Posted on 12/02/2002 11:24:22 AM PST by Remedy
I live in Colorado Springs and know Dr Noebel and Kevin Bywater personally. I am using their curriculum to teach Bible classes at the Air Force Academy Preparatory School.
Nice to see we frequent some of the same haunts: Summit, STR, etc. I am currently working on a Doctorate in Religious Studies with an emphasis on comparative worldviews, church history, and apologetics. I go to those sites often, along with Probe and Access Research Network.
I am using their curriculum to teach Bible classes at the Air Force Academy Preparatory School.
OUTSTANDING!
The republicans weren't around until 1854. That's quite a bit later.
There's no confusion. It is a long settled issue. The church(es) and the state are seperate.
Democratic-Republicans, or Jeffersonians in this case, is what I'm familiar with. I made the comment with regards to the historical Republican party created in 1854 and the fact the democrats claim the lineage to the Democratic-Republicans.
In his great rivalry with Hamilton there is almost nothing he would not stoop to to destroy him.
JEFFERSON VS. HAMILTON Confrontations That Shaped a Nation, Noble E. Cunningham Jr. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000 186 pp.,
Jefferson was a Francophile; Hamilton, an Anglophile.
from their first meeting in late 1782 or early '83 until Hamilton's death in 1804. They served together in Washington's cabinet, Hamilton as secretary of the treasury and Jefferson as secretary of state. Consider that in letters to President Washington both of these heroes of the Revolution came perilously close to formally charging the other with treason.
Cunningham's method is uncomplicated. He presents the reader with more than forty documents--consisting mostly of letters, reports, and speeches--in seven chronological chapters. Jefferson's and Hamilton's documents are interwoven so that we see each man proposing arguments and responding to the other's arguments and assertions. Cunningham's interspersed commentary is minimal.
Jefferson was born into the "privileged world of colonial Virginia planters, Hamilton began life in an insecure world in the British West Indies, Hamilton's father deserted the family when he was eleven years old. He had to struggle to achieve the kind of education Jefferson enjoyed as a birthright and had to earn his social position through gallant service as an officer during the Revolution. We might say, then, that Hamilton early had hitched his star to government and rose by the grace of government. Jefferson, on the other hand, served government in the spirit of noblesse oblige.
To his credit, Cunningham does not indulge in such speculation. When he addresses the inevitable question of which of the two was superior, which one was "right" in this historic rivalry, he does so by quoting two other important biographers of Jefferson and Hamilton: Dumas Malone, who favors Jefferson, and Broadus Mitchell, who favors Hamilton.
Malone, in his two-volume Jefferson and the Rights of Man, offers this comparison of the two: "Perhaps that is the real secret of [Jefferson's] eventual political success, as it assuredly is of his enduring fame. He was a true and pure symbol of the rights of men because, in his own mind, the cause was greater than himself." To Malone, Hamilton, however, "comes out of this investigation worse than I expected. ... I cannot escape the conviction that he ... lusted for personal as well as national power."
Mitchell sees the two differently. In his Alexander Hamilton: The National Adventure, 1788--1804, Hamilton was the idealist: "He was in love with the noble ideal of creating a vigorous, expanding nation." Jefferson "heard voices, saw visions, but was far from the stage of devising institutions or finding ways and means of equipping a new social order."
For his part, as a historian of the conflict between Jefferson and Hamilton, Cunningham clearly defines his mission with as much detachment and objectivity as possible. He simply presents us with the evidence in the form of well-chosen primary documents.
The first issue to divide Jefferson and Hamilton as members of Washington's cabinet was how the victorious new nation would finance its war debt. Should the states share equally the burden of the national debt? But what of the states that had already substantially paid their war debt? Would they not, in effect, be punished by such a settlement? Should the debt be paid at once, or should it be financed? The questions were thorny, and as secretary of the treasury, Hamilton championed a solution that was eventually adopted, the formation of a national bank.
One important reason for such a move was that a properly funded national debt "answers most of the purposes of money. Transfers of stock or public debt are the equivalent to payments in specie; or in other words, stock, in the principal transactions of business, passes current as specie." Hamilton then enumerated some of the attendant benefits of having established such stock: "First. Trade is extended by it; because there is a larger capital to carry it on. ... Secondly. Agriculture and manufactures are also promoted by it. ... Thirdly. The interest of money will be lowered by it; for this is always in a ration to the quantity of money, and to the quickness of circulation." The closely argued report was adopted with some modifications over Jefferson's objections--restrained objections, as he promised Hamilton they would be when Hamilton solicited his support.
Later, Jefferson's objections to the national bank grew more vehement as he sniffed out agendas hidden under the cloak of reasoned economic argument. Anti-Federalist that he was, Jefferson saw the national bank as a way for the "monarchists" to strengthen the federal government. In their plans of financing the debt--and, in his view, never paying it off--Jefferson saw a scheme to perpetually hold the states in extortion and thereby control legislation to their benefit.
He claimed to have acquiesced to the idea of a national bank for two reasons. He had been duped by Hamilton into accepting a plan he did not fully understand. And, as he wrote to his son-in-law Francis Eppes, "I see the necessity of sacrificing our opinions sometimes to the opinions of others for the sake of harmony."
To Jefferson, Hamilton was clearly transgressing into his domain as secretary of state. When Washington solicited Jefferson's opinion on the proposed national bank, Jefferson abandoned the restraint he had earlier promised Hamilton. In his Opinion on the Constitutionality of Establishing a National Bank, Jefferson argued that "all powers not delegated to the U.S. by the Constitution, not prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people (Xth Amendmt.). ... The incorporation of a bank, and other powers assumed by this bill have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the U.S. by the Constitution." A national bank, in other words, was, in Jefferson's opinion, unconstitutional.
. Moreover, Jefferson's argument against the bank opened a further rift between the two regarding a larger, more abstract issue: the complex and contentious point of just how the Constitution itself should be read.
Washington was persuaded by Hamilton and signed the bill to incorporate the bank just two days after receiving the report. In a private letter written five years later, Jefferson's ire was still smoldering.
By 1792 the conflicts between Jefferson and Hamilton involved such fundamental and unresolvable differences that they can be seen as foreshadowing the national horror, still about seventy years in the future, of the Civil War. The Federalists, Jefferson claimed, were scheming to concentrate and centralize political power in America through the establishment of a monarchy that "will form the most corrupt government on earth." Later in the letter he added, prophetically, "I can scarcely contemplate a more incalculable evil than the breaking of the union into two or more parts." But such fracture seemed to Jefferson inevitable when we review the mass which opposed the original coalescence, when we consider that it lay chiefly in the Southern quarter, that the legislature have availed themselves of no occasion of allaying it, but on the contrary whenever Northern and Southern prejudices have come into conflict, the latter have been sacrificed and the former soothed; that the owners of the debt are in the Southern and the holders of it the Northern division.
On the same day, September 9, Jefferson again wrote Washington, this time outrightly naming Hamilton and leveling specific accusations, each carefully elaborated and supported to show that Hamilton, not himself, was to blame for the feud. Whatever else he may have made of the deepening enmity between these two gifted members of his cabinet, Washington surely recognized that, in these exchanges of venomous accusations and counteraccusations, he was witnessing what many political observers had dreaded, the formation of political parties.
In 1796, Washington's vice president, John Adams, defeated Jefferson in a close election and became the second president. Under the constitutional provisions then in place, Jefferson became Adams' vice president. Of all the documents in the final third of Cunningham's book, which covers the period of Jefferson's vice presidency through his presidency (gained in 1800), none are so compelling as those dealing with the Sedition Act, which made its way through Congress in 1797. It too bode ill for preservation of the union.
The act made it unlawful for any persons "to combine or conspire to oppose any lawful measure of the government, to prevent any officer of the United States from performing his duty, or to aid or attempt to procure any insurrection, riot, or unlawful assembly." It also provided punishment of any person for writing, uttering, or publishing "any false, scandalous and malicious writing" against the president, Congress, or the government.
One of the charges that Jefferson had to defend himself against in his September 9, 1792, letter to Washington was that he had brought the poet Philip Freneau to Philadelphia for the express purpose of setting up a newspaper to defame and attack the Federalists. Sensitive, therefore, on the subject of "publishing malicious writing," Jefferson saw the Sedition Act as an attempt to silence Republican newspapers.
He immediately began to think of ways that states might assert their right to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional and void. Working with John Breckinridge, a former Virginian, and members of the Kentucky Assembly, Jefferson drafted the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which began with an ominous first point: "Resolved, that the several states composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government." The second point concludes that "the power to create, define and punish such other crimes is reserved, and of right appertains solely and exclusively to the respective states, each within its own territory." The conflict between the rights of the state versus those of the federal government was thus sharply defined. The sovereignty of the state of Kentucky and the authority of the federal government were set at loggerheads.
Following Kentucky's lead, in December 1798 the General Assembly of Virginia also adopted resolutions protesting the Sedition Act. In a letter to Theodore Sedgwick, a Federalist senator from Massachusetts, Hamilton, clearly fed up with Virginia's anti-Federalism, angrily proposed to hold its feet to the fire. A powerful federal force should without delay be brought against Virginia and put that state to "the Test of resistance."
Decades hence, Virginia, home of the capital of the Confederacy, would indeed be put to such a test of resistance over many of the same issues that pitted Jefferson versus Hamilton. And at that event the whole nation would tremble.
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