Saturday, June 19, 2010

Liberty Song Saturday: "Steady, Friends, Steady"


After watching our current congress shame itself once again on its march to folly, placing principalities and power over principle, I was in the frame of mind to hearken back to our Founders. They were men who understood the power of liberty to create a fire in the mind, and who with honor and courage faced down the might of a corrupt British Empire. They took to task a parliament and king whose own march to folly was made to the tune of narrow personal interests that caused them to deny the power and ingenuity of free men and women.

During the Stamp Act Crisis following the French and Indian War, the colonists so thoroughly resisted the various stamp taxes that the Parliament had to rescind them. They opposed this taxation by Parliament because they did not have representation in it, and they understood this to be a violation of their Rights of Englishmen, protected by the amorphous but none-the-less real English Constitution.

Because of the hated Stamp Act, our Founders began to understand that the corrupt interests of the men who controlled Parliament did not represent the interests of either Englishmen living in England or the interests of the Englishmen in her American colonies. And they knew that they had to resist. That resistance did not come easily. It required that they close their courts, refuse the stamps from England to land on American soil, and that they refuse to trade in English goods requiring the stamp. As often is the case, these political acts were economic as well, and required the American people their "money to give."

This was the revolution of the mind, when these former Englishmen opened their eyes to what they had created on the American continent, and began to think of themselves as a new and different kind of human being, as Americans. As John Adams put it, the real revolution occured then, as the thinking of Americans changed, causing them to become the people who would face down an empire and win. Adams wrote:

"The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and the hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations . . . This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments and affections of the people was the real American Revolution."

John Dickenson of Pennsylvania, author of Letters from an American Farmer, penned the Liberty Song in 1768, and it was first published in the Boston Gazette. Newspapers then, as the the Internet is now, were the first line of political resistance. Then, the forces of tyranny in the form of Parliament with the Stamp Act, and Royal Governors with their power to close down the presses, vainly attempted to stop "hate speech" against the King and Parliament. Now, the forces of tyranny in the FCC and FTC regulatory commissions--at the behest of the executive branch that empowers them, would like to place taxes and limits on our ability to publish freely in order to stop us from speaking out against the administration and its policies. For our resistance is deemed "hate speech."

The Liberty Song, sung to the tune of the older Hearts of Oak, an anthem of the Royal Navy, is the proper answer to tyrants who would silence us in their drive to disavow our Constitution that keeps safe the Rights of Americans:


"All Ages shall speak, with amaze and applause,
Of the courage we'll show in support of our laws.
To die we can bear, but to serve we disdain,
For shame is to Freedom more dreadful than pain.
Chorus: In Freedom we're born, and in Freedom we'll live,
Our purses are ready; Steady, friends, steady!
Not as slaves, but as freemen, our money we'll give."


Here then is the liberty song, sung by a Ron Paul R3volutionary. Note that he changed the last verse, as a tribute to Dr. Ron Paul.




This is America's first protest song. And it is amazing that they were protesting a venal, self-involved Parliament, much as we have been sickened by a venal, self-involved Congress.
Just as our Founders were in the Revolution of the heart and mind during the Stamp Act Crisis, I believe that we are in a R3volution of heart and mind now, and we begin to wake up to the destruction of our Constitution and way of life at the hands of the collectivists.

May Liberty Prevail!
G-d Save the Constitution of the United States.

No comments: