Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp 868 "The Tippah Tigers" Ripley Mississippi C.S.A. (occupied)

Since the winners write history, it is not too surprising that those who won the battle on the precise shape the United States would take get more press. So it is that several of the founding fathers do not get more historians interested in their beliefs and lives.

Among the anti-federalists were Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Patrick Henry, James Monroe, Richard Henry Lee, Edmund Randolph and a few others. But of those it was George Mason and Patrick Henry who carried the water for the individual and natural rights of man over those of the state. They seemed to have an instinctive understanding that it was the tendency of mankind to gravitate from tyranny to freedom and back again. They understood the nature of power and of those who wield it and that those who wield it are not often concerned with the consequences that power has for the individual.

The firebrand of the American Revolution (the secession movement that succeeded), Patrick Henry, was also an influential man from the pivotal state of Virginia. In the post-rebellion era, his opinion regarding the Constitution was crucial to its successful adoption. Patrick Henry and his fellow Virginians George Mason and Thomas Jefferson were the anti-federalists who made a scene.

If it weren't for George Mason and Patrick Henry, a Bill of Rights would not have been added to the Constitution. It was their vehemence and insistence that eventually forced the federalists to insert it. It put on paper rights that Madison and Hamilton and Washington assumed would be obvious. The three federalists argued that to declare those rights on paper would mean other rights would not get deserved attention or imply that rights had to be set to paper. Their argument showed a lack of foresight about the nature of man.

In addition, Mason and Henry sought an 11th right, one regarding private property, but it was left out. More is the pity, given the land grabbing by the federal government and certain interest groups in this day and age.

Much is made of the fact that the original document uniting the states in a loose confederation, the Articles of Confederation, was replaced by the present Constitution. The Articles joined the several states in a much more informal union, while the Constitution locked them into a sovereign central government located in Washington.

After the Revolution, Madison and Hamilton and their followers seemed to morph into an entirely different kind of American than those who had fought in the war. In the words of historian Vernon Parrington, a great change had come over men like Madison and Hamilton:

"[T]hey discarded the revolutionary doctrines that had served their need in the debate with England. They were done with natural rights and the romantic interpretations of politics and were turned realists … their economic interests were suffering from the lack of a strong centralized government, and they now held that men were animals with turbulent passions, and require government proper and adequate for animals. …The great obstacle to such a program was the political power of farmers, bred up in traditional practice of home rule, jealous of local rights, and content with the Articles of Confederation."

We might add that farmers and small businessmen had made up 90 percent of the Continental Army and had indeed pledged their lives, their fortunes and their honor to win that war. Thus, they had no small stake in the outcome of the federalist versus anti-federalist debate. It become clear that the 'natural' aristocrats like Washington, Hamilton and Madison sought to make sure an elite maintained control over lesser men for purposes of efficiency and power.

When the coup of the federalists took place in secrecy at the Constitutional Convention, three Virginians stood against it. They were George Mason, Edmund Randolph and Patrick Henry.

[Patrick Henry was not a delegate to the Constititutional Convention. However, he was a delegate to the Virginia ratification convention. His support of ratification for the Constitution was deemed crucial to eventual ratification by all the states, especially Georgia and the Carolinas. Washington asked the ailing Henry as a point of friendship to support ratification by Virginia. Mason was a delegate to both conventions and after all his hard work on drawing up the document chose not to sign.]

But it was George Mason and Patrick Henry, so different in personality, who formed the core of resistance. Mason was as cool, logical and quiet as Henry was a passionate philosopher and orator. Both had been successful large farmers and small businessmen, both were family men, and both had a similar distrust of a strong central government.

Mason believed that the Constitution which Madison was plugging had elements of top-down construction and control. He was also concerned that those favoring a strong central state had made a deliberate, concerted effort to get appointed to the Convention and thus form the resulting Constitution. He worried that the document favored a strong judiciary, a circumstance that would come to plague the new nation (emphisis added). The 11th Amendment was added to the Constitution to calm his fears. But as luck and history would have it, over the years that amendment has been set aside by judicial activism.

When the Constitution was accepted by the various state delegations, Virginia's Richard Henry Lee wrote criticisms in his journals about how the federalists - i.e., centralists - had planned and created a unanimous document when no unanimity existed.

Meanwhile, anti-federalists such as Thomas Jefferson had come to view Alexander Hamilton as more interested in making members of the Congress grateful to him personally than in setting up a viable nation-state. He was well aware that Hamilton would have preferred the government to be a monarchy or at the very least a cabal of aristocratic Americans with power held by a small group. Hamilton did not see the rights of man or individual liberty as being particularly valuable in the scheme of things. So it was early on that our form of government and the political process were on a collision course - the central state versus the rights of the individual under natural law, Divine law and common law (emphisis added).

Why did Mason object so strongly to a powerful central government as well as to the Constitution that came out of the Convention? In his "Objections to the Federal Constitution" Mason stated:

"There is no declaration of rights: and the laws of the general government being paramount to the laws and constitutions in the separate states are no security. Nor are the people secured even in the enjoyment of the benefit of the common law … the laws will be generally made by men little concerned in, and unacquainted with their effects and consequences. … [T]here is no declaration of any kind for preserving the liberty of the press, the trial by jury in civil cases, nor against the danger of standing armies in time of peace."

Most telling are Mason's final comments, which should give us pause as to what we have become as a nation in July 2001:

"This government will commence in a moderate aristocracy; it is at present impossible to foresee whether it will … produce a monarchy, or a corrupt and oppressive aristocracy; it will most probably vibrate some years between the two and then terminate in one or the other." (emphisis added).

George Mason did not sign the document for two reasons. One was his concern over a too-powerful central government and the other was because it did not end the slave trade. Both he and Henry commented on the fact that the slave trade would be a pernicious thorn in the side of the newly established country. How right they were.

How it must have irked Mason to watch as the direction of the nation was placed in the hands of a central authority. It was Mason, after all, who had been appointed in 1776 to draft the "Declaration of Rights" for Virginia. The ideas he brought away from English philosopher John Locke can be found in the Declaration of Independence - that a republic had to begin with a legally binding commitment that individuals have inalienable rights that are superior to those of the state. (emphisis added)

Mason's original work began "… all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights … namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

It was on the basis of these words that his friend and fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, penned the first part of one of the most eloquent and profound documents in human history, "The 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."

In 1787 Mason proposed that a bill of rights be added to the Constitution, but his proposal was defeated. That is why he refused to sign the new Constitution. He and Patrick Henry are the main reasons Americans have a document that limits the power of the central government over the legitimacy of their natural rights.

Without these two contrary patriots it is likely that the United States would have become a tyranny faster than it has. Patrick Henry, on the urging of his friend and compatriot George Washington, signed the Constitution. But Mason never did.

As it turns out, Mason and Henry were correct. The power of the state has trumped the power and rights of the individual. Before our eyes we are subjected to confiscatory taxes, a government with thousands of rules that tell us what we can do with our land and how much water our toilet tanks can hold. A government where the judiciary is corrupted and the courts clogged with cases that have no business being initiated. A government that promotes an educational system that shouldn't exist as a function of government. (emphisis added).

Because they listened to Madison and Hamilton, we have hundreds of government departments that are make-work projects for bureaucrats and politicians. At present we also have a system of patronage for the well-connected and the politically correct, through official departments like the National Endowment for the Humanities. Patronage is as old as dirt, but it should have been harder to institutionalize in a free republic.

Presently, we have a central government that no longer protects individual rights but does protect the power of the state, a government that has created forfeiture laws which nullify due process. It conducts wars on things, where people are the casualty. It continues to destroy basic natural rights to property and subjects our persons to search and seizure without due process of law. We have a standing army and unelected bureaucrats with as much power as or more power than our elected representatives. We have a central state where the executive can use executive orders to circumvent Congress and the Constitution (emphisis added).

While Hamilton and Madison had their reasons for wanting a strong central state, it was a quiet, bookish fellow and a firebrand who warned that the nation created out of blood and sacrifice would become what it has become - a tool for the elite and the aristocracy grown up out of money and power, a system that has created a prosperous economy while it continues to erode individual freedoms.

We must not forget that a healthy economy is not the same thing as liberty. Prosperity is the result of the individual at liberty making the most of that liberty while operating in a self-interested, self-disciplined way.

The promise of the Jeffersonian ideal, to keep it simple, to maintain a country where limited government is not a wish but a reality, has been run over by the philosophical descendants of our first aristocracy (emphisis added). The federalists were all that and more.

It is too bad they didn't listen to Mason and Henry. It might have saved us the likes of FDR and Bill Clinton, as well as 74,000 pages in the Federal Register. Those pages are crammed with limits on freedom but very, very few on government.

As it is, the notions of the federalists have combined with those who think that rights devolve from the state. Therefore, we are in a downward spiral toward a bad combination of philosophies. That combination denies inalienable rights and natural law. That combination builds an elite that is more interested in its own power than in the limits of the state or the rights of the individual (emphisis added).

On this July Fourth, it would do the politicians of both parties a lot of good to consider George Mason and Patrick Henry. They were the two who would have written out the slave trade and set a different course. Perhaps we would have been able to find a system of best government governing least. The closer a system is to the governed, the less likely it is to become corrupted.

Happy July Fourth. May the good Lord help set this nation on a new path of freedom.

Although he was a federalist, the words of Ben Franklin come to mind: "Where liberty is there is my country."

Please check out my Web site at www.aldenchronicles.com .

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Diane Alden is a research analyst with a background in political science and economics. Her work has appeared in the Washington Times as well as NewsMax.com, Etherzone, Enterstageright, American Partisan and many other online publications. She also does occasional radio commentaries for Georgia Radio Inc. Her e-mail address is Diane Alden.

This article was first published on NewsMax.com and is published here with permission.