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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (139324)	7/8/2004 3:07:37 PM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Looks to me like the signers of the Declaration of Independence were largely upper middle class professionals and tradesmen, not patrician. I think you're applying today's standards of living to that of circa 1760. Lawyers for example, you didn't get a university education being in the middle class. I am not sure, offhand, what the passage in the Declaration refers to... But it sounds good if you want to start a revolution. I thought I had cleared up the confusion, I was talking about the short- sightedness of the French Crown.... I understood that to be your earlier point. Though the point escapes me. As I mentioned earlier, I don't understand why the colonial desire for westward expansion entitles the Founding whiners to settle French property in the Ohio Valley and claim it belongs to Virginia. But I've moved beyond that. Virginia got the British in a war with the French. The British won everything east of the Mississippi and the colonists moved west. We've now moved on to the Declaration of Independence and the Founding whiners are not whining about emigration westward...they're whining about immigration. He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands. You just can't please these colonists. And it isn't an issue of making judgements on how the American Indian was treated. It's a point of who was actually inciting the Indians and secondly how does one reconcile what B. Franklin said about the Indians in letters vs. what he signed up to on the Declaration of Independence. He has two positions which contradict one another. As far as I've been able to tell, Franklin was supportive of the Indians throughout his life and this one reference in the Declaration was the exception. Perhaps he overlooked that particular item among all the others. and that it would have been foolish to have excluded enormous tracts from use by farmers or manufacturers just because Indians periodically passed through them. One would probably have to go through a tribe by tribe assessment and the locations in question. Not all tribes were migratory. It seems to have depended on what their primary food supply was. Deer don't migrate, there would be no reason to migrate. Buffalo migrate, you follow the buffalo herd. He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures. I know at least the Georgia legislature consented, but they signed the Declaration of Independence anyway. For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world I think this only applies to the Boston Harbor. As retaliation for the Boston Tea Party, King George III demanded that resitution be paid for the losses suffered and closed the Boston harbor until that was done. No doubt unfair collective punishment, but not exactly the large implications that were made in the Declaration of Independence. All of the colonies were not cut off from trade; it was one port, Boston. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance. He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures. I don't know about this one for sure, but I have a feeling "swarms of Officers" is taking some literary license. jttmab