Declaration of Independence - 1776
Articles of Confederation - 1777
The Constitution for the United States, Its Sources and Its Application
The Real Thirteenth Amendment: Titles of Nobility and Honour
The Latest Findings of the TONA Research Committee

The Original Thirteenth Amendment:
Titles of Nobility and Honour,
An Essay

Chapter 2
Ratification 1810-1820

"The world emerging from the next great war, then, will be a tougher world, more disunited than ever, abounding still more in concealed aims and secret preparations and the fears and suspicions they engender. What else can it be?

Many, under the stress of their conscious helplessness, will lapse into mystical religiosity, will refuse to bear children, will resort to suicide or the quasi-suicide of non-resistance. Many will take refuge in opiates." -- H.G. Wells, 1939

The original Thirteenth Amendment was designed to be, and is now a guarantee against the creation of corrupt rump congresses. It was designed to provide the citizens of these United States with a hard, armored shell to protect them against the depredations of foreign multi-national business combinations, their lobbyists, their spies, their hirelings, their double agents and their secret armies.

It was and is a kind of political "vitreous humor," a clear and flexible fluid that is organic in origin, designed to give shape to the "immunities and privileges" -- as guaranteed by our U.S. Constitution to both the citizens and the residents present here. It is intended to pass the light of the Lord's creation, the natural world, from outside of the Union to inside, presenting a view of the world at large to each and every citizen, ennobling their ambitions, protecting their property rights and the sovereignty of their status as the people of Montana, or Delaware, and so forth. It is and was designed to block the ambitions of nasty, and brutish warlords.

All the petty tyrannies to which the democratic process is prone, whether it is judicial tyranny, or the Peerage of Robes and Gowns as established in the academies or on the campuses of the several States -- most are actionable under this section. It does not prohibit fraternal organizations from associating and giving out awards or rewards.

It does not matter whether the Title of Nobility and Honor is purchased or acquired by birth or awarded in a lottery: it is forbidden, and all of the deeded rights and privileges it might carry, even if acquired by barter, are proscribed. Nor shall any government agent, whether by charter or by the lack of a charter, be allowed special privileges or immunities, even if they seem logical in the pursuit of their assigned functions.

The Titles of Nobility Amendment can, and should, and will act to conjoin the disharmonious music of State and federal government into a two-octave harmony that floats free in the world at large, and binds the government at home with thick constitutional chains which only the people may unlock or discard. It gives the common citizen a two-octave blessing of protection in a cruel and unusual world: State sovereign within the United States, federal citizen without.

The men who wrote this Amendment knew what Albert Jay Nock articulated in 1935, when he despaired of those individuals who make themselves the tools of the state:

"Instead of looking upon the State's progressive absorption of social power with the repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel toward the activities of a professional criminal organization, he tends rather to encourage and glorify it, in the belief that he is somehow identified with the State, and ... he therefore consents to something in which he has a share." - Our Enemy, The State

The whole history of this Amendment has been fraught with problems, though, including mistakes, duplicity and fabrications. The worst are the bureaucratic swindles of the Members of the Bar, who have published the Constitution privately, omitting the Thirteenth, and who have ignored or disdained seventy-two State or Territorial editions of organic laws, which show Article 13 to be valid.

To have a graphic display of the approvals on a State by State basis, see the Table of Ratifications and Publications.

Covering the Amending process, Article V of the Constitution does not stipulate any method for doing that. That means the several States have total discretion, and the power to select whatever means of announcing a ratification vote that their sovereign legislatures see fit to enact by law. An important measure passed April 20th, 1818, establishes a duty belonging to the Secretary of State, who "shall publish and make known" the results of votes taken by the several States, and issue certificates of ratification. But this law, amended in 1820, cannot and does not impair the rights of the States to communicate their decisions by the means that they decide to be proper.

A most crucial juncture was reached in 1815, when early in the year Congress voted to authorize a new edition of the Laws of the United States, from the first day of the first session through the 4th of March of that year. The money was appropriated and the firm of Bioren and Duane was retained to assemble and print these Laws, in five volumes, including the Constitution of the United States and all of its Amendments.

With a caveat included in its introductory pages, that the status of the Thirteenth Article of Amendment was in doubt, the Bioren and Duane edition of the "Laws of the United States ...." was duly published and contained the Title of Nobility Amendment as issued in 1810, correct and proper to the last comma, and listed as Article 13. Its front page contains the words, "authorized by an Act of Congress."

But, as many critics of this Amendment have noted, Article V of the Constitution does not require -- or, therefore, allow -- an authorized publication to establish the facts of ratification. Three-fourths of the states are required to approve any given Amendment -- three-fourths of the states who participate in the Article V drafting and approval process, as members of Congress. Nothing in Article V allows a state which enters the union after an Amendment is passed along and sent to the states -- to vote for or against such a proposed section! That state may make a pro forma ratification but such a vote cannot count toward the total of three-fourths required under Article V, three-fourths of the several States which issued the Amendment being needed for the approval.

No one knows exactly why the new, comprehensive edition of the Laws of the United States was set up to include the Titles of Nobility as Article 13: the loss of all House records in 1814, as well as having the Library of Congress burned by the British army, makes any further research impossible. Also, the Journal of the Special Session of the Senate of Virginia, held in 1814 is missing -- and this is very curious! -- so are all their manuscript journals from approximately 1810 to 1820.

The Bioren and Duane was duly published, and issued to members of Congress and others in Washington City, and copies of it survive to this day, in the Law School at Yale and in that University's Beinecke Rare Book Library. The craftsmanship of those printers and the paper employed in 1815 were extraordinary, and of the highest quality. President James Monroe and his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, conducted themselves in 1817 and '18 as if the Thirteenth Amendment was properly ratified. Questions arose over the status of this section, though, and at the request of the House, John Quincy Adams queried the three states that they were unsure of (as of the end of 1817): these were Connecticut, South Carolina and Virginia.

To understand the faulty arguments which have been made against the validity of this Amendment, the Titles of Nobility section (with its Draconian penalties for accepting foreign pensions or emoluments), it is necessary to understand which States were polled by John Quincy Adams. Careful and meticulous research conducted by Brian March, among others, has positively established that the three States entering the union after 1810 -- Louisiana, Indiana and Mississippi -- were not polled by Secretary Adams.

Since they did not participate in voting on the Amendment as required under Article V, when it was issued to the States, these new members of the union were not considered qualified to ratify or reject it. Nor, when they were admitted to the union, were these States invited by Congress to participate in the Article V ratification process for the Titles of Nobility. "In the Journals of John Quincy Adams," says March, "it is clear that neither Louisiana, Indiana nor Mississippi were contacted."

That is the most crucial factor in understanding what happened next, and to why the Amendment was properly ratified and announced as such in 1819. The planters' economy of Virginia was a mature one, by 1818, and many state banks had issued large loans. Men of property enjoyed high values for their land, massive numbers of English workingmen had begun migrating to the new states in 1816, seeking to escape from stagnating wages and to find opportunity, and speculation was rampant.

"At no phase in history have the common people played a dominant part in the government of Great Britain," wrote H.G. Wells, "and in every phase the baronial oligarchy has prevailed. It is the tradition and education of this oligarchy which determines the behavior of the ...Government and its role in contemporary world affairs."

The working classes in Britain were manipulated by the banking interests, and the money factors, in the years after the Napoleonic wars. "The British masses neither rule nor want to rule. They are politically apathetic. They do not produce outstanding individuals to express their distinctive thoughts or feelings," writes Wells in 1939, "because they have no distinctive thoughts or feelings to express."

The British people, even the merchant classes, have never controlled the banking houses resident on their islands because the aristocracy has always shielded them from scrutiny. Their struggle for social freedom has always been limited -- until the era of Margaret Thatcher -- because, as Albert Jay Nock declared, "without economic freedom no other freedom is significant or lasting, and that if economic freedom can be attained, no other freedom can be withheld."

Social critics like H.G. Wells will never agree, precisely, on Nock's proposition: but they have always opposed the consolidations that the money factors use to make money off of money, because it eats up credit which would otherwise be available for development. The State of Virginia should have been immune to money-changing swindles in 1818 and 1819, as first Illinois and then Alabama joined the union and markets were expanding. Nevertheless, a crisis in banking ensued.

The seriousness of this banking issue became transparently clear in 1819, when a financial panic closed banks all over Virginia. W. Cary Nicholas, who was governor of Virginia in 1818 and the director of a Richmond bank "was dragged into ruin," as Fawn Brodie puts it. He died leaving Thomas Jefferson holding a co-signer's note for $20,000, which would end up costing him some $1200 per year in interest alone. In this environment of speculation and mass bankruptcy, the leaders of Virginia met to authorize a new and comprehensive version of their state's laws, including the United States Constitution.

When it was published, agreed to on March 12, 1819 --and issued for circulation at the end of the year and into 1820 -- it included the Titles of Nobility Amendment as the valid Article 13, and a special printing of four thousand copies was ordered. This was the manner chosen by the Virginia legislature to announce and publish their ratification of this Amendment. Recent research in the archives of Virginia has revealed that multiple copies of this edition, also known as VA2, were forwarded to the two houses of Congress in Washington, to the President and to the Secretary of State. Also one copy of Virginia's organic laws, including the Thirteenth Amendment as valid, was placed with the Library of Congress, where it remains to this day. For many years those who oppose recognition of this controversial and important section of our Constitution, have argued that because Virginia did not, apparently, send a "Letter" to then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the ratification vote was somehow nullified.

Because Article V does not stipulate that any such "Letter" be sent, the authorized publication by the Virginia legislature, and the now-documented transmission of VA2 to the House and Senate and Secretary of State, must stand as pure and indisputable evidence of ratification. Seventy-two times in the years between 1819 and 1876, state or territorial editions of their organic laws have included this Title of Nobility Amendment as the valid Article 13 -- and that is entirely too many independent publications to be blamed on the mistakes made in Bioren and Duane, 1815.

Almost immediately (after 1819), state editions of the organic laws (and including the current Constitution of the United States with Article 13 in place), and acts of the legislature were published. North Carolina and Georgia have editions from 1819, Rhode Island has one in 1822, and Massachusetts published the Amendment as being ratified in 1823. The federalist bastion of Connecticut had four different publications by 1839.

Virginia had every right to issue its ratification notice in such a manner, it paid for the printing and thus the original Thirteenth Amendment, barring foreign princes and powers from meddling in our domestic political and business affairs, was ratified by thirteen of the seventeen states in the union in 1810 -- and is now and has been a lawful part of the United States Constitution, for 178 years.

It has also been suppressed and nearly forgotten since 1876.

Work to sabotage this Amendment began almost at once, upon its publication by Virginia, and gained speed and allies after 1828. Most predictably, whenever an independent researcher begins to dig into just who wanted this valid section of our Constitution squashed, the influence of British bankers and their hirelings in these United States -- mostly attorneys-at-law -- comes clearly into focus.

A pattern develops, over time, and from the vantage point of the 1990s the careful observer can identify just how this great and vibrant American Republic has been sapped by its many allegiances with Britain. Most educated Americans know little of the true wealth of the crowned heads of Britain, and the Netherlands, just as they know little of the business interests who developed global trade over the last five hundred years. Royal families, banking trusts and Chinese triads -- clan-based criminal organizations -- have long since mastered the art of the masquerade; they pose as public institutions, non-profit agencies, private corporations and even as charitable foundations. The less often a principality like Liechtenstein is mentioned in the world press, the more probable it is that these world-spanning commercial powers do their banking there! In the digital world of the 1990s, it is getting harder for them to hide their machinations, in part because their accumulated wealth and power is so obvious.

There would not seem to be any connection between the Gulf War conducted by the United States and its loosely-knit Arab alliance, against Iraq, and the original Thirteenth Amendment. Yet the authors of this section clearly wanted Congress, as a political body responsible both to the people and the States, to have complete control over all dealings with foreign princes.

Knowing that London banks handle a vast amount of the wealth of Kuwait and their royal family, the al-Sabahs, and that their Emirate was a creation of British foreign policy in the 1920s, should alter every American's perception of that part of our mutual, shared history with Great Britain. Again and again, American blood has been spilled for the benefit of British bankers, money factors, and the royal families who are now completely intertwined with them.

All through that long period when Labor was triumphant in the British islands, that socialist economic dinosaur constructed on the wreckage of Victoria's Empire was controlled from behind and above by the family 'Windsor'. As H.G. Wells, the leading advocate of world socialism in the 1930s, put it, Britain was never likely to be fully "democratic," i.e., socialist:

"On the whole the totalitarians make the more exciting and attractive promises and give the brooding young [men] the most immediate prospect of authorized activities. Official Great Britain pays the dole and encourages no presumptuous hopes." But what Wells was saying, in "The Fate of Man," was that "an excess of bored and unemployed young men ... must in some manner find relief, [or they] will shatter human life altogether under new conditions."

The royal family, descendants of German princes, own the most land in England, and their Tory allies have long dominated the Court of St. James. Besides Buckminster Fuller, and the one great industrialist he truly admired -- Henry Ford -- few American leaders of this century have ever understood that the money factors and their royal allies are equipped with one-hundred year plans. Joseph P. Kennedy was one such American who understood, and he was ruthless in his pursuit of the same kind of wealth, power, and family longevity possessed by those royals. Any thinking person, in these 1990s, can gauge the success of his one-hundred year planning.

There is another history behind the "accepted" or given history taught in our public schools and academies, a history of influence-peddling, spies and assassinations and the attempted destruction of our precious Constitution.

The great Buckminster Fuller, poet, architect and inventor of the geodesic dome, elaborated on these truths in his opus magnus, Critical Path in 1981. His reward for a life spent laboring for the good of all humanity? After his death Fuller's works are ignored by almost every great college and university, his principles are not widely taught, even though they are based on both good science and the desire to make all mankind successful. Only a handful of his fans, his grandson, and the global access provided by the Internet keeps the teachings of synergy -- Synergetics -- alive.

He also taught that the royal families of Europe were simply fronts for, and parties to, the superbly organized commercial houses founded in the days of the great sailing ships.

They are now so thoroughly intertwined with banking and electronic commerce and the intelligence services of their "home nations," as to be indistinguishable. What you see on the surface is not what you get down below, and always, said Bucky Fuller, always the true powers are those who control sailing, shipping and navigation on the oceans.

In the era 1800 to 1818, the greatest challenge to the hegemony of Great Britain and her seapower was coming not from France, which was invested mostly in land-based armies and in securing farmland and mines -- but from the new, upstart, democratic-republicans of the United States. Everything that happened here was of concern to those who controlled British commerce, its fleets, and the crown itself.

Illinois was admitted to the union, while John Quincy Adams was still polling Connecticut, South Carolina and Virgina: This section was not offered to their Legislature for immediate consideration, thus making the argument for "subsequent" or "equal footing" ratifications, a moot argument. What the British could not foil by war in 1812, they apparently tried to stymie by, possibly, creating a financial panic in 1819, in the wealthiest and most influential new American republican state -- Virginia.

South Carolina is the only member of the group of seventeen with no recorded position on the original Thirteenth Amendment: and, because the section was issued without a time limit, the Palmetto State could pick up the measure and approve it at any time! But the gist of the research done over more than ten years by David Dodge, Brian March, Tom Dunn and others of the TONA Research Committee is simple -- the Titles of Nobility and Honours Article of Amendment to the Constitution was ratified and properly so.

Nothing done by stealth or artifice can remove the Titles of Nobility Amendment from our Constitution, lawfully, even though no published edition of the U.S. Constitution now extant shows it to be valid. Its protections against foreign powers seeking to corrupt our political process, against princes seeking to insinuate themselves with our leaders, against secret agents and their plans of empire, acquiring influence with our many State governments -- still remain! -- they have but to be reclaimed, like lost luggage in a musty old train station. The full fare for this item has been paid, pre-paid, in fact, with the blood of patriots and American soldiers, sailors and airmen. It is part of the American "patrimony," it is an inheritance descending from the era that follows, immediately, the formation of this Republic. Restoring it to its rightful place, between Article 12 and the anti-slavery section put forward by Abraham Lincoln, is a debt of honor owed to James Monroe, and certainly to James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

As James Madison said, in arguing for ratification before the New York State legislature when he and Hamilton presented the new Constitution to a skeptical bunch of Yankees:

"The Constitution requires an adoption in toto and forever. It has been so adopted by the other States. Adoption for a limited time would be as defective as an adoption of some of the Articles only."

That is why the States are bound by new Amendments even when they have rejected them, and it is certainly the basis for arguing that once a State has approved an Amendment, it surrenders jurisdiction over it and cannot subsequently deny, repudiate it or over-turn the ratification vote.

The original Thirteenth Amendment was "put to death" during the Civil War, and for reasons which remain obscure, our most beloved President, Abraham Lincoln, issued two different "new" Amendments entitled Article 13, one in 1861 and the currently designated "Thirteenth" or anti-slavery amendment, in 1865. Yet it lived on in Colorado after the war, appearing in the 1868 organic laws of the Territory, and apparently was considered valid when this State came into the union in 1876. That year was also the year that Wyoming Territory published its organic laws and the U.S. Constitution, including the original Thirteenth as Article 13, the anti-slavery amendment as Article 14, and the civil rights amendment known as the Fifteenth Amendment, as Article 15. For reasons that are also obscure, Wyoming's Territorial leaders refused to recognize the so-called Fourteenth Amendment in 1876. After 1890, when Wyoming became a State, the original Thirteenth was not heard from again.

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The Original Thirteenth Amendment, 1815-1820

"Since the last anniversary of our Independence, we have again been delivered from the danger of foreign control; -- our liberty has been established a second time. I speak not of an escape from the terror of British arms --", said Nathaniel Chauncey, Esquire, in an Oration given to the Washington Benevolent Society of Philadelphia on July 4th, 1815.

"Our gallant countrymen have gloriously shown their ability to repel invasion -- I speak of the termination of a war, which associated us with a band of robbers -- a war, which involved us in the guilt, and threatened us with subjection to the control, of a conspiracy against the order, liberty and happiness of the civilized world -- a war which made us abettors in a plot, for the destruction of all that is valuable in the possessions, or the hopes of man."

Strong language coming from a man of about thirty years of age, a graduate of Yale College in the storied class of 1806, and schooled at law in New Haven! Speaking on the national holiday, to a federalist gathering in Philadelphia, in the name of paying homage to George Washington, he accuses the Madisonian government of plotting "the destruction of all that is valuable in the possessions, or the hopes" of men. No speaker worth his salt, in those tempestuous days, could fail to affirm property rights as being the foundation of all republican sentiments. It is the rhetoric of the former president John Adams, pure and undistilled.

For a modern man or woman to understand the situation in these United States in 1815, requires a long stretch of the imagination. For example, some imagination is necessary to enjoy a good historical drama -- like "The Journey of August King," a movie made in 1995 -- because the high-speed, digital world of the Internet is as far removed from the mainly agricultural society of that time, as those people were distant from the Neanderthals. Yet here is a wholly American story:

That movie was set in 1815, in the prosperous hills of North Carolina, and it stars Jason Patric as a widower who encounters a runaway slave girl (played by Thandie Newton). The story of "The Journey" concerns August King's moral crisis of conscience. He is a young man of property, still grief-stricken over the previous death of his young wife and baby. When he encounters the runaway slave girl, who is quite obviously the daughter of a white slaveowner and his "dusky" housekeeper, he is both repelled and fascinated. She is scared and beautiful and forbidden, and he wants nothing to do with her. The power of the story in this movie rests in their ability to reach past their social conditions -- house slave-girl and the freeholding farmer -- to see each other's essential humanity. And always, this world of 1815 is one dominated by nature -- where reality is one of rushing rivers and rock-strewn mountain wagon paths -- of mud, geese and stubborn cows, and glorious sunsets.

The republican government of 1815 North Carolina is a patchwork of local communities exercising "home rule" or self-government. Slaves are not allowed in some jurisdictions, but the law on runaways is statewide. Justice is immediate, it is personal and terrible to behold. But it is also very close to the people. Farmer August King is comfortable and even prosperous, in that agrarian world.

The local sheriff is a man well-known to any citizen, not a stranger behind a badge and a gun. His daughter may have designs on a handsome young widower, and an equally strong feeling of jealousy towards a pretty seventeen-year old slave girl. This is the excellent role developed by Thandie Newton, who animates her character with charm and a certain crankiness that makes this movie a gem of historical drama.

The runaway is the property of the man who is also her father, who keeps her mother well-dressed but in bondage. This is the reality of life for millions of American people in the southern states, which are extended to Louisiana in 1812 and which encompass vast territories in Alabama and Mississippi, as well. But slaves are property -- not citizens -- and can be disposed of in almost any manner, including a most gruesome death on the gibbet.

The edge of the industrial age to come is just visible in this world, and manufactured tools are highly prized in the life of August King. That makes his losses, imposed as punishments for helping the runaway slave girl escape, all the more emotional and compelling.

The swift and severe justice rendered by his neighbors, including the sheriff, leaves him destitute. His wagon is broken down, his geese disappear, his cow dies and his supplies are all stolen. The slavemaster and his men burn King's house to the ground, as is the law -- but it is a house he had built with his own hands. He is left with the deed to his farm, his furniture and his tools stacked up together under the stars. The slave girl is not recaptured, and she follows the underground railroad to freedom, wearing a dress King had purchased for his late wife, but one that she had never had a chance to wear. "The Journey of August King" was not a great success by the current standards of Hollywood but it is of immense value in understanding the day-to-day world -- and the nature of the Americans then living -- who had elected the Eleventh Congress, which passed the original Thirteenth Amendment in 1810. Even more so, this film illustrates the world governed by the State legislators, who had given this proposed section twelve ratifications (and three rejections), by 1815.

"Life throughout that period resolved itself into a scramble for wealth. The whole nation thought dollars," wrote H.G. Wells in 1939, and "talked dollars. For several generations it was a distinctly exhilarating scramble. There was so much unexploited land, such reserves of natural wealth available, that it was possible to accumulate vast fortunes and still find fresh employment for everyone who chose to work."

Of course, the contradictions of employing forced labor -- otherwise known as slavery -- in building those fortunes in the south, or in making profits from the wealth thus produced, as was done in the northern states under the guise of finance and commerce, would require fifty years of agitation and a bloody Civil War to resolve.

Or was there an international conspiracy, led by the money factors of British and Dutch royalty, to erode and collapse the new Republic, the loosely-bound united States in Congress assembled? Were the actions of men of the law free from all foreign entanglements, or was there a distinctly pro-British bias, and favoritism? Consider part of the message of Virginia's Governor Tyler, to the House of Delegates in December of 1810:

"Shall we forever administer our free republican government on the principles of a rigid and high ton'd monarchy? I almost blush for my country when I think of these things. Let a stranger go into our Courts, and he would almost believe himself in the Court of King's Bench. Can the Judicial department be free from their chains, but by a revisal of Common Law under Legislative authority?"

"Why cannot those maxims and principles which follow the Common Law, be selected for our purpose, and made the rules of decision in cases where they apply? As to the written or statute Law, no Judge can be fairly [said] to be independent or free who goes to a British Judge to see how his Lordship has been pleased to decide in a like case."

"This course of legal procedure is too servile and humiliating for an American citizen."

So, too, industry and the legal complications of foreign commerce were constantly on the minds of men like Nathaniel Chauncey, Connecticut born and Yale-bred. The Connecticut Yankees enjoyed superior representation in the government, as Oliver Wolcott had been Secretary of the Treasury, and it was virtually impossible to elect anyone except a Yale man to either State government or to the Congress!

The northern federalist cause included maritime commerce and strong naval forces:

1815 was the year, for example, that the first steam-powered warship was deployed. The U.S.S. Fulton, an innovation of the upstart Navy of the new Republic. From many sources like Mr. Chauncey's July 4th Oration, we have no doubt whatsoever about the opinions of the New England federalists concerning the military policies of James Madison (and as always, an attack on him was also an attack on Thomas Jefferson):

"For three campaigns they prosecuted the invasion of Canada," complained Nathaniel Chauncey, "without gaining an inch of territory."

"But England in her turn became the invader, and our capital was disgracefully surrendered to a handful of men. It was now seen, that the people must defend themselves -- That our rulers could declare war, but were unable to carry it on -- That though they were bound by the Constitution to protect the country, its deliverance was not to proceed from them."

"Here was a cause in which our countrymen might lawfully display their courage. Numbers came forward, prepared to repel the enemy," said Chauncey, referring to the armed citizen's militias of Washington City and the Washington Guards, "[to] redeem the honor of the American name. When the [fighting] spirit of the people was thus aroused, their real character appeared."

What follows, in this Oration by Chauncey, the full text of which was published by the U.S. Gazette in Philadelphia, is an extraordinary admission of culpability for the ruinous political bickering which had characterized the previous ten or twelve years. Chauncey, a young man of the law representing the ruling clique of Connecticut, sets forth the usual homilies and praise of George Washington, commending the study of his life to every young man in the audience. Then he evokes the idea of compromise between the federalist northern states and the Democratic-Republicans:

"The bitterness of party spirit, which has so long prevailed, is a most lamentable evil, and the present seems ... auspicious [for a change]." Chauncey's words have hardly had time to float off to the back of the audience. He then returns to his original theme of bitterness and anger towards France: and to a critical suspicion of James Madison and "a set of men, whose policy, hitherto, has been insincere and ruinous."

This important oration, given before the Washington Benevolent Society in Philadelphia, captures the spirit of the opposition facing Madison and his fellow Virginians during this era. Yet it also provides a key to the contradictions which were present in the New England States, between the republican ideals of the ruling class and the crass, brutal and successful commercialism of their ship-building and trans-oceanic trade (especially with China and the eastern spice islands).

After 1815, though, the obviously pro-British character of the federalists in New York and southern New England proved to be their undoing. The rhetoric they had employed against the democrats of France proved to be identical in character to the anti-British furor which animated the Jeffersonian radicals in Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas during those same years, 1790 to 1810.

As Albert Jay Nock adduced, in his landmark work on Jefferson, from 1926:

"The French had the measure of matters in America. They knew that no issue of academic political theory had set the country by the ears. States rights, anti-Federalism, anti-monarchism and all that kind of thing, were but the American equivalent of their own libertT, egalitT, fraternitT.

"What really had divided the country, in their view, was a mode of constitutional development inaugurated by a bold seizure of power, and designed to subordinate the economic interests of the producing class to those of the monopolist and exploiting class. The French agents in America were able men, hard-baked realists, no better and no worse than the average run of men who hold such positions.

"Their reports to the French Foreign Office showed that they knew their game. Fauchet, in so many words, ascribes to Hamilton's policy the solid intrenchment of a class which 'shows a threatening prospect of becoming the aristocratic order,' non-titular, indeed, but in solid substance of economic control, precisely like that which the French proletarians had just ousted; and Fauchet puts his finger firmly upon the consequent formal opposition between the producing interest, l'interet foncier ou agricole, and the monopolist exploiting interest, l'interet fiscal."

A building social movement, which would flower in the early 1830s, was being nurtured in the academies and colleges of Harvard, Yale and Brown during these tempest-tossed years, after 1806. As material wealth increased, the intellectual leaders and the moral philosophers of these Colleges sought to link public virtue with public education based on Christian principles, in the name of safe-guarding republican government! Their fear of Bonapartism and the military dictatorships installed by cavalry generals made Kings was real, authentic, and grounded in the events current to that day and age.

Jerome Bonaparte had been made King of Westphalia in 1807, while Joachim Murat had been set up by the Emperor as King of Naples in 1808. Everywhere they looked, New England federalists saw the Little Corporal bestowing Honours and Titles and overthrowing the republics he had previously fought to establish. It was a sobering lesson in revolution, republicanism, and the persistence of royalism. No wonder the House of Representatives passed the Titles of Nobility and Honour Amendment by a vote of 87-3, in 1810!

It is clear, from reviewing the published works and speeches of this era, that the coming social reform movement was Christian and fundamentalist in character; and greatly stimulated by the published writings of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill (the great social reformers in England). Very young men from the elite academies were able to rise quickly as this movement flowered, and in some ways it drained the passion out of the federalist cause and left it to crumble away. The federalist philosophy included a serious and deeply-held animosity towards the greatest excesses of Napoleonic France, and the pure democracy which had brought that royalist tyranny to the forefront.

"Antipathy, therefore, can never be a right ground of action. No more, therefore, can resentment, which ... is but a modification of antipathy." That wise counsel is derived from Jeremy Bentham's "Principles of Morals and Legislation," first published in 1789 and well-known in America by the time that the Titles of Nobility and Honour Amendment was sent out to the States for ratification. However, the bitter feelings of the federalist elite in New York and New Haven and Providence caused them to 'disconnect' from the very people who were giving them their support.

Again, there was a spirit of anti-royalism alive in the land in those years, as the address of Governor Tyler in 1810 so clearly demonstrates:

"[There is a] factious spirit ... unfortunately prevailing among many of our country-men; a spirit which has led to indiscriminate opposition to every wise and energetic measure, and has gone a great way towards involving the United States in civil discord. This unfortunately clearly [proves] a too great love of money, the prevailing passion of the times, which would sacrifice the very independence of our country for a price -- for a mean and degraded America -- a Commerce which never increases the wealth of the nation, without bringing into it a due proportion of the vices of other countries. It produces also, what is called in polite circles, citizens of the world, the worst citizens in the world -- who having no attachment to any country, make themselves wings to fly away with from impending danger. Commerce is certainly beneficial to society in a secondary degree, but never should it have the ascendancy over the agricultural and manufacturing interests -- these are our primary objects."

"Commerce also begets a predilection for every thing foreign, and is too apt to engender contempt for things of our own. It permits an interference of foreigners with our Government and its measures, which no country but ours ever will suffer to that degree which we have experienced."

This is the bedrock philosophy of American nationalism, founded in the proper concern for the success and prosperity of the States, protected by the hard armor of the federal government, without, and left free to experiment and try or fail, within the borders of the United States, with their own domestic institutions and business.

It places the emphasis on agriculture and the manufacturing, here, in this country, for all our people, and for all times. It is the bedrock philosophy which sustains the original Thirteenth Amendment, which was active when it was created, and which speaks to us over 186 years, as we struggle with the new institutions of the "global" economy, and the Titans of Commerce who have replaced the money factors of British and Dutch origin.

It is an America First philosophy, which does not seek to oppress or control the actions of other sovereign nations, but rather to protect and empower the several States, and to eliminate foreign influence-peddling from the halls of our Congress, our House and our Senate. It is the bedrock of republicanism as it was known then, and as it can be restored and revived in the Internet-driven, computerized world of the 1990s.

End of Chapter 2

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Continue

Introduction - "The Original 13th Amendment Titles of Nobility and Honour"
Chapter 1 -The Prohibition of Titles of Nobility and Honour
Chapter 2 - Ratification 1810-1820
Chapter 3 - Philadelphia Lawyers and a Mock Nobility
Chapter 4 - Panic, War & Opium
Chapter 5 - One Hundred Years of Pain
Chapter 6 - The Secret Armies
Table of Ratification and Publications
The 13th Anti-Slavery Amendment and The Flawed 14th Amendment
Our Enemy, The State by Albert Jay Nock, The Classic Critique Distinguishing "Government" from "State"