 The sun never set on the British Empire. It was the largest empire in world history.
In April of 1775, Britain prepared to send government troops on a preemptive raid to seize guns from American patriots at Lexington and Concord.
George Mason of Virginia stated: “To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”
James Madison wrote (Letters & Writings of James Madison, 1865, p. 406): “The advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation…forms a barrier against the enterprise of ambition… Kingdoms of Europe…are afraid to trust the people with arms.”
Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story wrote in Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, 2nd Edition, 1833, p. 125): “The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium (safeguard) of the liberties of a Republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers.”
Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Cooley wrote in The General Principles of Constitutional Law (2nd Ed., 1891, p. 282): “The Second Amendment…was meant to be a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers… The people…shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose.”
Patrick Henry wrote (Elliott, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions, 1836, 1941, p. 378): “Let him candidly tell me, where and when did freedom exist when the sword and the purse were given up from the people? Unless a miracle in human affairs interposed, no nation ever retained its liberty after the loss of the sword and the purse… The great object is, that every man be armed… Everyone who is able may have a gun.”
Joel Barlow wrote in Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, Resulting from the Necessity and Propriety of a General Revolution in the Principle of Government (1792, 1956, p. 46): “The foundation of everything is…that the people will form an equal representative government…that the people will be universally armed… A people that legislate for themselves ought to be in the habit of protecting themselves.”
Jeffrey R. Snyder, esq., wrote in “A Nation of Cowards” (The Public Interest, 1993, no. 113): “Classical republican philosophy has long recognized the critical relationship between personal liberty and the possession of arms by a people ready and willing to use them.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote (Cicero, Selected Political Speeches, trans. M. Grant, 1969, p. 222): “There exists a law…inborn in our hearts…that if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.”
Aristotle wrote in Parts of Animals (trans. A. Peck, 1961, p. 373): “Animals have just one method of defense and cannot change it for another… For man, on the other hand, many means of defense are available, and he can change them at any time… Take the hand: this is as good as a talon, or a claw, or a horn, or again, a spear, or a sword, or any other weapon or tool it can be all of these.”
Aristotle wrote in Politics (trans. T. Sinclair, 1962, p. 274): “Those who possess and can wield arms are in a position to decide whether the constitution is to continue or not.”
Machiavelli wrote in The Prince (trans. L. Ricci, 1952, p. 73, 81): “Among evils caused by being disarmed, it renders you contemptible… It is not reasonable to suppose that one who is armed will obey willing one who is unarmed.”
Cesare Beccaria wrote in On Crimes and Punishment (trans. H. Paolucci, 1963, p. 87-88): “False is the idea…that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it… The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most scared laws of humanity, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity… Such laws…serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
Roman historian Livy wrote (trans. B. Foster, 1919, p. 148): “Formerly (during the reign of Rome’s 6th king, Servius Tullius, 578-535 BC) the right to bear arms had belonged solely to the patricians. Now plebeians were given a place in the army… All the citizens capable of bearing arms were required to provide their own swords, spears, and other armor.”
Thomas Paine wrote (Writings of Thomas Paine, Conway, ed., 1894, p. 56) “The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self defense. The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the
Montesquieu wrote in The Spirit of the Laws (trans. T. Nugent, 1899, p. 64): “It is unreasonable…to oblige a man not to attempt the defense of his own life.”
Thomas More wrote in Utopia (trans. R.M. Adams, 1975, p. 71): “Men and women alike…assiduously exercise themselves in military training…to protect their own territory or to drive an invading enemy out of their friends’ land or, in pity for a people oppressed by tyranny, to deliver them by force of arms from the yoke and slavery of the tyrant.”
Machiavelli wrote in On the Art of War (trans. E. Farnsworth, 1965, p. 30): “Citizens, when legally armed…did the least mischief to any state… Rome remained free for four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred, although their citizens were armed all that time, but many other states that have been disarmed have lost their liberty in less than forty years.”
Machiavelli wrote in Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (trans. L. Walker, 1965, p. 492): “If any city be armed…as Rome was…all its citizens, alike in their private and official capacity…it will be found they will be of the same mind… But, when they are not familiar with arms and merely trust to the whim of fortune…they will change with the changes of fortune.”
Jefferson wrote to George Washington, 1796 (The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, John P. Foley, ed., New York & London, Funk & Wagnalls “One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.”
Machiavelli wrote in The Prince (trans. L. Ricci, 1952, p. 73, 81): “An armed republic submits less easily to the rule of one of its citizens.”
Noah Webster wrote in An Examination into the leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, Oct. 10, 1787, (Paul Leicester Ford, ed., “Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword because the whole body of the people are armed.”
Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (ed., Cannan, p. 309): “Men of republican principles have been jealous of a standing army as dangerous of liberty… The standing army of Caesar destroyed the Roman Republic. The standing army of Cromwell turned the Long Parliament out of doors.”
Earl Warren wrote in The Bill of Rights and the Military, (37N.Y.U. L. Rev. 181, 1962): “Our War of the Revolution was, in good measure, fought as a protest against standing armies… Thus we find in the Bill of Rights, Amendment 2…specifically authorizing a decentralized militia, guaranteeing the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Jeffrey R. Snyder, esq., wrote in “A Nation of Cowards” (The Public Interest, 1993, no. 113): “Political theorists as dissimilar as Niccolo Machiavelli, Sir Thomas More, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau all shared the view that the possession of arms is vital for resisting tyranny, and that to be disarmed by one’s government is tantamount to being enslaved by it.”
The Texas Declaration of Independence, March 2, 1836, stated: “The late changes made in the government by General Antonio Lopez Santa Ana, who having overturned the constitution of his country, now It has demanded us to deliver up our arms, which are essential to our defense – the rightful property of freemen-and formidable only to tyrannical governments.”
Mahatma Gandhi wrote in An Autobiography of the Story of My Experiments with the Truth (trans. M. Desai, 1927): “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.”
Islamic Sharia law forbids non-Muslims from possessing arms, swords or weapons of any kind.
Adolph Hitler acted similarly with his Edict of March 18, 1938: “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subjected people to carry arms; history shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subjected people to carry arms have prepared their own fall.”
German Firearm Act of 1937 stated: “Firearm licenses will not be granted to Jews.” Richard Munday reported in “The Monopoly of Power,” presented to the American Society of Criminology, 1991, the Nazi order regarding arms, SA Ober Führer of Bad Tolz: “SA (Storm Troopers), SS (para-military adjunct of the Gestapo), and Stahlhelm… Anyone who does not belong to one of the above-named organizations and who unjustifiably keeps his weapon…must be regarded as an enemy of the national government and will be brought to account without compunction and with the utmost severity.”
Jefferson wrote in the Declaration on Taking Up Arms, July 1775 (The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, John P. Foley, ed., New York & London, Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1900, No. 2152; Paul Leicester Ford, ed. i, 476): “We…most solemnly, before God and the world declare that…the arms we have been compelled to assume we will use with perseverance, exerting to their utmost energies all those powers which our Creator hath given us, to preserve that liberty which He committed to us in sacred deposit.”
Democrat Vice-President Hubert Humphrey was quoted by David T. Hardy, The Second Amendment as a Restraint on State and Federal Firearms Restrictions (Kates, ed., Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out, 1979): “The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.” Get the book Change to Chains: The 6000 Year Quest for Global Control
On April 19, 1775, the British continued their march to Lexington and Concord intent, not only on seizing arms, but to arrest Boston Tea Party leader Samuel Adams and Massachusetts Provincial Congress president John Hancock.
They were also going to arrest Jeremiah Lee, who was America’s largest colonial ship owner and the wealthiest man in Massachusetts.
John Hancock, who had previously experienced British tax collectors confiscating his merchant ship Liberty in 1768, led the Massachusetts Provincial Congress to declare, April 15, 1775: “In circumstances dark as these, it becomes us, as men and Christians, to reflect that, whilst every prudent measure should be taken to ward off the impending judgments… (a day) … be set apart as a Day of Public Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer…to confess their sins…to implore the Forgiveness of all our Transgression.”
Connecticut Governor Jonathan Trumbull, whom Washington called ‘the first of the patriots’, was the only colonial governor at the start of the Revolution to support the patriot cause. He proclaimed a Day of Fasting, APRIL 19, 1775, that: “God would graciously pour out His Holy Spirit on us to bring us to a thorough repentance and effectual reformation that our iniquities may not be our ruin; that He would restore, preserve and secure the liberties of this and all the other British American colonies, and make the land a mountain of Holiness, and habitation of righteousness forever.”
The poem, Paul Revere’s Ride, written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, described how American patriots sent a warning from Boston’s Old North Church that the British were coming: “Listen my children and you shall hear He said to his friend, ‘If the British march
Though Paul Revere was captured along the way, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott continued their midnight ride. “Through the gloom and the light,
In early dawn of APRIL 19, 1775, American “Minutemen,” confronted British government troops on Lexington Green and Concord’s Old North Bridge.
Then American patriots chased the British back, as Longfellow‘s poem continued: “You know the rest. In the books you have read Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Longfellow ended: “So through the night rode Paul Revere; A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
Two months after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the Continental Congress, under President John Hancock, declared, June 12, 1775: “Congress…considering the present critical, alarming and calamitous state…do earnestly recommend, that Thursday, the 12th of July next, be observed by the inhabitants of all the English Colonies on this Continent, as a Day of Public Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer, that we may with united hearts and voices, unfeignedly confess and deplore our many sins and offer up our joint supplications to the All-wise, Omnipotent and merciful Disposer of all Events, humbly beseeching Him to forgive our iniquities… It is recommended to Christians of all denominations to assemble for public worship and to abstain from servile labor and recreations of said day.”
Though it took eight years, Americans won their independence. A century later, on APRIL 19, 1875, at that same Old North Bridge, American patriots were honored by the dedication of the ‘Minute Man Statue’ designed by Daniel Chester French.
On the statue’s base is a stanza of the poem The Concord Hymn, written Ralph Waldo Emerson, APRIL 19, 1860: “By the rude bridge that arched the flood, The foe long since in silence slept; On this green bank, by this soft stream, O Thou who made those heroes dare, New England celebrates APRIL 19th as “Patriots’ Day.” For God’s Glory Alone Ministries thanks Bill Federer and www.AmericanMinute.com
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The American Minute: Patriots’ Day – “And fired the shot heard round the world.”
