Dakota Beacon

A book review by Lynn Bergman

My Personal Story

I was born and raised in Grand Forks, North Dakota. My grandfather farmed near Edinburg, North Dakota. One of my most prized possessions is my grandfather’s complete set of steam engine mechanics books passed down to me by my father. My father was a demolitions platoon sergeant (who did not lose a single man under his command) and earned the bronze star in WWII. After the war, he became service manager for Nomland Motor Company in Grand Forks. I became a Professional Civil Engineer and a Registered Land Surveyor in North Dakota, Arizona, and Colorado. I entered the field of politics as a TEA party organizer and political activist, subsequently writing to share my self-education in ideology and politics with similarly interested readers.

Honorable Treason – The Declaration of Independence and the Men Who Signed It

I stumbled into this book by David Freeman Hawke in a thrift store and had no idea as to the wealth of information it contained. It came out in 1976, the year of our country’s bi-centennial.

Our National Heritage

At the time of our nation’s founding, agriculture represented about 90% of our economy. Land surveying played a big part in the development of the United States of America and continues to be a true “profession” even as teaching, medicine, and other former professions have prostituted themselves to the collective bargaining trap. “Individual thinking” has immensely suffered by the teaching profession’s transformation to collectivism over recent decades. Medicine is already showing negative results and can be expected to follow the sad example of teaching.

Famous Surveyors

Three of the four presidents on Mount Rushmore were land surveyors; George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.

Three of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Clark, Stephen Hopkins, and John Morton, entered surveying to avoid the role expected of them by their “farming fathers.”

Declaration of Independence Signers John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Roger Sherman, and James Smith were also educated into and earned part of their life’s income by surveying.

All seven signers who had been surveyors obviously chose to make the leap into politics. The only profession better represented was law.

Improvement Without Metamorphosis

Early discussions in the Second Continental Congress often referred to “Civil War” between Whigs and Tories. As time slowly passed and the narrative continued, “Revolution” replaced “Civil War” as the likely outcome of a Declaration of Independence. These “Reluctant Rebels” must have instinctly understood that internal division on the issue of slavery must be delayed for independence to become within reach. The year 1808 was set as the goal to resume the discussions on slavery following the abolition of trans-Atlantic slave trading.

Signers on the Battlefields

All signers knew their actions could cause them retribution and several of them gambled their lives on the battlefield. Lewis Morris, Benjamin Rush, Caesar Rodney, William Whipple, Thomas Hayward, Arthur Middleton, and Edward Rutledge were willing and able enough to serve with courage.

Retributions on the Signers

Josiah Bartlett failed to attend the First Continental Congress because his home had recently been burned down, rumor had it, by a gang of Loyalists, renegade Tories of the class then called “cow boys.”

The signers had pledged their fortunes, and all in varying degrees suffered for their boldness. The British looted the country mansions of Arthur Middleton, Thomas Heyward, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, and Lewis Morris. They burned Carter Braxton’s great house to the ground.

Thomas McKean was “hunted like a fox by the enemy.” He recalled after the war, “compelled to move my family five times in a few months, and at last fixed them in a little log house on the banks of the Susquehanna.

George Wythe lost nearly all he owned.

The Honestest Man in Verginia

George Wythe was said to have been cut from the mold that had shaped George Washington. His father died when Wythe was three, leaving the family plantation to his older brother. His mother, who gave him a grounding in Latin and Greek, died a few years later. A relative subsequently allowed him to read law in his office. Wythe was admitted to the bar at age twenty. After practicing with a partner (and marrying his partner’s sister who died a year later) in Spotsylvania County, Virginia for about eight years, his brother died and he assigned others to manage the family plantation. He then married and settled permanently in Williamsburg, Virginia. He became a professor of law and policy at the College of William and Mary where his students included Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Henry Clay. Virginians regarded Wythe as their greatest legal scholar. But there is more to Wythe that only his words can reveal:

            “Religion is our best and greatest friend; it furnishes the best of all motives to virtue and the strongest dissuasive to vice. Christianity, of all religions, is the sweetest and sublimest in the world for it labors throughout to infix in our hearts this great truth, that God is love.”

When Wythe had doubts about a client he was to defend, he required an oath before his defense, and if any deception was practiced upon him the fee was returned and the case abandoned. Wythe had another peculiarity… he took the words “liberty” and “freedom” with embarrassing literalness, applying them to black men as well as white. He freed his slaves upon his death and willed them a share of his estate. The other George, Washington that is, freed his slaves but not those of his wife and provided no share of his estate.

I have the strong opinion that these two Georges may have been the two most important to the Revolution, begging my comparison. Both were honest high and above any of their peers. Wythe knew that God is love and Washington counted on that same love. But of the two, Washington, in leading the Revolutionary Army, was probably just slightly more courageous with his life. Both would well understand the equation of life’s success:

Love = Work + Courage

The “Leveling Spirit” of New England

Throughout this book, no single philosophy is as reviled by the other signers as the “leveling spirit” of New England. This forerunner to socialism, prior to even the birth of Karl Marx (May 5, 1818) surprised me, but it should not have. Today, some clergy are the staunchest proponents of equal outcomes (Pope Francis?) rather than equal opportunity. Perhaps there have always been and will always be “useful idiots” who advocate “Heaven on Earth”, and too many with the added caveat of the total absence of Almighty God.