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Peace at any cost is a prelude to war!
CONGRESS ACTION: November 28, 1999
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THANKSGIVING: This week the nation once again celebrated Thanksgiving, 379
years after the Pilgrims established their colony at Plymouth Plantation in
1620. This year, as in many years past, schoolchildren across the nation have
spent the few days before the holiday talking about turkeys and Pilgrims,
making lists of what they are thankful for, and a fair share have been
brainwashed by politically correct -- and false -- revisionist history of the
first Thanksgiving in 1621. That first Thanksgiving, they have been told,
came about because the Pilgrims, incompetent farmers that they were, nearly
starved to death in that first winter on the hostile shores of the new
continent. The following spring, the kindly local Indians showed them how to
plant crops and hunt wild game, and when the fall rolled around and the
harvest was gathered, the Pilgrims were so pleased with their bountiful crops
that they held a celebration to thank the Indians for saving their lives.
That thanks, as the tale unfolds, soon turned to genocide as, in later years,
the evil white Europeans turned their firearms on the Indians who, being
peace-loving and unfamiliar with such fearful weapons of destruction, were
driven from the ancestral lands which they had tended in supreme harmony with
nature. The history of our nation was all downhill from there. Very
satisfying to the politically correct, hitting all the high points which
children must know: ungrateful white intruders from Europe, malicious use of
firearms, and peaceful and magnanimous Indians victimized by religious
zealots. Nice and satisfying to some. And for the most part, incontrovertibly
false.
The Pilgrims, of course, were not the first Europeans to venture onto this
continent. Columbus came here more than a century earlier, and the natives he
first encountered were the Carib tribe, who were cannibals. And evidence
discovered several years ago points to a European presence on this continent
which may have dated back 9000 years before that (pre-dating, incidentally,
today's self-proclaimed "Native Americans"). Later, European fishing vessels
and fur trappers and traders made frequent visits to these shores and gave
the Indians, among other things, a knowledge of firearms. According to the
diary of William Bradford, the sometime governor of Plymouth Plantation ("Of
Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647"), the Pilgrims encountered many Indian tribes
when they landed here; some friendly, some not so friendly, and some hostile
and perfectly willing to attack the Pilgrims -- which they often did -- with
the firearms they had obtained from the earlier traders. Bradford wrote that
some of the tribes were already hostile to each other when the Pilgrims
arrived, and some had been engaged in inter-tribal warfare for years. Often
it was because the Pilgrims allied themselves with one tribe that they were
attacked by another, hostile to the first. There was in fact an excess of
barbarity on all sides. But now to that first deadly winter at Plymouth
Plantation, and the subsequent feast of thanks.
Before leaving Europe the Pilgrims entered into a contract, dated July 1,
1620, with the merchant investors (called the "Adventurers") who financed the
trip. That contract provided, "The persons transported and the Adventurers
shall continue their joint stock and partnership together, the space of seven
years.during which time all profits and benefits that are got by trade,
traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means of any person or
persons, remain in the common stock until division." The contract further
provided, "That at the end of the seven years, the capital and profits, viz.
the houses, lands, goods and chattels, be equally divided betwixt the
Adventurers and Planters; which done, every man shall be free from other of
them of any debt or detriment concerning this adventure." In short, the
Pilgrims agreed to establish a commune, with all property and the fruits of
all labor contributed into a common pool to be divided equally among the
Pilgrims for their daily survival, and between the Pilgrims and the
financiers at the end of the seven year contract. They called their
arrangement a "commonwealth", because all wealth -- the product of their
labors -- was held in common, and there was no private property to speak of.
The modern term for this is socialism. Even back then they had a word for it
which we know today, derived from the concept of commonly owned property:
communism. The arrangement was no more successful in the 17th century than it
has been in our own century. Human nature being what it is, even among the
pious Pilgrims, those who work and produce grow resentful when the fruits of
their labor are taken and given over to those who do not work, in shares
equal to their own, with no reward for their own hard labor.
The first winter was indeed a time of privation and death for the Pilgrims,
for the simple reasons that they had landed in the new continent too late in
the season for planting crops, and without sufficient time and energy
following their debilitating voyage to construct housing adequate to protect
them from the fast approaching New England winter. Half of them died. The
following spring they planted, hunted, and fished to provision the small
colony. Their harvest that fall was barely sufficient to meet the needs of
the frugal Pilgrims. Every day they looked to God for salvation, and
following that first harvest they gave thanks for their survival. But they
did not give thanks to the Indians -- even contemplating such an idea would
have been a sacrilege to such devoutly religious people -- they gave thanks
to their Lord who had spared them and provided for them. Bradford wrote, "And
thus they found the Lord to be with them in all their ways, and to bless
their outgoings and incomings, for which let His holy name have the praise
forever, to all posterity." Bradford, writing in 1621 regarding their first
harvest (and his only commentary on the first Thanksgiving), "They began now
to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and
dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and
had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs
abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish,
of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All
the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as
winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but
afterwards decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store
of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they
had about a peck a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn
to that proportion. Which made many afterwards write so largely of their
plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true
reports."
One Pilgrim, Edward Winslow, wrote to a friend in England describing the
celebration of that first harvest, by letter dated December 11, 1621, "Our
harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent four men on fowling, that so we
might after a more special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the
fruit of our labours. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a
little help beside, served the Company almost a week. At which time, amongst
other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst
us, and amongst the rest their greatest king, Massasoit with some 90 men,
whom for three days we entertained and feasted. And they went out and killed
five deer which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our Governor
and upon the Captain and others." The Pilgrims did invite friendly local
Indians to join in their feast, and those Indians, as any courteous guest
would do at that time of meager provisions, and as we often do today when we
are invited to someone's home, brought food to contribute to the feast.
But the harvests were not as abundant as they might have been, and Governor
Bradford and the leading citizens were troubled. They still depended on trade
and supply ships for a significant portion of their provisions, and given the
nature of seaborne travel in those days, the arrival of those ships was
erratic. They barely produced enough food to sustain themselves, and much of
their labor went into hunting and fishing, so as to supplement their own
needs and to be able to send some furs and salted fish back to pay the debts
owed to their financiers in Europe. So the leaders of the colony gathered
together, and after much debate they decided to make a fundamental change in
the way their colony was organized. They had found the system of communism to
be terribly harmful, and so they replaced it with a system of private
property. In 1623 Bradford wrote a lengthy passage into his diary describing
their momentous decision to allow, as he put it, every man to work "for his
own particular", to work his own crops on his own land:
"All this while no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might
expect any. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they
could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still
thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of things, the Governor
(with the advice of the chiefest amongst them) gave way that they should set
corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves
... This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as
much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the
Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and
gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and
took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege
weakness and inability, whom to have compelled would have been thought great
tyranny and oppression. The experience that was had in this common course and
condition, tried sundry years and that amongst Godly and sober men, may well
evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients applauded by
some of later times, that the taking away of property and bringing in
community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing, as if
they were wiser than God. For this community was found to breed much
confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to
their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for
labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength
to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense. The
strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than
he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could, this was
thought injustice. . And for men's wives to be commanded to do service for
other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed
it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands brook it. Upon the point
all being to have alike, and all to do alike, they thought themselves in the
like condition, and one as good as another; and so, if it did not cut off
those relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did at least diminish
and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them."
More than a century and a half later, in 1790, an American named James Wilson
wrote a treatise titled "Lectures on Law". Wilson was a signer of the
Declaration of Independence in 1776, a delegate to the Constitutional
Convention in 1787, and was later appointed by President George Washington as
an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In his 1790 work, Wilson
wrote, ".all commerce [in Plymouth] was carried on in one joint stock. All
things were common to all, and the necessaries of life were daily distributed
from the public store. . The colonists were sometimes in danger of starving;
and severe whipping, which was often administered to promote labor, was only
productive of constant and general discontent... . The introduction of
exclusive property immediately produced the most comfortable change in the
colony, by engaging the affections and invigorating the pursuits of its
inhabitants."
The benefit of private property and the destructive effects of socialism were
quickly recognized by the Pilgrims, and they survived because of those
discoveries. Those lessons were taken to heart by our Founders and enshrined
in our Constitution. Yet too many people today continue to ignore those
lessons. The persistent attempts to impose socialist plans and welfare-state
wealth redistribution in our country, attacks on private property and
individual achievement, the provocation of class envy, and the efforts to
instill those ideas in our children through mis-education and demagoguery,
continue to cause untold damage and mischief. All spawned by those ideologues
who consider themselves smarter than anyone else; those who, as Bradford put
it, have the "vanity of that conceit.as if they were wiser than God".
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mr. Kim Weissman
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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