As you know George Washington wasn’t bashful about going to war—even with an army of untrained, unschooled, and even unpaid farmers, merchants, and shopkeepers. And look what he did with the British!
Thomas Jefferson was not known for his willingness to fight. But when the Barbary Pirates continued their demands for payments of ransoms for ships captured in the Mediterranean, Jefferson refused to meet their demands. Instead he sent ships to fight the pirates (think Muslims). He had to request more men and ships to meet the test.
James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, wrote a message to the States complete with a dire warning that still holds true today. It’s quite a long sentence and paragraph (I took the liberty of dividing the paragraph in two for easier reading). Nevertheless, I’m going to repeat it here for you:
John Adams, our second President, believed adamantly in Virtue and Religion. He said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
In light of the debate that continues about the status of health care in the United States, I’ve been considering some of the thoughts of our Founding Fathers. They founded this nation on freedom, self-reliance, and accountability. Those are character traits that were important to them. Now we are considering how everyone can have adequate health care at the cost of the whole citizenry.
The Founding Fathers of our nation established a republic, a democracy that turned the power to the people. It was a new nation that said that the citizens, the people, would come first and would therefore choose their own leaders for the new nation.
We learned in our Contracts class, that to understand a contract you had to look into the “four corners” of the document to understand the basic premise. That apparently isn’t the case with the most important document in the establishment of the nation, the Constitution.
Most have forgotten that Thomas Jefferson refused to make blackmail payments to the Barbary Pirates for protection in the Mediterranean Sea. Our merchant ships were threatened with destruction or capture. Other nations had complied to their extortion demands. “But not the United States” Tom declared.
To All You Mothers Out There: