american revolution. was the founding of america creative? america

American Revolution

• Was the founding of America creative?

America

America: as a Nation

• Born of the enlightenment• Acceptance of the principle of freedom• Looking for better life• Strong middle class• Owned land• Egalitarian feelings• Lack of a dominant church• Technical/scientific orientation

Cause of Revolution

• Economic problems in Great Britain brought injustice

• Political injustices• American protest reactions

– Secret protest societies

– No taxation without representation

– Boston Tea Party

Implementation of Enlightened Concepts

• First and second Continental Congress

• Declaration of Independence– Jefferson’s creativity

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation…”

- Declaration of Independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.


We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States;… And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.


"When in the pathway of times that pass, it becomes meet for one group of men to dissolve the links of views between groups which have connected them with one that is not himself, and to guess among the powers of the earth the detached and same post of being apart to which the Laws of World and of World's God allow them, a good awe to the feeling of beings demand that they should say the reasons which force them to the breakup.“- Declaration of Independence without plagiarism of John Locke

“We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man, which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which, through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the habeas corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their expression in the Declaration of Independence.”

– Winston Churchill

Quote from John Kennedy when he was President of the United States upon hosting a dinner for a group of Nobel Prize winners.

“This is perhaps the greatest collection of intellects to ever dine in the White House with the exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined here alone.”

• How did the Americans win?– Methods of fighting– A few American successes (Trenton, Saratoga,

Swamp Fox)– Long supply lines from Great Britain– French support (military and political)– Support of some in Great Britain– Large area of engagement (New England to

Georgia)– Surrender of best general (Cornwallis at

Yorktown)– Diplomacy of Franklin and Adams

War of Independence

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."– John Adams in McCullough, David, John Adams,

Simon and Schuster (2000), pp. 236-7.

Establishing an Enlightened Government

• Roman Model– Checks and balances– Rule of law– Indirect election– 2 Branches of government

• Debate over the form of government

• Established principles of liberty (Bill or Rights)

View of America

• Alexis de Tocqueville– Revolution stemmed from

desire of freedom– Laws– Freedom of press – Religion– American attitude: get it done– Men and women: equal but

different

“The Revolution of the United States was the result of a mature and reflecting preference for freedom, and not of a vague or ill-defined craving for independence. It contracted no alliance with the turbulent passions of anarchy, but its course was marked, on the contrary, by a love of order and law. It was never assumed in the United States that the citizen of a free country has a right to do whatever he pleases; on the contrary, more social obligations were there imposed upon him than anywhere else. No idea was ever entertained of attacking the principle or contesting the rights of society; but the exercise of its authority was divided, in order that the office might be powerful and the officer insignificant, and that the community should be at once regulated and free.”

– Alexis de Tocqueville from Democracy in America

“What is understood by a republican government in the United States is the slow and quiet action of society upon itself. It is a regular state of things really founded upon the enlightened will of the people. It is a conciliatory government, under which resolutions are allowed time to ripen, and in which they are deliberately discussed, and are executed only when mature. The republicans in the United States set a high value upon morality, respect religious belief, and acknowledge the existence of rights. They profess to think that a people ought to be moral, religious, and temperate in proportion as it is free. What is called the republic in the United States is the tranquil rule of the majority, which, after having had time to examine itself and to give proof of its existence, is the common source of all the powers of the state. But the power of the majority itself is not unlimited. Above it in the moral world are humanity, justice, and reason; and in the political world, vested rights.”


“The people in America obey the law, not only because it is their own work, but because it may be changed if it is harmful; a law is observed because, first, it is a self-imposed evil, and , secondly, it is an evil of transient duration.”


Laws

Laws

"For as their laws and their governments were established by the voice of the people, and they who chose evil were more numerous than they who chose good, therefore, they were ripening for destruction, for the laws had become corrupted."

– Helaman 5:2

Conclusion (for me): You must teach morality so thatthe majority will think morally and obey moral laws. To do otherwise is futile and leads to lawlessness.

“If the sphere of his [an American judge] authority and his means of action are the same as those of other judges [in other countries], whence does he derive a power which they do not possess? The cause of this difference lies in the simple fact that the Americans have acknowledged the right of judges to found their decisions on the Constitution rather than on the laws. In other words, they have permitted them not to apply such laws as may appear to them to be unconstitutional.”


“The sovereignty of the people and the liberty of the press may therefore be regarded as correlative....In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils that it creates....It is an axiom of political science in that country [America] that the only way to neutralize the effect of the public journals is to multiply their number.”


The Press

“Men sacrifice for a religious opinion their friends, their family, and their country; one can consider them devoted to the pursuit of intellectual goals which they came to purchase at so high a price... Liberty regards religion as its companion in all its battles and its triumphs, as the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims. It considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.”


Religion

“America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement… No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and in his eyes what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do. This perpetual change which goes on in the United States ... serve[s] to keep the minds of the people in a perpetual feverish agitation, which admirably invigorates their exertions and keeps them, so to speak, above the ordinary level of humanity... The American, taken as a chance specimen of his countrymen, must then be a man of singular warmth in his desires, enterprising, fond of adventure and, above all, of novelty.”


Get it Done

“The United States of America has only been emancipated for half a century from the state of colonial dependence in which it stood to Great Britain; the number of large fortunes there is small and capital is still scarce. Yet no people in the world have made such rapid progress in trade and manufacturers as the Americans; they constitute at the present day the second maritime nation in the world, and although their manufactures have to struggle with almost insurmountable natural impediments, they are not prevented from making great and daily advances....But what most astonishes me of the United States is not so much the marvelous grandeur of some undertakings as the innumerable multitude of small ones.”


“Democratic nations will therefore cultivate the arts that serve to render life easy in preference to those whose object is to adorn it. They will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and they will require that the beautiful should be useful.”


“Thus the Americans do not think that man and woman have either the duty or the right to perform the same offices, but they show an equal regard for both their respective parts; and though their lot is different, they consider both of them as beings of equal value. They do not give to the courage of woman the same form or the same direction as to that of man, but they never doubt her courage; and if they hold that man and his partner ought not always to exercise their intellect and understanding in the same manner, they at least believe the understanding of the one to be as sound as that of the other, and her intellect to be as clear. Thus, then, while they have allowed the social inferiority of woman to continue, they have done all they could to raise her morally and intellectually to the level of man; and in this respect they appear to me to have excellently understood the true principle of democratic improvement. As for myself, I do not hesitate to avow that although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen woman occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the American, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: to the superiority of their women.”


Conclusion of the Founding Period

• Westward expansion• Civil war

– Gettysburg Address

THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Thank You

Thinking

"Preserve, then, the freedom of your mind in education and in religion, and be unafraid to express your thoughts and to insist upon your right to examine every proposition. We are not so much concerned with whether your thoughts are orthodox or heterodox as we are that you shall have thoughts."

– President Hugh B. Brown, First Presidency

“There is no philosopher in the world so great but that he believes a million things on the faith of other people and accepts a great many more truths than he demonstrates....A principle of authority must then always occur, under all circumstances, in some part or other of the moral and intellectual world. Its place is variable, but a place it necessarily has...Thus the question is, not to know whether any intellectual authority exists in an age of democracy, but simply where it resides and by what standard it is to be measured.”


“The idea of the unity of mankind constantly leads them back to the idea of the unity of the creator; while on the contrary in the state of society where men are broken up into very unequal ranks, they are apt to devise as many deities as there are nations, castes, classes, or families, and to trace a thousand private roads to heaven.”


“To evade the bondage of system and habit, of family maxims, class opinions, and, in some degree, of national prejudices; to accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as a lesson to be used in doing otherwise and doing better; to seek the reason of things for oneself, and in oneself alone; to tend to results without being bound to means, and to strike through the form to the substance – such are the principal characteristics of what I shall call the philosophical method of the Americans.”


“America is the only country in which it has been possible to witness the natural and tranquil growth of society, and where the influence exercised on the future condition of states by their origin is clearly distinguishable....These men had, however, certain features in common, and they were all placed in an analogous situation. The tie of language is, perhaps, the strongest and the most durable that can unite mankind....It was realized that in order to clear this land, nothing less than the constant and self-interested efforts of the owner himself was essential;...These men possessed, in proportion to their number, a greater mass of intelligence than is to be found in any European nation of our own time.”


“Aristocracies often commit very tyrannical and inhuman actions, but they rarely entertain groveling thoughts...In aristocratic ages vast ideas are commonly entertained of the dignity, the power, and the greatness of man. These opinions exert their influence on those who cultivate the sciences as well as on the rest of the community....You may be sure that the more democratic, enlightened, and free a nation is, the greater will be the number of these interested promoters of scientific genius and the more will discoveries immediately applicable to productive industry confer on their authors gain, fame, and even power....In the midst of so many attempted applications of so many experiments repeated every day, it is almost impossible that general laws should not frequently be brought to light; so that great discoveries would be frequent...If the democratic principle does not, on the one hand, induce men to cultivate science for its own sake, on the other it enormously increases the number of those who do cultivate it.”


american revolution. was the founding of america creative? america

Documents

america america

declaration of independencewe

separation declaration

united states of america

laws of world

rights of man

bill of rights

good people