The Consolidation Conspiracy: John Taylor's Critique of Nationalist Myth

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host John Harris to discuss a very important political book by a very important political thinker in American history, and that is

John Taylor of Caroline. The book that we are going to be discussing is called New Views of the

Constitution, and normally this is the kind of thing that would be an exclusive for Patreon supporters.

I decided in the spirit of Christmas to make this available to everyone. Of course, the slideshow, though, is only available for Patrons.

We've already done a discussion of Edmund Burke in the Anti -Federalist Papers. This is our third installment in our series on the

Anglo -American conservative tradition. The point of this is to chart a path back, to go to the roots of who we are as a people, what makes us unique, what are the true and valuable things that have contributed to the arrangements that we've enjoyed for so long in this country, what's made

America exceptional, those kinds of things. Of course, behind all of this is an Anglo -Protestant ethos, a

Christian understanding of the nature of man, of who God is, of the order that God has created.

This is something that has mediated through tradition to us, and we want to preserve those true, good, valuable things for our posterity.

It is in that spirit that we are doing this particular series. This is probably one of the shorter ones.

I didn't even know if I was going to do something on John Taylor of Caroline. I was thinking of jumping straight from the

Anti -Federalist Papers to the middle of the 19th century, but the more I thought about it, the more

I thought, you know, John Taylor is an important political thinker. I think his views on the

Constitution, because he's done a number of works we could have talked about, but his views on the Constitution I think are very important because they contrast sharply with another important American political thinker, and that is

Joseph Story. In fact, if you go to law school, if you take any course in the philosophy of law in American history, you're going to be talking about Joseph Story in a foundations course, right?

But Joseph Story is actually in the more nationalist tradition, and you don't probably read, at least

I don't know of any major law school. Maybe there are some that are now doing it, but you're not going to read John Taylor of Caroline, even though John Taylor of Caroline is probably more of an important political thinker if you want to understand the original intent of the

Constitution itself. And he is from the Jeffersonian, localist, Republican tradition.

He is the bridge between Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun. He influenced Calhoun tremendously.

Jefferson at one point said that Colonel Taylor and myself have rarely if ever differed in any political principles of importance.

That's from Thomas Jefferson, and so very high praise coming from him.

So I think because of that, it's important to understand a perspective that has been ignored in many places for many years, and it shouldn't be.

We need to recover this, and it is in the hope that we can recover it that I'm doing this particular video.

So all that to say, I should probably mention this before we get into the details here.

If you are a patron, if you do support this particular podcast, I can't do these things for free, so I do appreciate all your support.

But you are able to take this slideshow and any of the slideshows that we do in this particular course, and you can use them, you can modify them, you can create your own course on conservative history or American Christian political tradition, whatever you want to do.

And that's one of the ways that I can give back to you, so thank you for your support. Well, let's start a little bit with who

John Taylor of Caroline was, just give you some background information. John Taylor was born in 1753 in Caroline County, Virginia, thus his name,

John Taylor of Caroline. It almost sounds medieval, right? That's how he was known, though, and it's because of the county he was born in, which is very consistent with being a localist.

He attended William and Mary, where he studied law, and during the Revolutionary War, he became a colonel.

It's funny reading some of what he said about the Revolutionary War and just his observations of the differences between North and South.

He was very much a Southerner, and you're going to start to see the conservative tradition in the

United States becomes more of a Southern thing. It wasn't always that way.

The localist tradition, at least, and the more federal kind of states' rights, regionalist, agrarian, all of that existed in many parts of the

United States, and there were certainly states in the North that wanted a local federal arrangement.

It starts to shift, though, and John Taylor of Caroline might be one of the first figures where you really start seeing this shift.

You could trace it back and say, well, the South was always more traditional and hierarchical and these kinds of things and pastoral or whatever, but I think when it comes to federalism itself as an arrangement and separation of powers, the resistance to consolidated power, you're really going to start to see the

South pick up that mantle more or at least conserve what had been America the whole way through, from all the way from Maine to South Carolina.

So anyway, John Taylor of Caroline is a veteran of the Revolutionary War. He served multiple terms in the

Virginia House of Delegates and the U .S. Senate, and his works include

Eritre from 1813. This is his agrarian work. He was, of course, a planter and was very much part of the planter class, was very involved in trying to figure out how to be efficient in planting.

And Eritre is one of those books, probably one of the most important, if not the most important book in the 19th century on agriculture in the

United States. And he also published an inquiry into the principles and policy of the government of the

United States, 1814. Construction construed and constitutions vindicated, 1820.

1822. And, of course, his last book, which is the one we're going to be discussing, New Views of the Constitution of the

United States. And he died in office in 1824, a year after his book came out. Now, John Taylor of Caroline is known to be a very witty and even somewhat sarcastic at times in a very highbrow sense,

I suppose, person. And if you read even this book, it's funny. The last chapter, I was not expecting.

It is full on sarcasm and mockery. And it's actually hysterical to read it.

It is somewhat comedic. And I think I appreciate it because it comes after this serious discourse.

So after he's made all his arguments, he kind of makes he puts that cherry on top of everything and just makes a complete fool's errand out of any kind of nationalist consolidator who tries to make mincemeats of the

Constitution. And so I won't go into his last chapter as much. If you want to read the book, you can. But it's very funny.

And I mean, things like, well, we we can find the letters for the word national in the Constitution.

If you just hunt for N -A -T and so forth. And that means it's national.

Right. Like just he tries to take some of the arguments that are so ridiculous and he reduces them to absurdity, compares them to absurd things.

But he's witty throughout this whole book. And he was known for his wit, for his perception, for his memory, for his eloquence during his entire life.

John C. Calhoun even remarked on this. He was a lifelong friend of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

And he was also a major intellectual, like I said, that influenced John C. Calhoun and later

Southern constitutional thought. So this obviously he died before the Civil War, but he would have influenced the states rights tradition that ended up taking a stand in the war between the states.

So very important in American history for those reasons. Now, I want to start off by reading a section from the introduction to this particular edition, which is put out by Regnery.

I don't think Regnery's around anymore, but you can still get copies of this. And this is, let's see, written, this introduction, it's a really great introduction.

It is written by James McClellan at the University of London. And it's called

John Taylor's Secret Memorandum. I did not know about this, or if I did, I forgot. But it's,

I'm just going to read part of this. It says it must be admitted that John Taylor's three terms in the United States were all too brief and too sporadic to leave much of a mark on legislative history.

Probably the most memorable incident of his Senate career, though, is one that may have rocked the foundations of the union had

Taylor made it known to the public. It occurred in May of 1794, a month before Congress adjourned.

Taylor had vigorously opposed most of Hamilton, that's Alexander Hamilton's program, as soon as he entered the

Senate. And he rejected Hamilton's broad interpretation of the Constitution, the Bank of the United States, the funding program, the creation of national debt, excise taxes, a standing army, and tariffs.

He also expressed concern about the growing power of the president and the federal judiciary. And it was no secret that he had opposed the adoption of the

Constitution in 1788. Shortly after delivering a speech advocating suspension of the payment of the

British debts, Taylor was approached by two of the nation's leading federalists. Remember, the federalists are really nationalists.

So nationally, it's confusing because the federalists who wrote the federalist papers, they're nationalists.

The anti -federalists are actually federalists. They're more for federalism as a system, which is what

Taylor's defending. Anyway, these are more nationalists, Rufus King of New York and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, and both had served as delegates to the

Federal Convention of 1787. So they were important in the adoption of the Constitution. Now, King invited

Taylor into one of the committee rooms of the Senate where they could converse privately, informing Taylor that he wished to discuss an important subject.

So you have two, eventually two, but right now it's just one, senators who are coming to Taylor and they're saying, we want to talk to you about something very important, something that's very important.

And they were coming from a different political philosophy than Taylor. So what could they want to discuss that they might have in common, right?

What could they be in agreement with Taylor on? When they were alone, King declared that it was utterly impossible for the

Union to continue, that the North and South would never agree on issues of public policy, and that a dissolution of the

Union by mutual consent was preferable to a forced separation. At this point in the conversation,

Ellsworth entered the room either by accident or design, and King repeated what he had been saying, and Ellsworth agreed with him.

Taylor replied that he intended to support the Union if possible, but agreed that a peaceful separation would be preferable to a forced one.

The cause of the problem? Hamilton. Hamilton's ambitious master plan for solving the nation's economic woes.

He thought an effort should first be made to eradicate the cause of the problem before resorting to a permanent separation.

King disagreed, however, insisting that the differences went much deeper because Northerners and Southerners never had and never would think alike.

The discussion ended with the parties. They reached an impasse and could not agree on the cause of the sectional hostility.

Taylor left the room convinced that the Federalists were seriously contemplating a dissolution of the Union, and of course some of their compatriots later on did in the

Hartford Convention. The Essex Junto later did that with Gray Otis, Timothy Pickering, Gouverneur Morris, and Caleb Strong, who was the chairman in 1814.

So this happened early in the career of John Taylor, I believe,

I think I read the date before, in 1794. So the Constitution, the ink isn't even dry on this thing, and they're already contemplating separation between the

North and the South. And slavery is not the issue. The expansion of it, anything related to it, it's not even part of the discussion here.

Now, it doesn't mean that that wasn't part of the wider economic issues, but this is not what they were discussing at the time directly.

And this is something that was found out years later, and this introduction goes into how and why.

But they wanted to conceal this. There was no reason to make this public when it didn't happen.

But it just goes to show you that some of the rifts that occurred in the United States, rifts that frankly existed in a more homogenized nation, and see, even

I'm using the word nation there when I shouldn't be, a more homogenized arrangement between separate states, which practically functioned as nations, but for one country, so we can use the word country,

I suppose, they were already having divisions, they were already having schisms. And this is between people who are coming from different parts of the

British Isles, who have different cultures. Now, expand that to today. Think about all the differences today in this very fractured country that is not as homogenized, when we quite literally do have different nations living in this country.

In fact, just today, I saw a post from a Christian, I think it's someone who's a missionary or someone who settles refugees or something, but he was saying how the people from Somalia, Somalians who live in the

United States, they should be treated well, these kinds of things. And it's just, I don't think that would be even a concept for the founding generation, the people from Somalia.

That's such a different place in the world to have them settle here and have a say in the governmental proceedings and all that kind of thing, to give them control.

That would be such a foreign concept. They're so different in so many ways. Their religion's different. And this is something that we are more used to today.

But as we can see from our own present situation, the elasticity of the rubber band is starting to become frayed and it's not able to stretch anymore.

We are coming apart, as it were. And something that John Taylor Caroline and the founding generation were trying to navigate was, how do we get people who are fairly similar?

They come from the same island. How do we get them to get along? And one of the things was, well, we have a federal arrangement.

People can take care of their business in one state or one region, and people can take care of their business in another region.

And they don't have to have the same government that makes all decisions for them emanating from the center.

Massachusetts can be Massachusetts, and South Carolina can be South Carolina. And they can come together for certain powers that they have delegated to a central authority for trade and for self -defense and then all the other things.

They can navigate themselves. That was the whole idea. It was meant to promote peace and promote strength at the same time, to have an alliance, to have a group of states that can, for efficient reasons, trade and monitor their borders and immigration and engage in treaties and that kind of thing.

But at the same time, their domestic institutions and the way they conduct business that are unique to them, they can continue doing it that way and not have to conform to the ways of a foreign people in their minds.

And this almost was splitting our country apart long before there was ever a war between the states or a civil war.

So here's the question. Here's the question. Did the Constitution transform the

U .S. from a federation to a national government? Because this is the thing that I think we as modern

Americans so often assume, that there was this weak document called the

Articles of Confederation, if you learn anything about it, and it didn't work. And so we adopted the U .S. Constitution.

And when we adopted the U .S. Constitution, if we were ever a federation, it was before that.

We became a national government, a one -size -fits -all national government at that point, an

American people. And this is one of the things John Taylor denied. So there never was an American people. You could say there was

American peoples, but there wasn't one consolidated American nation,

American people. And I would submit to you, if there wasn't back then, there is less so even now.

You can refer to the American people in a general sense. I'm not saying that's necessarily wrong, but really what you were referring to is peoples.

You're referring to very different people in very different places with very different interests, but who have enough similarity to come together for certain limited defined purposes.

Joseph Story, who is the premier remembered and studied jurist of the injustice of the 19th century, wrote in the commentaries on the

Constitution of the United States, which he published in 1833, so 10 years after John Taylor's writing, and he knew about John Taylor's work, but there's no evidence that I know that he interacted with it at all.

But he said the obvious object of the preamble of the Constitution, so we the people, was to substitute a government of the people for a confederacy of states, a constitution for a compact.

He also said the Constitution was, from its very origin, contemplated to be the frame of a national government, of special and enumerated powers, and not of general and unlimited powers.

This is apparent, as will be presently seen from the history of the proceedings of the convention, which framed it.

So the Constitution gave us a national government. It gave us a substitution for the government that we had previous to this.

And this is the thing that most Americans just take for granted now. That's what they think happened because, well,

Joseph Story said so. And he was really inheriting an increasingly pro -national tradition that was arising from Chief Justice John Jay, from the way that the

Constitutional Convention was remembered through the eyes of the Federalist Papers, because some of the information concerning the convention didn't come out until later that would have refuted that, or it wasn't highlighted.

And so John Taylor is writing against this kind of thing, even though you don't have

Joseph Story's publication yet, but you had other tracks and pamphlets that were advocating this strong kind of Hamiltonian, consolidated government, big government, if you will.

And he says, no, that's not what happened at all. He says, basically, when Congress called for the establishment of a national government alongside a federal constitution, the preservation of the union, and a convention for the sole purpose of revising the

Articles of Confederation, the national language was stripped from the credentials of each state's delegates.

In other words, when Congress came together and they said, we're going to have a new constitution, there were efforts to make it more nationalistic, more centralized, more consolidated.

And one of the things that initially was proposed was using the term national alongside terms like federal.

And there was some tension in this. And what ended up happening was each state that came to the convention and was authorized by their state, each delegate from a state, and they were authorized by their state, those delegates, to make a decision for their state on whether or not they would adopt this constitution, what the constitution would look like, all of that.

Each of them said things like this. We are here to discuss and decide upon the most effectual means to remedy the defects of the federal union.

That's New Hampshire or Massachusetts, who said for the sole purpose of revisiting the Articles of Confederation to render the federal constitution adequate to preserving of the union.

Or North Carolina, which said for the purposes of revising the federal constitution and so forth. Each of these states left out the term national.

So Congress calls them and says, wait, we're going to be called for this purpose. And each state says, essentially, no, this is the purpose we're called for.

This is what we're doing here. We are here for a federal union.

We are here to figure out how to make a better, more perfect union.

We are not here to create a new thing, a new national, a new centralized, a new consolidated government, a new entity that's monolithic.

We're not doing that. We're still 13 separate states. We're still delegating authority for certain defined purposes.

That's what we're doing. We are the sovereigns of this document. We're not creating a new sovereign that rules over all of us.

Now on this point, John Taylor of Carolina says, in the mode of amending the constitution of 1787, as well as in the necessity for the ratification of a state to make it binding upon that state, we discern distinctly the opinion of the convention that no

American nation existed. Had it been made by an American nation, it would be a rare anomaly.

That state nations should have the power to reject and alter it. So we say it makes no sense.

We had the Articles of Confederation, which is supposed to be this perpetual union, and you have all these parties to it that are able to dissolve it because they're the sovereigns, the states.

Well, they weren't coming back together to now create this, to get rid of all their separate, unique power and to give it to one central authority.

You can't make a nation that way. That's not how it happens. These are the entities that formed organically, that preceded the creation of the constitution of the

United States and the federal government that we think of today. Those are the states. So that's what he's trying to say.

So the question is consolidation or federation. Is it a federation of states or is this a consolidated government?

And the story of the American political tradition has been more and more consolidation over time.

At the same time, I think within the heart of Americans is this sort of longing for a localist

Jeffersonian ethos. And you see this in especially even Christmastime with that small town kind of Norman Rockwell feel, with even the

Hallmark movies and things that are enjoyed at this time of year. People still want there to be this unique kind of local, shielded from the rest of the world place that you can go to and find quaintness and find particularity.

But in our political tradition, in the way that we've actually expanded the power of the centralized authority, the general government, you don't see that.

You see just more and more consolidation, unfortunately. And so there's efforts to prevent this.

Conservatives have been trying to do that north and south for a long time. There's efforts to combat big government, to try to preserve and even form and make sure that local hierarchies are intact.

But the center keeps expanding and the government keeps getting more and more of a stranglehold over our everyday lives.

So the answer is it was intended to be, and in some senses, it still is a federation of autonomous states.

The term union assumes independent parts. These are all points that John Taylor made in his book.

The Declaration of Independence recognized the colonies as united, but also free and independent states.

The Articles of Confederation of 1777 claimed a state retains its sovereignty. And this arrangement was not changed before the

Constitution. The Constitution of 1787 used terms like federal, state, and Congress.

The term people referred to people as represented by their respective states. State ratified the

Constitution in their conventions, their state conventions. States that did not ratify were not bound.

So remember you had four states that were holdouts and the

Constitution would have kept going. Those states just would have been out of it. So, I mean, it would have been awkward to say, we the states as the original rendition was supposed to be, we the states of, and enlisting the states, this particular states in the

Union, do ordain this Constitution when they had not all actually done that yet.

They hadn't ratified it. So you needed a different term and just a general term of, we the people of the

United States. And eventually though, of course, all the states did ratify it.

On June 25th, 1787, this is while the Constitutional Convention is meeting, the convention voted to strike the word national and insert

United States in the resolutions then under consideration. And the style was adopted not to establish the idea of an

American people, but to defeat it. And this is what a lot of people forget. They think they quote that line, we the people of the

United States. And what word do they focus on? They focus on the word people. It's the people of the United States.

Well, actually that particular line was put in there for the opposite reason than it's usually assumed today.

It was to defeat the idea that there's one consolidated American people, that what we should focus on is people of the

United States. That's the issue here. That's the focus.

And if you understand the history of the Constitutional Convention and why they adopted that language, it was they wanted to communicate the idea that the parties to this document are states.

And so when they went through various portions of the

Constitution, things like what the Congress is going to do, instead of saying the

National Congress, it was Congress of the United States. Those are two very different things.

And that was decided very early on that they were going to, well, at least basically midway, maybe a little early through the convention, they decided this is what we're going to do.

So it actually was early on. So I believe the Constitutional Convention went through West September. If the

Declaration of Independence is not obligatory, said John Taylor of Carolina, our entire political fabric has lost its

Magna Carta and is without any solid foundation. Now, I challenge you on this. Why do we usually remember the

Declaration of Independence today? It's a foundational political document, right? Well, it's because it says, not the

Constitution, we're talking about the Declaration, it says there's these unalienable rights, right? That's what everyone remembers, unalienable rights, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.

What is John Taylor of Carolina focusing on? Really what the rest of the document talks about. The fact that, and especially if you go to the end of the document, the beginning and the end, that there are particular states that are free and independent, the document says, that have rights that have been violated by the

King of England, the arrangement that they were supposed to be under. That's the whole foundation, the formation, what got the ball rolling in this whole project.

And he says, that's the thing that's uniquely American, that's the thing to focus on, but that's not what's focused on, that's not what's remembered about that document.

And that should make you a little skeptical, why? Why is that remembered? Why isn't the thing that actually makes a document more unique as a document?

Now, I use the term conspiracy here in the proper sense of the word, not in the way it's been redefined to mean something unsubstantiated without evidence.

This is something that at the very least has circumstantial evidence, but there's more than just circumstantial evidence. There is a consolidation conspiracy.

And John Taylor of Carolina, of course, talks about this, that there were parties to the formation of the constitution who were really hoping to get a different document.

And because they weren't able to get that document in the convention Congress that formed and the convention that was ratified by the states with their proceedings, they ended up having to do it a different way.

And that's been the story of our country. Like I said, that those who were nationalists at the time and for big government and consolidation, they've been able to get their way, but through progressive increments over time.

But this was the plan from the beginning. John Taylor of Carolina essentially says, the convention's proceedings, this is where the story starts, they were kept secret from the beginning.

There really wasn't a lot that got out. The public didn't know exactly what was going on.

Even the Federalist and the Anti -Federalist Papers, and the Federalist Papers were published. The Anti -Federalist Papers were not published until much later, at least as a unified body of work.

They were published under pseudonyms and the public is getting these bits and pieces and the proceedings were kept secret.

So you have in 1788, the Federalist Papers, which are cited heavily by John Marshall, Chief Justice of the

Supreme Court, and he was a consolidator. These were really all the public had to go on just about.

Now you did have advocates of federalism. And when I say federalism here, I mean these guys would have been more

Anti -Federalist. I know it's confusing, but they were the true torchbearers for federalism, against the nationalists who called themselves

Federalists. I know. So the advocates of actual federalism, Robert Yates, Chief Justice of the

New York Supreme Court, and Luther Martin. That's an easy one for Protestants to remember. Not Martin Luther, Luther Martin, Maryland lawyer.

They had notes that were published, but they left early. They weren't there for the whole convention.

And when they left at that point, the nationalists seemed like they were having the upper hand. And so if you read what they wrote, you would think that the

Constitution was heading towards some kind of a nationalist agenda, and it didn't.

1819, we have a redacted official journal that was published under John Quincy Adams.

And then we have 1840, James Madison's notes are published, which are probably the most cited notes of the

Constitution, because I think they're the most thorough. It wasn't until much later though. And of course, Madison is, he goes back and forth.

Obviously he helped with the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. So some people will claim him as a

Federalist. Some people will say he's a Republican. He was, I think he was probably more of a nationalist.

He wasn't Hamilton, but he was certainly veering in that direction. He was kind of, depending on the debate, he might be on either side of it.

But James Madison, he wasn't where John Taylor Caroline was. He wasn't where the

Anti -Federalists were, certainly. And he was, his notes were published in 1840.

So that's really all we have. And so you think about that. For years, we didn't have proceedings and we still have a record that's not as complete as historians would like to have.

But there's still a lot there. There were three parties, says

Luther Martin, this is a long quote from him. There were three parties in the convention, okay? You had one whose object it was to abolish and annihilate all state governments and to bring forward one general government over this extensive continent of a monarchical nature under certain restrictions and limitations.

The second party was not for the abolition of the state governments nor for the introduction of a monarchical government under any form, but they wished to establish such a system as would give their own states undue power.

And then a third party was what I consider the truly federal and Republican, which were unwilling to act contrary to the purpose for which they were elected.

The first party, conscious that the people of America would reject their system if proposed, this is very key, joined the second, okay?

So you have basically people here that are more like they want Great Britain again. They want basically a king, like Alexander Hamilton's guys.

Those guys join with James Madison's guys, okay? They join with the nationalists.

So you have two kind of, I would say, more big government people, right?

More so than John Taylor is. And they joined together. And they know that the people of America aren't gonna want their plan as much, especially

Alexander Hamilton admitted this blatantly and openly. So what they do is they know that by departing from a federal system, they pave the way for their favorite object, the destruction of the state governments and the introduction of monarchy.

Parts of the proposed system were warmly and zealously opposed. So during the debates,

Luther Martin's watching this and he's saying, I'm watching and I'm seeing the people who want a very strong centralized government joining with those, that second group, who is not for the abolition of state governments nor for the introduction of a monarchical government under any form, but they wish to establish such a system as would give their own states undue power.

And so these aren't federalists. These are people that they want more of a strong centralized government.

They try to band together to get something that is going to increase the power of the federal or the, as they would have called it, the general government.

Now, John Taylor of Caroline says about this. He says, secrecy is intended for delusion and delusion is fraud.

This stratagem to obtain a victory over the people's most sacred right in the ambuscade mode can only be accounted for upon a supposition that the people should be worked as puppets first by the wire of concealment and secondly, by the wire of construction into the catastrophe of a consolidated government.

So he's saying that it seems like there was a method to this madness, that there was a veil of secrecy.

People didn't know exactly what was being debated and what kind of a document they were given.

We're always told, Ben Franklin says, when he's asked, what kind of government? Well, a republic, if you can keep it, if that happened.

Well, the people didn't really know exactly what kind of a government they were getting and so there's these debates going on and the federalists are promoting it to the people like, this is federalism, this is, and remember the federalists are the nationalists, so the nationalists are saying, it's federalism.

It's states' rights, don't worry. You know, I think of, maybe not quite as egregious as this, but it's similar in my mind.

I just thought of the Obamacare thing, right? If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor We're not gonna do anything.

It doesn't change that much, guys. Let's allay the fears here. Remember, these people have all come out of a consolidated government with an official state church, with a king, with a very strong parliament.

They didn't have the same kinds of, they were very suspicious of consolidated power, right?

That's the situation. You have to remember that and keep that in the back of your mind the entire time. So these people don't want that and so how are you going to give them a spoonful of sugar to help the consolidation medicine go down?

We have to convince them that what you're giving them is not that and won't ever be interpreted as that.

And this is really what John Taylor is accusing some people of and he gets a little more specific and I'll talk about that later, but here's just a few admissions.

This is not comprehensive, but in Yates' journal of the proceedings of the convention, he talks about various nationalists.

Edmund Randolph says, Governor Randolph candidly confessed that his resolutions were not intended for a federal government.

He meant a strong consolidated union in which the idea of states should be nearly annihilated. We don't need states.

I mean, that sounds like progressive from the 21st century. Charles Pickney. Mr. Pickney read his system and confessed that it was grounded on nearly the same principles as Mr.

Randolph's resolutions. James Madison. Some gentlemen are afraid that the plan is not sufficiently national while others apprehend that it is too much so.

The states at present are only great corporations having the power of making bylaws and these are effectual only if they are not contradictory to the general confederation.

The states ought to be placed under the control of the general government at least as much as they formerly were under the

King and British Parliament. So that's James Madison. States are only great corporations.

They ought to be placed under the control of the general government. Then you have Alexander Hamilton, right? Who's known for this.

No amendment of the confederation can answer the purpose of a good government so long as state sovereignties do not, do, rather, in any shape exist.

To avoid the evils deducible from these observations, we must establish a general and national government and annihilate the state distinctions and state operations.

I believe the British government forms the best model the world has ever produced. I confess that this plan and that from Virginia are very remote from the idea of the people.

So you say the people don't think this is very popular, especially in Virginia. But you know what?

I think the British had it right. I mean, they just fought a war with Britain and he wants to go back to Britain.

That's what he wants. He wants a monarchy, essentially. So, but how is he going to do this?

And if you read the Federalist Papers, what John Taylor of Caroline points out is essentially that Alexander Hamilton is just deceiving you.

He's just lying. He doesn't have a problem with that. He will lie to convince you that actually the

Constitution is giving you a nationalist government, but then he'll even contradict himself at points, trying to allay fears that it's giving you a consolidated government.

And I'll go through some of that. So the Federalist Papers, okay. This is important because this is what you study when you go and you study the

Constitution today. And I think you should study the Federalist Papers. Absolutely, 100%. That's why

I talked a lot about them when we did our show on the Anti -Federalist Papers, because I thought we do need to talk about the

Anti -Federalist Papers, but obviously in order to do that, you can't do that without talking about the Federalist Papers. And they do at least tell you how this was sold to the public.

And it is the primary way, and even in our national memory, and I see I even say the word national, right?

In our memory as a country, this is how we think of ourselves and how we remember the

Constitution. And this is a summary really of those debates that happened in the Constitutional Convention.

Since we didn't know what was happening in there, this is what got remembered. The Federalist Papers sell the

Constitution as a Federalist arrangement while also assuming a national sovereignty that was rejected.

So remember at the Constitutional Convention, a national sovereignty is rejected. The word national is stricken, but the

Federalist Papers try to convince you that, well, yeah, you have a Federalist arrangement, but there's also a national sovereignty here as well.

And let me give you some examples of this that are pointed out. These aren't all of them, but here's a number of them that are pointed out by John Taylor Caroline.

First of all, state sovereignty is presented. Federalism is presented.

The state governments are invested with complete sovereignty, says Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 31. The Constitution is to be found on the assent and ratification of the people of America, not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent states, says

James Madison in Federalist 39. In 45, Madison says, the powers delegated by the proposed

Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which remain to the state governments are numerous and indefinite, and that's 100 % true.

That's a great line too. That is exactly what the Constitution gives you. Now, at the same time, terms like national, general, and sovereignty of the union that the convention had deliberately expunged are introduced into the

Federalist papers representing the Constitution. So Hamilton says in Federalist 9, the proposed

Constitution, so far from implying an abolition of the state governments, makes them constituent parts of the national sovereignty.

Huh. By allowing them a direct representation in the Senate, so there's a national sovereignty. Hamilton says in 89, who is to judge of the necessity and propriety of the laws to be passed for executing the powers of the union?

The national government under the control of the people. Hmm. The House of Representatives will derive its power from the people of America.

So it's like one body of people, right? Not separated by states, but one body of people. And the people will be represented in the same proportion and on the same principle as they are in legislatures of each particular state.

Huh. Wait, how does this go together? So it keeps going. So far, the government is national and not federal.

So at this point, I believe he's talking about the House of Representatives. So he said the House of Representatives, well, that's the national part.

The federal part's the Senate, I guess, right? But that's not true. The House of Representatives is not national just because it's proportional as far as population is concerned.

It's still population from particular states. That's the whole point. They're still from these particular states.

And at that time, I believe states were the ones that were even appointing those to sit on that representative body.

So he also points out things like national supremacy. And this is, I think, where the rubber really meets the road.

This is, I believe this is a quote. I don't think I cited it here, but I believe this is from James Madison in the

Federalist Papers. He says, in controversies relating to the boundaries between two jurisdictions, so state and then general government, so you have the state government, so you have the general government, consolidated government in D .C.,

the tribunal, which is the federal courts, so you think of the Supreme Court, which is ultimate, ultimately, to decide, is to be established under the general government.

So think about it this way. The general government in Washington, D .C., gets to appoint, they decide, it's the president who decides, ultimately, and it's under the purview, supposedly, of Congress.

They can impeach, but when do they do that? So the president appoints these lifetime -serving

Supreme Court justices, and then, of course, there's also these other federal courts. And they, when there's a conflict between the states and the national, or the,

I should say, the general government, they get to weigh in, these judges. And who gets to appoint those judges?

The general government. So when there's a conflict between the general government and the states, the general government gets to appoint the judges who make the determination as to who's right and who's wrong.

I mean, some people would say maybe that's the fox guarding the hen house.

That effectively means that the one side has sovereignty or has domination over the other side.

The general government has domination, through the courts, over the state governments, which is not what the

Constitution, if you read the Constitution, it doesn't say that. You don't even find judicial review in that.

This is something that took place over time, in precedent, and this is what

John Taylor Caroline is trying to point out. He's saying, this is how this is being sold to you, but look, there's the devils in the details.

These nationalists are trying to put one over on you. That's what he's trying to say. So his conclusions are, the stray words and constructive supremacies interwoven with the

Constitution by the Federalists, look rather like the casual overflowings of an accumulated fund than the effect of a critical examination into their consistency with a form of government.

So what is this? That's what he's saying. This is not a critical examination of the

Constitution. This isn't about the Constitution. This would be like if you're doing Bible study. You're reading a commentary and you're like, where did you find that?

You're not trying to figure out what the text of Scripture says. You have an agenda, and that's what he's saying.

He said, these guys had an agenda. He says, I cannot discern the remotest consistency between Mr.

Madison's sovereignty of states and the supremacy of a federal judiciary. The whole federal sphere possesses no supremacy or sovereignty or power over the state spheres, but a part of the federal sphere does.

So he makes mincemeat of that argument. Now, what's the case for state sovereignty?

Okay, you may ask, how do we know the states are sovereign and not this Leviathan creature they created?

Well, the Treaty of Paris in 1783 refers to each state as free and sovereign independent states and actually lists all of them, the

Treaty of Paris is like separate treaties between Great Britain and these various states that are free, sovereign, and independent.

The ratification articles of 1777 and the constitution of 1787 support, and this is a quote from John Taylor Caroline, a corporate character.

And this implies a derivation from and subjection to some sovereignty and a power to modify or abolish this corporate character.

This designates the exact place where the sovereignty resides. The federal government is derived from and may be modified or abolished by the states.

And its corporate character is its only tenure, good only on account of the validity of the sovereignties by which it was bestowed.

In other words, who created these arrangements? Did the states create them?

Now, you'll find later, Abraham Lincoln comes along and says, well, actually the states were created by the federal government.

The government created these states, but actually historically, the states are the ones that created the constitution and the

Articles of Confederation. This federal system is a project of the states. They are coming together for certain defined purposes.

They are giving up some of their power that they can take upon themselves again. I don't think

John Taylor talks about this, but if you read some of the ratification agreements, there's even things saying, well, we can leave.

We can secede if this doesn't go according to plan. So this was something that the states themselves created.

Article one, section eight, and article four, section three, Congress cannot take land from a state without consent.

This is one of the things John Taylor talks about. He says, look, the land, the actual land in these states is fixed and only the states are allowed to, let's say if the government wants to do a military base, give that land to the government.

The government can't just come in and take it. When you're talking about sovereignty, you're talking about land.

That's one of the basic things. Now, of course, I don't know that we have that as much as we did, but this is one of the arguments he uses.

He says the amendment clause also, article five in the constitution, says that three -fourths of the state legislatures or state conventions are required to abolish or amend the constitution.

And this is when you hear about this convention of states, that's what they're talking about. The states can come together and we can abolish this whole thing if we want.

We don't even need to go through Washington. Well, technically that's true actually. Technically that's true.

At least what the constitution says, the original intent on paper. Now, whether or not today, would the powers that be, since we're downstream from this, would they abide by that?

And do states have the power to stand up to the general government? Probably not, but legally speaking, yes.

Now, Taylor had some specific complaints and you find these in 269 to 270 on those pages in his book.

And there's more than this, but these are the ones that I thought stood out because he just names them in a sequence. And I'm just going to go through them very quickly, but he talks about federal assumption of state debts.

And these are some of the things the anti -federalist papers talk about too, that they're worried about. That the assumption of state debts,

John Taylor says, and the abandonment of paper money. So that's another issue here. Pretended to reimburse the people for the latter injury by entailing upon them a pecuniary aristocracy.

The people of a few states are deluded into an opinion that they receive it, whereas it is received as in England by the capitalist aristocracy.

What does he mean by that? Well, he means that, especially during the revolutionary war, the states incurred all these debts.

And one of the things that the constitution was going to solve was, how do we start paying back some of these things when our credit is just in the gutter and some of these states are not being as, let's say forthright with paying back some of these debts.

And Alexander Hamilton wanted a national bank the whole time. He wanted something that could really take care of his state debt.

Well, that's exactly what happened. And the federal assumption of state debts and the abandonment of local currencies, there used to be local state currencies.

I don't know if you knew that. But this is a world that we have forgotten, basically, because we have one legalized tender now.

Maybe we can think about it a little bit more now because we do have cryptos now, but even the government wants to get into regulating those.

But having states regulate their own currencies, have their own power to tax banks and these kinds of things if they wanted to arrange their own affairs.

This was all run roughshod over by the general government with the creation of a national bank.

And really what happens in this arrangement is that the capitalists he's talking about, this aristocracy, these are the financiers.

These are the people that primarily live in the Northeast. These are the rich men north of Richmond, still there today, that are going to benefit from this consolidation.

And this runs right into the national bank. He says, Banking, besides cramming the idle child of legislation with more money, contains most of the furniture of Pandora's box.

The profit of agricultural capital is reduced to three per centum and that of pecuniary enhanced up to 10 or 20.

Does not this fact decide who pays or who receives a tribute? So if you're into agriculture, you're not benefiting from this.

The national bank, now the government can borrow from, like they still do.

And when they borrow from the bank, who are they actually borrowing from? Well, people who are buying bonds, people who are rich, who now are invested in the expansion of the centralized authority.

Now they want higher taxes. They want infrastructure. They want their money to grow.

They want those bonds to increase in value. So this is what gives us the banking system of today.

So it's not just the creature of Jekyll Island. I mean, this precedes Jekyll Island and that's the

Fed, but we've just gotten worse and worse things over time. And this is another thing,

I'll just point this out briefly. There's a lot of talk, at least as I'm, this is an evergreen episode, but as I'm talking right now, there is a lot of talk about Jewish interests and how really our banking problems go back to Jewish power, consolidated

Jewish power. And this is pretty much, everything is blamed by some people on Jewish power.

And this is sort of my own aside here, but the slave trade, the feminism, socialism, progressivism, pretty much every ism from the 19th century.

But one of those things, of course is banking and Jewish people, obviously have been very involved in banking. The thing is though, you find this problem starting before high levels of Jewish immigration.

It doesn't mean that Jewish people don't represent at higher percentages, bankers or anything like that.

It doesn't mean in the 20th century, if you go to some of the top banks, they're not going to have a high number.

I haven't looked at the numbers, but high number of Jewish people in these financial rules. What I'm trying to say though, is the problems that we talk about though, were here before there were high levels of Jewish immigration in the second part of the 19th century.

And it's not to say just, well, we get Jews off the hook or something like that.

It's really more just to say there's a human problem here. Alexander Hamilton wants the national bank.

He got his national bank very early and we've been having trouble ever since.

I mean, Jackson's, one of his main things, Andrew Jackson was, get rid of the national bank. And there's a class thing going on here.

It's the farmers, it's the blue collar workers. It's the middle America people who don't want this. It doesn't benefit them.

It's enriching the people who are their political enemies. And we've just had finance capitalism.

John Taylor gets into tariffs here too. And other things that are instruments of a certain class that wants consolidation, control, to enrich themselves.

This was happening at a very early stage in our country's history. And all you needed are humans for this kind of thing to happen.

Now you have the protective tariffs, as I mentioned, bounties to capitalists, says

John Taylor, under the rejected proposition to give rewards for the promotion of manufacturers constitute a large annual tribunal imposed upon labor for their benefit.

Land and pecuniary speculators may affect a combination of which the majority of every state must be the victim.

And this of course plays heavily into the force bill, the tariff of abominations of 1828, and then even the war between the states, the

Civil War. Lincoln wanted to raise the tariff and the tariff was a big political football because it benefited one section and it punished another.

And this is something that, according to Taylor, this would not have happened under a strict construction of the constitution.

If we were to honor the federal system that the constitution actually represented. A congressional lottery, a lottery invinced by the, if I can say the word, diminutiveness.

Diminutiveness? Okay. I know what dimitude is, but I don't see that word a lot. Of the fraud, the contempt of geographical and personal avarice for the division of powers.

So he's saying, the Congress actually did apparently have a lottery at one point.

And he said, look, this is not, you can't do that. The pension law.

The pension law is of a sufficient size, he says, to prove that these motives can make heavy as well as light obliterations of this plain federal principle.

So the pension law was basically, became this abused thing. Revolutionary War soldiers, they're going to get their pension, but this, like a lot of things that the government does, people want to get their piece of the pie and it becomes abused.

Internal improvements. A single road evinces the capacities of local powers in Congress for squandering the money of the

United States. He says, look, basically, like we want to do one infrastructure project, all the buzzards show up and they want their little piece of their infrastructure project.

What are they going to do? This is where earmarks and pork come from. He's saying it's already happening. The supremacy of the federal court, which is probably his biggest issue.

The supremacy of the federal court is another apple of discord thrown among the states sufficient to, of itself, to obliterate all the best principles of the constitution.

And by the time he's writing this, you already have judicial review. You have rulings that say that the federal courts get to rule in criminal cases where state laws are violated so long as federal laws are also violated.

It becomes the general government's issue at that point.

They take it from the states. Rulings that say that you can't tax a national bank and so therefore, because the power to tax is the power to destroy.

So these are all things that expand the general power, the consolidated power.

And you have John Taylor saying, this is the situation we're in.

This was not what we thought we were getting with the constitution, but this is where we are at. And he says, these effects are notable proofs of what is to be expected from the constructive evasions of the division of power by the

Geographical Congress. They would have been avoided by an adherence of the federal government to federal objects.

So we could have avoided all this, but we didn't. We didn't avoid them because of the way that we decided to interpret this document.

So this brings us to, can federal branches nullify state laws, which is probably one of the biggest issues in all of this.

Because behind this is really, where does the sovereignty lie? If the sovereignty is with the states, then you can't.

If the sovereignty is with this creature they created, this centralized authority, then yes. And this is where we're at today.

Plans to do this, though, were rejected during the Constitutional Convention. John Taylor says, it can never be conceived that a principle of a negative over state laws audibly proposed and rejected had silently crept into the

Constitution. So he said, look, if this was all rejected during the debates for what this document is and what it would mean, how are we back here?

How did things that were rejected slip back into it? In the picture there, of course, is

John Jay, who was very responsible for at least expanding the courts into these nullifying, going roughshod over states.

So you have Edmund Randolph's Virginia Plan and Charles Pickney's draft, which allowed

Congress to negate state laws. All right, so these were propositions when they were coming together and saying, all right, we need a new plan.

Articles of Confederation not working. Randolph had the Virginia Plan. Charles Pickney had his own draft.

And they said in those, we're gonna negate state laws. We're gonna have one consolidated thing.

Well, those were rejected, essentially. In May 30th, 1787, a vote of eight states to establish a national government consisting of a supreme legislative judiciary and executive was reversed.

So there was this vote. Eight states voted for it, but it was reversed. Then you have

June 8th, 1787, a motion by Charles Pickney, seconded by James Madison to negative all laws, which to them shall appear improper.

And this was rejected seven to three. So it would have been, it would have given the general government the power to negate the laws of the states.

It's rejected. June 13th, 1787, a motion by Edmund Randolph, seconded by James Madison to encompass the jurisdiction of the national judiciary to cases which involve the national peace and harmony was omitted from article three.

So this, they don't get their way. You have June 18th, 1787, Alexander Hamilton, semi -monarchical complete plan died for lack of a second.

So he actually, this is kind of funny. So Alexander Hamilton gets up there and where I'm sitting right now, I'm actually across the river.

If I walk down my hill and I look out, I'm going to see Poughkeepsie, New York. And that is the city where Alexander Hamilton was making his speeches in support of the constitution later.

So he was very much in support of the constitution, but before when the constitution was being formed, he had this grandiose plan and it was basically the

British plan. Like let's have the British form. We're not going to use the term king and queen, but that's basically what we're going to have.

And this, he gives a speech for about six hours on this and he's done and it fails because not one person gives him a second.

So did not one other person agreed with him. So he couldn't proceed. So August 18th, 1787,

Charles Pickney had a consolidated plan with 17 additional powers. Things like even, we're going to have a national university and that kind of thing, all rejected.

The supreme clause only applied to the constitution, supremacy clause rather, only applied to the constitution itself.

So once the constitution is ratified, adopted, there's the supremacy clause. And so there is a supremacy that the general government does have in the few and defined things that the states give up to the general government.

And what John Taylor said about this is the supremacy of the constitution is an admonition to all departments, both state and federal, that they were bound to obey the restrictions it imposes.

So basically you've got to obey this document. It neither enlarges nor abridges the powers delegated or reserved.

So what he's trying to say is you can't take one branch of the federal government or the consolidated government.

I guess I could use federal in this sense, can't I? Yeah, I can. Okay, so you can't take one branch. You can't take the courts, for example, and say, well, the courts get to determine when there's a disagreement between the states and the general government.

The courts can just come in there because of the supremacy clause or something like that. Because the supremacy clause is the supremacy of the arrangement that they're voting on.

And all branches have to abide by that. It is not saying that one branch is now going to run roughshod over the others or over the states.

So that's another part of the constitution that gets abused. But this is something that if the early generation, the initial generations, founding generation, and those who preceded it in the federalist period, federal period, rather, and even up to the

Civil War times, if this was all understood, the debates that went into the

Constitutional Convention, you probably wouldn't have the confusion that resulted and eventually made its way to things like a war.

But that's what happened. So Taylor is one of the figures, one of these sages trying to say, hold on guys, remember what we voted on.

Remember why we voted on it. Remember what it meant. The meaning didn't change here.

Taylor's American exceptionalism. And Taylor is very much a patriot. Obviously he fought in the war for independence.

And he thinks that there are some unique, really good things about the United States.

And the first thing he highlights is checks and balances. He says, the United States understood the discrimination between civil slavery and liberty.

And in the formation of the federal government, endeavored by limitations and prohibitions to reserve and secure as many of their individual rights as might be retained without defeating the end of providing for their common interests.

What he's saying is there are checks and balances in this system. And those things were good.

These limitations, these prohibitions were intended to protect something good.

He also had localism in the United States. The United States saw that any geographical interest, if invested with supremacy by the establishment of a consolidated national government, would oppress some other geographical interest and made a new effort to avoid this national malignity by a concentrated

Supreme power, though lodged in the representatives of the people. So you have people, and people represent localities, they represent regions when they elect their representatives.

And these geographical interests stand up against a centralized authority.

And then federalism, of course, which is the main thing here. This is the main American characteristic that every body of men invested with Supreme power, he says, whether collected together by the single principle of representation or by mixed principles of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, is influenced by a secret or an avowed spirit of avarice and ambition.

Translation, it doesn't matter what system of government you have. Men, when they get together, they're going to be evil.

Or there's at least a temptation to be evil, right? And the more power, the more skin in the game, the more benefit, the more it attracts evil people.

They demonstrate the propensity of men to combine for bad as well as good ends. So people can also combine for good things too.

But in our federal combination, the difficulty was to give efficacy to the good and to expel the bad motives leading men to combine or unite.

So here's the thing. If you give someone supreme power, if people are endowed with a collective ability, it doesn't matter what system it is, but if there's a collective ability to control and to gain, you are going to have ambitious people wanting to fill those roles, to be part of it, to get close to it.

And so the genius of this system, is what he's saying, is we are trying to make a combination where we recognize that this tendency exists.

How do we make it so the temptation is lessened? And that when someone does want to abuse power, there's someone else to come in and check them.

And they can only go so far and things will hopefully work for mutual interest.

There's no perfect system, but this one seems to be better. He says, we rejected

England's monarchy and aristocracy and also its concentration of supreme power and men assembled at one place.

So we got men assembled everywhere. We got all the state governments, they have their own assemblies. And this diffusion of power is supposed to make for a better system with less temptation and more controls.

Now, of course we know that any system can falter and this is why

John Taylor's writing is because in his day, I mean, he was there during when the ratification was happening and he's already watching it come unraveled.

And he's saying, look, let's get back to the principles we talked about. Let's get back to the arrangement we talked about here. We're drifting here guys.

And so he has this warning. He says, and I quote, if federalism is lost, the subjugation of the people to some despotic form of government will be more probable here than in countries where equivalent auxiliaries for political vice do not exist.

At Rome, the division of power between the people in the Senate terminated in a despotism. In France, its division between the people and the representative steeped the hands of representation in blood and obliterated national liberty.

And in England, a concentrated supremacy is dealing out oppression to Ireland. In these instances, the want of some division of power, able and interested to excite the attention of the people to usurpations and frauds has exposed them to be harassed into lager and molded into servility.

He's saying, if we lose federalism, we lose the country. We lose our freedom.

We lose our liberty. And we will be just like these other places and a despot will rule.

I think his words ring true more now than they did then. I think that many of us feel deep down inside of us that we are losing.

It's like another step has been taken, another rung down the ladder of losing that initial arrangement that the founding generation, probably the most brilliant generation in all of our history, put together.

And it's a sad thing, but at the same time, we still have the ideas. We still have the books.

We still have the heroes. We have the figures. We still have the same, hopefully, spirit in our blood.

We have an idea. We have a passion. We have heritage.

We have all these things. And we have an understanding of human nature, which comes from a

Christian perspective, from divine revelation and from observation of the natural world.

We can see that man himself is corruptible. And maybe we are waiting for the time that people will once again regain some sense of a localist flavor, a localist ordo amoris, of valuing the people around you, valuing the local region, the farm food from your local farmers, the things that your local people make.

I don't know how many of you do this. I go to even get my shoes repaired and things like that.

I buy them from places that are made somewhere else because I don't know of anyone locally who makes shoes. But trying to think through how can

I support my local community? How can I eat at the place that's not the corporate place but is the mom and pop place?

Those kinds of things, those all matter. And all government is ultimately local in some sense.

But we keep getting more and more of a consolidated government.

We keep getting big government issuing more and more control over our lives.

Even the whole idea of these executive orders. That was a joke when Obama was in office.

Saturday Night Live was doing skits about it. And now you have Donald Trump doing it all the time. And maybe he has to on some things to reverse some of the damage, right?

But we also know we are setting precedence. We are, even if some things are necessary, we know we're expanding something that it feels dystopian.

It feels like there's a stranglehold waiting for us, a noose waiting for us as it were.

Civil kind of slavery, which is what John Taylor talked about. And it may be that it will be a

Cincinnatus. There may be someone who has to come in and take the authority, the control of the deep state and turn it on itself.

And it may be a drastic political move. Or it may be there's a war, there's foreign governments that take over the

United States. I don't know the future of this country. But I do know that some of the wisdom that the founding generation had and that John Taylor talks about is forever.

It will always be with us. And it's something good to know. It's something uniquely American. It's something that's still part of us.

It's still part of our art and our music. It's part of our food. It's part of the differences between us.

The government can try to, and these corporate interests can try to make people automatrons.

And in some ways, maybe they will make everyone similar in some ways. But these local, regional differences, they always come out.

People who are sharing different experiences in different areas with different weather patterns and different climates and different accents and just all kinds of differences that exist and attach themselves to local areas, those things will always be there.

And the federal arrangement recognized that and tried to wield the strength of various peoples who were very similar and saw themselves as sharing a similar destiny.

They were able to, for defined and specific purposes, come together for trade, for self -defense, for immigration, these kinds of things.

And maybe once again, we can get back to that at some point. That's the hope.

That's why I do these videos too. I want to retain for future generations a sense of what made

America great in the first place. And one of those things is federalism. And that's what

John Taylor of Caroline was able to pass down to us. And the next time, we will talk about another small government, localist,