Sentiments and Words Worthy of President's Day Celebration - 2011

February 21, 2011 | Self

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President's Day is a day to celebrate those Presidents who have exhibited untiring devotion and dedication to the essential ideas of liberty, as laid out in the Declaration of Independence and structured into the Constitution of the United States. recognizing that Constitution's limits on their power. Early Presidents, such as Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Jackson stressed that Constitution's principles as the guardian of liberty for the nation and its people.

A president whose philosophy fails to recognize the superiority and sovereign "people's power" of that document undoes all the monumental work accomplished by the Founders on behalf of liberty and leaves the law afloat and without anchor, relying, as of old, on mere imperfect men and women.

From Page xv of "Our Ageless Constitution," are excerpted words from President Andrew Jackson's Proclamation of December 10, 1832:

"We have received it [the Constitution] as the work of the assembled wisdom of the nation. We have trusted to it as to the sheet anchor of our safety in the stormy times of conflict with a foreign or domestic foe. We have looked to it with sacred awe as the palladium of our liberties, and with all the solemnities of religion have pledged to each other our lives and fortunes here and our hopes of happiness hereafter in its defense and support. Were we mistaken, my countrymen, in attaching this importance to the Constitution . . .? No. We were not mistaken. The letter of this great instrument is free from this radical fault. . . . No, we did not err! . . . The sages . . . have given us a practical and, as they hoped, a permanent* Constitutional compact. . . . The Constitution is still the object of our reverence, the bond of our Union, our defense in danger, the source of our prosperity in peace: it shall descend, as we have received it, uncorrupted by sophistical construction, to our posterity. . . ."

*Underlining added for emphasis

During this President's Day celebration, let us recognize and honor the words and sentiments of Jackson on that day in 1832, when the counry was young and the passion for liberty was alive in the hearts of citizens.

Thomas Jefferson's "First Inaugural" outlined what he deemed to be the essential principles. Look them up, and read them to your children.

In an 1816 letter, his words carry such importance and foresight that they deserve repeating on this particular President's Day, for he highlights the nature of the problems we face in 2011, considering that the largest employers are government entities, meaning that his last line describes a situation where citizens literally are hiring themselves to "rivet the chains on the necks of their fellow-sufferers."

"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." -

Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39

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Contribute your own favorite presidential affirmations of our Constitution's protections. If enough of those are included here, and circulated to others, that will be a meaningful celebration of President's Day.