We Hold These Truths
By Skip Miller
JAMESTOWN – This is where it began. This is the anvil on which the concept of a nation was hammered. This is the mother soil of the dreams, disappointment, industry, wars, privileges and guaranteed rights.
This is Jamestown, one of the most historic sites in the world. This is the birthing room of a nation that would become known as the United States. Without Jamestown there would not have been a Virginia, a man on the moon, a 9-11.
It was the first permanent English settlement on the continent. It was a group of English subjects who quickly learned an aristocratic caste system would not function so far removed from the king’s court. Survival depended on the work of all men, not just those stationed at the lower end of the social scale.
This is where it began, those beliefs we now hold self-evident. It was to here the king sent fluffy men who were to be called governors. Men who arrived dressed in the finery of London, expecting the settlers who provide all they needed while they governed.
It was here people questioned, and sometimes rejected, being governed by a man who knew nothing about how they lived, and could not marshal their aspirations and defenses.
It is the last Sunday in June. Tourists shuffle along in the 100-degree heat, puffs of dust rising from their footfalls. A cacophony of languages, accents and child demands reaches ears already ringing from the heat. Guides and settlement re-enactors are as sluggish as the backwater stretch of the James River where replica ships don’t move enough to make their moorings creak.
The guide on the Susan Constance is chubby, sweating. He rolls through the dialogue he knows so well, welcoming adults and warning kids not to run or jump or climb on anything. The tourists who go below deck return soaked in sweat, mopping their brows.
It is a short, air-conditioned car ride from Jamestown to Colonial Williamsburg. If Jamestown was the anvil, Williamsburg was the hammer. Williamsburg where colonial men tested the limits of their patience and their freedoms.
In times of emergency they fended for themselves. In times of disease they healed themselves. No matter the time, they sent a percentage of their crops – tobacco became the major export – to England and the king. The king wanted more, always more, to help finance a war, please a lord, fulfill a whim.
The settling of Jamestown was financed by a company. The proprietors of that company thought the settlers would find the precious metals that must be deposited here and there in this new world. At the top of the company hierarchy was the king who always, and without fail, got his share. Williamsburg provided a society and galvanized objectives.
As Virginia reached the halfway point of its second century of existence, long-range governance became unbearable. The governor, appointed by the king, was there to make sure the proper amount was sent to England. Any problem with the governor took months, sometimes years, to resolve.
In sum, the Virginians were English subjects who did not have the full benefits of being English. They viewed themselves as second class, pawns whose English rights were restricted by the tremendous distance between them and the royal court.
Over time that evolved into an idea of independence. Their only involvement with the king, they decided, was the ships that hauled away the products and crops that made the king happy and otherwise filled the vaults of royalty.
Bwould be sent to the king. Mason produced a draft of what became known as the Virginia Articles of Rights.
He sent his draft to Thomas Ludwell Lee, who made amendments and returned it to Mason. Mason incorporated those amendments. On June 12, 1776, he presented his Declaration of Rights to the full convention.
There were 16 items. The first item was the Virginians’ belief that “all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights …”
As a whole, the declaration was an outline of the government and basic rights and laws the Virginians believed were theirs to choose. They could elect their own representatives to their assembly. They believed a free government owed its responsibilities of “justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue” to the people that created it. It outlined the idea of the free exercise of religion, and extolled that “freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.”
The declaration was unanimously adopted on that day of June 12, 1776. Thomas Jefferson used it as a blueprint when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Dated July 4, 1776, its second paragraph is this:
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. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. ?Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
It is the last Sunday of June, sweltering and solemn. This is Jamestown, where kernels of the ideas of individual rights and freedoms began to sprout.
Upon us now is July 4. Cookouts, fireworks, parades, games and laughter. That is the July 4 celebration as we know it. It would be good to step aside and ask ourselves a question: have we maintained the spirit and meaning of the declarations that are the taproot of this American family tree?