American Minute with Bill Federer: French Revolution vs. American Revolution; and the term of 13th President Millard Fillmore

Best-selling author Os Guinness stated in an interview with Dr. Albert Mohler, (Thinking in Public, June 5, 2017):

“The culture war now at its deepest roots is actually a clash between 1776, what was the American Revolution, and 1789 and heirs of the French Revolution.”

The American Revolution was preceded by a Great Awakening Christian Revival, but in contrast, France’s Revolution was preceded by the eroding of morals by lewd theater, brazen infidelity and Voltaire’s anti-Christian philosophy.

Yale President Timothy Dwight wrote July 4, 1798:

“About the year 1728, Voltaire, so celebrated for his wit and … his hatred of Christianity …formed a systematical design to destroy Christianity and to introduce in its stead a general diffusion of irreligion and atheism.”

France had a stable monarchy from 486 AD until 1793, a little over a decade after King Louis XVI helped America gain independence.

French revolutionaries promised the people a dream of “liberty, equality, fraternity” – fraternity being a socialist order.

“Equality” in America meant equal treatment before the law; but in France “equality” meant everyone having an equal amount of possessions.

If the fraternity — the socialist state — thought someone had too many possessions, it used the power of the state to take them away.

France’s socialist agitators demanded they be tolerated by the king, but once in power, they quickly commenced a Reign of Terror with zero tolerance for those resisting the new secular state.

They tore down statues, defiled churches and desecrated graves in an effort to erase France’s Judeo-Christian heritage.

They did not just remove the mild and progressive King Louis XVI, but insisted he be executed by beheading.

Then, with an insatiable lust, they commenced with killing off anyone associated with the old order, beheading tens of thousands by the guillotine.

The French Revolution became the model of all subsequent bloody socialist revolutions.

In Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, British statesman Edmund Burke wrote how they seized power through fraud:

“France, by the perfidy (treachery) of her leaders … has sanctified the dark, suspicious maxims of tyrannous distrust …

Sovereigns will consider those who advise them to place an unlimited confidence in their people as subverters … who aim at their destruction … An irreparable calamity to you and to mankind.

Remember that your parliament of Paris told your king that, in calling the states together, he had nothing to fear …”

Burke condemned the political leaders who certified the fraud:

“These men should hide their heads …

They should bear their part in the ruin which their counsel has brought on their sovereign and their country …

They have seen the French rebel against a mild and lawful monarch with more fury, outrage, and insult than ever any people has been known to rise against … the most sanguinary (bloody) tyrant …”

Lawless leaders opened the floodgates for lawlessness to sweep across the land, as Burke explained:

“They have found their punishment in their success: laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigor; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished;

a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom;

everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence …

Were all these dreadful things necessary? … No! …

The fresh ruins of France, which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the devastation of civil war; they are the sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace.”

In a “fraternity” or socialist system, everyone supposedly shares equally, but the looming questions are:

Inevitably, those in the position of deciding who gets what become a ruling class, a deep-state elite — an oligarchy — with the most politically opportunistic among them acting as the party boss that no one can oppose – in other words, it becomes a dictatorship.

Like water in a sink circling faster and faster till it concentrates into a vortex and is sucked down the drain, power, without the restraints of morality, will inevitably concentrate into the hands of the most unscrupulous.

Edmund Burke continued:

“The persons who have thus squandered away the precious treasure … the persons who have made this prodigal and wild waste … have met … with no opposition at all …

Their pioneers have … demolished and laid everything level at their feet.

Not one drop of their blood have they shed in the cause of the country they have ruined.

They have made no sacrifices to their projects of greater consequence than their shoebuckles, whilst they were imprisoning their king, murdering their fellow citizens, and bathing in tears and plunging in poverty and distress thousands of worthy men and worthy families.

Their cruelty has … been the effect of their sense of perfect safety, in authorizing treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations, slaughters, and burnings throughout their harassed land …”

Burke concluded:

“If this monster of a constitution can continue, France will be wholly governed by … an ignoble oligarchy founded on the destruction of the crown, the church, the nobility, and the people.

Here end all the deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men. In the … bog of this base oligarchy they are all absorbed, sunk, and lost forever.”

After the lawless chaos of the godless French Revolution, the people were ripe for someone promising to restore order.

Along came Napoleon who usurped power and ruled as a dictator.

After years of Napoleonic Wars resulting in over 6 million deaths, Napoleon was forced to abdicate in 1815.

Regarding the Revolutions in France, British Statesman Lord Acton wrote:

“What the French took from the Americans was their theory of revolution, not their theory of government – their cutting, not their sewing.”

France continued to experience instability, and in 1832, the Paris riots took place described in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables.

That year, 1832, Millard Fillmore was first elected to the U.S. Congress. He eventually became the 13th U.S. President.

In the same period of time the United States has had one form of government, France has had over a dozen:

On December 6, 1852, Millard Fillmore compared the American Revolution with France’s many revolutions:

“Our own free institutions were not the offspring of our Revolution. They existed before.

They were planted in the free charters of self-government under which the English colonies grew up, and our Revolution only freed us from the dominion of a foreign power whose government was at variance with those institutions.

… But European nations have had no such training for self-government, and every effort to establish it by bloody revolutions has been, and must without that preparation continue to be, a failure …”

Fillmore added:

“Liberty unregulated by law degenerates into anarchy, which soon becomes the most horrid of all despotisms …

We owe these blessings, under Heaven, to the happy Constitution and Government which were bequeathed to us by our fathers, and which it is our sacred duty to transmit in all their integrity to our children.”

Millard Fillmore was born January 7, 1800.

He assumed the Presidency when Zachary Taylor died unexpectedly.

Fillmore stated July 10, 1850:

“I have to perform the melancholy duty of announcing to you that it has pleased Almighty God to remove from this life Zachary Taylor, late President of the United States.”

After being sworn into office, President Fillmore addressed Congress. July 10, 1850:

“A great man has fallen among us and a whole country is called to … mourning … I appeal to you to aid me … in the discharge of the duties from which …

I dare not shrink; and I rely upon Him who holds in His hands the destinies of nations to endow me with the requisite strength for the task and to avert from our country the evils apprehended from the heavy calamity which has befallen us.”

During his term as President, Millard Fillmore sent U.S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry to open trade with Japan.

At the U.S. Naval Academy, in front of Maury Hall, is a Japanese Bell, commemorating Commodore Matthew Perry.

Commodore Perry, on a Sunday in 1853, while sailing to Japan, set his Bible on the capstan and read Psalm 100, then sang:

“Before Jehovah’s awful throne

Ye nations bow with sacred joy.”

Commodore Perry wrote:

“I have just finished the Bible; I make it a point to read it through every cruise. It is certainly a wonderful Book — a most wonderful Book …

From boyhood I have taken a deep interest in Christianizing the heathen, and in imparting a knowledge of God’s revealed truth everywhere.”

On December 24, 1851, the Library of Congress, then located inside the Capitol, caught fire.

Two-thirds of the 55,000 volumes were destroyed, included most of the 6,487 books purchased from Thomas Jefferson’s personal library in 1815.

President Fillmore helped to form a bucket brigade to extinguish the flames.

After the Texas War of Independence, 1835-1836, and the Mexican-American War, 1848, President Millard Fillmore successfully averted a renewal of hostilities with Mexico. He addressed Congress, August 6, 1850:

“The treaty, being a part of the supreme law of the land, does extend over all such Mexicans, and assures to them perfect security in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, as well as in the free exercise of their religion.”

President Fillmore:

Southern States were overwhelmingly Democrat and favored the institution of slavery and expanding it into the new territories added to the Union.

Fillmore was the last President belonging to the big-tent Whig Party, which was was being torn apart by anti-slavery tensions.

Millard Fillmore stated:

“May God save the country, for it is obvious the people will not.”

The Whig Party subsequently dissolved, with its members filtering into the:

Endeavoring to keep the United States together prior to the Civil War, President Fillmore signed the Compromise of 1850, engineered by “the Great Compromiser” Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky.

Clay, who belonged to the Whig Party, had previously engineered the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

The Compromise of 1850 admitted California into the Union as a free state and abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia.

Unfortunately, the Compromise yielded to Southern Democrat demands for the Fugitive Slave Act, which, instead of averting a war, just postponed, and perhaps precipitated, it.

California, which had recently begun the Gold Rush, prohibited slavery in its Constitution of 1849:

“We, the People of the State of California, grateful to Almighty God for our freedom … do establish this Constitution …

Article 1, Sec. 18. Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in this State.”

During his Administration, Fillmore:

Fillmore stated in his Third Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1852:

“Is it prudent or is it wise to involve ourselves in these foreign wars?

Is it indeed true that we have heretofore refrained from doing so merely from the degrading motive of a conscious weakness?

For the honor of the patriots who have gone before us, I cannot admit it …

Men of the Revolution, who drew the sword against the oppressions of the mother country and pledged to Heaven ‘their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor’ to maintain their freedom, could never have been actuated by so unworthy a motive …

The truth is that the course which they pursued was dictated by a stern sense of international justice, by a statesmanlike prudence and a far-seeing wisdom, looking not merely to the present necessities but to the permanent safety and interest of the country.”

President Millard Fillmore stated in his First Annual Message to Congress, December 2, 1850:

“Being suddenly called in the midst of the last session of Congress by a painful dispensation of Divine Providence to the responsible station which I now hold …”

He continued:

“Nations, like individuals in a state of nature, are equal and independent, possessing certain rights and owing certain duties to each other … which rights and duties there is no common human authority to protect and enforce.

Still, there are rights and duties, binding in morals, in conscience, and in honor …

The great law of morality ought to have a national as well as a personal and individual application. We should act toward other nations as we wish them to act toward us (Matthew 7:12) …”

He added:

“… And now, fellow-citizens, I cannot bring this communication to a close without invoking you to join me in humble and devout thanks to the Great Ruler of Nations for the multiplied blessings which He has graciously bestowed upon us.

His hand, so often visible in our preservation, has stayed the pestilence, saved us from foreign wars and domestic disturbances, and scattered plenty throughout the land.”

President Millard Fillmore stated in his Second Annual Message to Congress, December 2, 1851:

“None can look back to the dangers which are passed or forward to the bright prospect before us without … a grateful sense of our profound obligations to a beneficent Providence, whose paternal care is so manifest in the happiness of this highly favored land.”

After a epidemics of influenza, yellow fever and cholera, Fillmore stated in his Third Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1852:

“Our grateful thanks are due to an all-merciful Providence, not only for staying the pestilence which in different forms has desolated some of our cities, but for crowning the labors of the husbandman with an abundant harvest and the nation generally with the blessings of peace and prosperity.”

In 1862, Millard Fillmore was named the first chancellor of the University of Buffalo.

Millard Fillmore, whose ancestors were Scottish Presbyterians and English dissenters, married his wife Abigail in the Episcopalian Church.

Fillmore wrote:

“I owe my uninterrupted bodily vigor to … life-long habits of regularity and temperance.

Throughout all my public life I maintained the same regular and systematic habits of living ..

The Sabbath day I always kept as a day of rest. Besides being a religious duty, it was essential to health.

On commencing my Presidential career, I found that the Sabbath had frequently been employed by visitors for private interviews with the President.

I determined to put an end to this custom, and ordered my doorkeeper to meet all Sunday visitors with an indiscriminate refusal.”

Concluding his comparison of the French Revolution with the American Revolution, Fillmore stated December 2, 1850:

“Our liberties, religious and civil, have been maintained, the fountains of knowledge have all been kept open, and means of happiness widely spread and generally enjoyed greater than have fallen to the lot of any other nation.

And while deeply penetrated with gratitude for the past let us hope that His All-Wise Providence will so guide our counsels … securing the peace of the country.”

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