(07-24-2018, 11:10 AM)mikesez Wrote:

(07-23-2018, 10:16 PM)jj82284 Wrote: HAS to mean?  Lol.  At least you acknowledge ur grabbing at straws.  

The unifying theme of the war was articulated in the doi.  Individual rights vs. The rights of the monarch was critical to that.  Also critical was the "thousand tyrants" meaning the idea of a legislature so powerful that it could unilaterally violate individual rights in the same manner as a king.  That's why we have a system of limited government through constitutional republicanism.  This stands in stark contrast to contemporary constitutions and charters that express or guarantee rights of the state on behalf of the collective at the expense of the individual.

Let me explain as clearly as possible. I avoided bringing this up because it upsets people even more, but it is the truth.
The conception of individual rights which they had in New England in 1776 or 1787, if put down into words, would have banned slavery.
The topic was dodged so that at the state level, the individual rights of those designated as slaves could be ignored.
The dodge was so complete that the topic of citizenship, and whether must be a citizen to bring a case into court, was also dodged, leading the Supreme Court in Dred Scott to fill in the blanks, saying that slaves were not citizens and that non-citizens could not sue in federal court.  This ruling surprised many people at the time who thought they understood the Constitution.

Why would that upset people?  And ur right.  Slavery was and is antithetical to individual rights and thus the do I was cited in deliberations of the 13th and 14th amendments.  The concept was at such stark contrast that the practice begin to die out almost immediately after the signing of the Constitution so much so that it took government intervention and the publicizing of the cost to maintain slavery at the turn of the 19th century otherwise the practice would have died out 50 to 60 years before the Civil War.

The political realities of maintaining the Union in the early days of our nation in no way retroactively strips the importance of individual rights to our founding in our current legal moral and social traditions.

---