledge’s under God.

The phrase under God can be an indicative statement of every creature’s, human or not, complete dependence upon God as the Originator, Maintainer, and Terminator of their being or existence and their action or operation, whether they are capable of realizing this or not, and whether they do realize it or not, and whether, where it is possible, they submit to God or not.

It can be just a metaphysical statement that the finite is contingent upon the Infinite, and even when a finite free choice is contrary to the will of the Creator. Merely that meaning of the statement can imply also an imperative aspect to being under God, namely, that any creature who is metaphysically under God and capable of acting accordingly should ethically act so, according to God’s law, and, when necessary, with help from God, if possible, that enables full compliance, full acting under God.

The phrase under God can also, simultaneously with the first meaning above, signify a thankful acknowledgement of one’s existence, the nature of one’s status, and one’s possession of a possibility of cooperating with God, acting under God.

Further, the phrase itself can signify a pledge that the proclaimers of the indicative status not only recognize and mean the second meaning above, but also positively promise to act in accordance with their status, to act always under God, in accordance with the laws of nature and nature’s God-Creator-and-Governor. Here the phrase is a promissory note, a permanently planned I do, with a unconditional determination for the future of I will. So it can bear indicative, imperative, and a future unconditional uses, as long as it is not intentionally restricted to simply a bare theoretical admission of finitude.

It requires no supernatural revelation of, or belief in, any propositional statements for one to acknowledge theoretically the status of finitude. It could, however, require such, even if received and accepted only implicitly, to sincerely pledge to act as dependent upon the laws of nature and nature’s God and so according to them.

It is true that Christian faith teaches that to carry out the pledge without any serious failure requires a receipt and acceptance of help from God, because of man’s condition of frailty, weakness, and instability.⁷

But if supernatural revelation is primarily God’s self-revelation, or the granting of His grace, a share in His divine life, rather than a series of only secondarily significant theoretical propositions (however wonderful they may be), then at least the fulfillment of the pledge in practice, if not the pledge itself, necessarily involves the gift and acceptance of supernatural revelation, of faith, hope, and love—divine life.

We are trying to show that the pledge under God, can always be an act of supernatural faith by the pledgers, even if it may not be such necessarily. That no doubt is a big, if not the only, reason why neither Jews nor Christians in America have protested against the phrase as such. Some Americans United for the Separation of Church and State may protest against its legality or constitutionality, at least when its use is called for by public officials, on the grounds that it mixes religion and politics and confuses loyalty to a nation with submission to God. Yet just because no Muslim, whose religion’s very name, Islam, means submission or under God, cannot coherently quarrel with the pledge itself, that does not prove that its use is a fanatical identification of one’s human government with God’s divine government.

Almost no scholar argues against the position that a main teaching or conviction of the Declaration is that government or human power should be limited, even if they do not agree that it is metaphysically limited in its nature or status. All Americans agree that humans should keep it limited.

Now the claim that the highest power known to man, today possessing a capacity to destroy the planet’s total life with nuclear weapons, should be limited, even regulated by right reason (the natural law), is a claim that human use of power is not unconditionally authorized, that is, it is not self-grounded, totally autonomous, answerable to nothing other than its own rationality and free choice. Being limited means that no man is God! We limit men because (we know) they are not God—that they are limitable, and answerable to God.

So without realizing it at all, the irreligious and secularist Americans who claim to be atheist actually recognize and implicitly acknowledge that the Unconditioned (God) exists when they affirm, as most do, that human government should be limited, if only because government’s knowledge and will, including its good will, are limited. (Even if its power could destroy this planet’s life, it cannot yet destroy Earth’s very existence.)

In other words, if you limit your government you do so in view of the Unlimited which you presuppose. As we have argued in previous essays, quite dependent upon Thomas Aquinas and Karl Rahner, to recognize a limit or even to determine a limit is to pre-recognize the unlimited. Inside your home, you can know that your home’s wall is not the utmost side of the total universe only if you know there is something beyond your wall. Hegel told Kant that Kant could not set a limit on human knowledge unless he had himself already transcended that limit (and thereby contradicted himself). To know the finite as finite presupposes that you know the infinite. And, of course, since every thing we know is finite and we know it is finite, we implicitly know God in every act of knowing any finite thing other than God. That means God is self-evident.

Conclusion: even the loudest atheists cannot not know what the Declaration means by God. However, because God is not some additional (finite and determinately knowable) thing like all creatures are, God is, and will always be, even in the world to come, infinitely mysterious to the human mind. That makes it possible to miss God in articulating theoretical knowledge but impossible to miss Him in the action of practical knowing.⁸ The atheist disputes anyone’s theoretical references to God even though he unavoidably confronts that Infinite Mystery in every moment of consciousness.

So even those who repudiate the Declaration because it is God-based cannot avoid recognizing in practice what they repudiate in theory. Otherwise, an atheist can do no wrong. Ignorance may be far from bliss, but malice or bad will is the pits. A man who suffers from the latter understandably says, I don’t think there is a God, but if there is, He is surely out to get me.⁹ The Declaration never denies what Christians believe, that God is out to get men—out of the pits—even if His touch will somewhat and temporarily scorch.

Supreme Court Acknowledgements of the Declaration

The first volume of the United States Reports of all the cases decided and opinions written by the Supreme Court over 230 years initially includes some decisions that preceded our 1789 Federal Constitution and U.S. Supreme Court.

We are going to look at many of the cases throughout our history. We are interested in both their explicit references to the Declaration indicating its significance, meaning, effect, and relevance, as well as their implicit references to it by their reliance upon its political philosophy and, maybe sometimes, its ethical or moral philosophy reflective of the natural law tradition on which the Declaration relied.

The first case was a April, 1781 Pennsylvania Supreme Court case, Republic v. Chapman, which refers to the Declaration three times. Chapman was indicted for high treason, but he claimed he was only a prisoner of war who had never been a subject of the commonwealth of PA. The prosecutor said he was an inhabitant, a subject, and owed allegiance to PA., for he was born there and only left to join the British army in December of 76, six months after the Declaration of Independence.

Chapman claimed that on 12/26/76 when he left PA., it had no government to provide him protection so he owed it no allegiance. It did not really exist. PA’s first constitutional act occurred only on 1/21/77 and all three branches of government were not organized yet for they began operating only in April of 1777. Also, on 1/26/79 its act reviving laws passed between 5/14/76 and 2/11/77 admitted those laws had been suspended during that time and not in force. Also, only after 2/1/77 did any act define treason, and when it did it was explicitly not retrospective. So, he argued, the 3/6/78 law under which I am charged is an ex post facto law, which is contrary to the words and the spirit of the PA constitution (to which he now appeals).

The prosecuting attorney general said by the Declaration of Independence of 7/4/76 every state in the union was solemnly declared to be free and independent. But even before that, on 11/25/75 (the Continental) Congress had recommended to (colony or state) legislatures that new governments should be framed, and courts of justice be set up to deal with captives, and, within PA, a Council of Safety with other temporary bodies actually discharged the functions of State.

On 7/15/76, in consequence of the Declaration of Independence, a General Convention met at Philadelphia and on 9/28/76 agreed to that social compact under which the people of this state are now united. By 11/28/76 (a month before Chapman bolted) many public officers were appointed and began functions including members of the [state’s] Executive Council."¹⁰

From this recapitulation, said the A.G., it appears that even before the establishment of the constitution a government under the authority of the people was administered by councils, committees, and conventions. While he admitted that the legislature, which is sovereign, began working only after the PA constitution was established, he relied on the Declaration’s political philosophy for the existence of political authority in PA before that date, and so he argues that no passage of any law was necessary to the government’s being in existence. The constitution was agreed to (be formed?) on 9/28/76 by the General Convention.

The Judge instructed the jury that a kind of government was administered before the present constitution, although the powers of sovereignty (at least, we interpose, some aspects of it) were lodged with Congress under whose authority councils and committees were elected by the people to secure, as far as so imperfect a system could, the rights of life, liberty and property, and to conduct (take part in) the war.

It was certain, indeed, that a formal compact is not a necessary foundation of government, for if an individual has assumed the sovereignty of the people and assented to it, whatever limitation might afterwards have been improved, still this would have been a legal establishment. Granted, no definition of treason against these bodies existed, but treason is a crime known to the Common Law. The later constitution incontrovertibly dissolved Britain’s governmental powers (over us) but not those previously exercised by councils and committees.

The Judge recalled that the Defense claimed the state’s sovereignty was incomplete until all its departments were in act so it could provide protection, and until then it could not expect allegiance (the duo of feudal politics).

Locke said that when the Executive is totally dissolved, as when James II abdicated, there can be no treason, for laws are a mere nullity unless there is power to execute them. But the Judge insisted that all the members had been already chosen before Chapman joined up with the Redcoats. The 2/11/77 act says that all inhabitants, present or future, shall pay allegiance. Then the Judge defined treason as a criminal attempt to destroy the existence of the government.

The Judge admitted the 1/28/77 Revival act was clumsy. It was meant to say that laws enacted originally under the authority of King George, and in force from 5/11/76 to 2/77 on that account, no longer derived their virtue and validity from that source. But it said their operation should be suspended AND that ‘required obedience to them, to the Common Law, and to much of the statute law of England as have heretofore been in force in PA." Still, the Judge thought that their view was that the separation by the D. of I.