Perfect Union
Uncle Roger just keeps emailing me!
Attack, didn’t we live under a confederate union before the founding fathers formed “a more perfect union” Did the Articles of Confederation fail?
Yes we did. But we won the Revolutionary War under the Articles of Confederation, and any constitution that can guide a fledgling nation through a war as gruesome as that can hardly be called a failure. No, I blame Alexander Hamilton for the Federation. Hamilton was the most vocal of the Federalists and became iconic of the Federalist movement. He also authored the majority of the Federalist Papers, along with James Madison and John Jay.
See, the thing is that the Federalists reasoned that in a Republic, there would be no need to guarantee personal rights because those in government would all be elected, and therefore would never harm the people they represented. Although good in theory, it’s very odd to me that they wouldn’t be more ready to ensure the personal freedoms of the citizens after fighting such a bloody war for exactly those reasons. It should have been painfully obvious that without personal freedoms guaranteed, the government can always be perverted to invade and harm the citizens’ lives.
The Confederation was designed with personal freedoms in mind, and the Federalists wanted to put all of our freedoms in the hands of the government. If you notice, the original Constitution, as written by Federalists, mentions nothing of the ordinary man. It was the Bill of Rights, written by those who had supported maintaining the Articles of Confederation, that maintained the liberties of John Q. Public. The Bill of Rights would later become the first ten Amendments of the Constitution, the last testament to the libertarian Articles of Confederation.
Damn you, Hamilton.
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