North Carolina's Horrid Fragment of Feudal Despotism

From: bernhard1848@gmail.com
Constitutional scholar and lawyer R. Carter Pittman (1898-1972) wrote that "Philosophy and sociology have always been the tamper tools that have sprung institutions of liberty out of alignment. Historical research and common sense born of experience, have always been the tools to spring them back into place. Doctors of pseudo-socio-science have always been the apes of tyranny."

He viewed the "all men are created equal" phrases in State constitutions as being "forced upon the people . . . by carpetbag doctors of pseudo-socio-science, while Federal bayonets held the outraged white people at bay. As soon as those doctors were run out, nearly all the States returned to George Mason's phrase: "That all men are born equally free and independent."

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"


North Carolina's Horrid Fragment of Feudal Despotism

"Inequality will exist as long as liberty exists.  It unavoidably results from that very liberty itself." Alexander Hamilton, 26 June 1787

"American high school and college textbooks are loaded with equalitarian propaganda, all pointing to the Declaration of Independence equality clause as the "American dream" or the "American creed."  No one questions the right of all men to equal justice under law, but propagandists have carried the doctrine beyond equality of rights to equality of things . . .

The Declaration of Independence never became living law in America, and no provision of the Federal Constitution or Bill of Rights can be traced to it and . . . its influence on State constitutions and bills rights has been insignificant.

It was written to serve the temporary purposes of a sanguinary conflict.  It was and perhaps will always be history's most effective piece of propaganda, but it neither grants nor protects human rights.  The Declaration of Independence does not say that all men are equal.  It says they were "created" equal.  There equality ends.

The [United States] Constitution proclaims in its preamble that it was established "to . . . insure domestic tranquility . . . and secure the blessings of liberty."  Nowhere does it hint a purpose to insure or impose equality of men or things.

For decades after 1776 North Carolina's Bill of Rights proclaimed "that all men are born equally free and independent."  There must surely be some explanation as to why people who had lived under the maxims of George Mason since 1776 should suddenly change in 1868.

The Constitution of 1868 was framed in a convention called under the reconstruction acts of [the Northern] Congress, by Major General [Edward] Canby.  It assembled at Raleigh, January 14, 1868.  Federal soldiers stood guard over deliberations. The same equality clause was inserted in the bills or rights of many Southern States while the natural leaders of the white people were held at bay by Federal bayonets. See for examples, the Alabama Bill of Rights, the Louisiana Bill of Rights of 1868, South Carolina's of 1868 and Florida's of 1868.

As is well-known by those the least familiar with American history, shortly after the Federal troops were withdrawn [in 1877], the white people of the South quickly expelled the carpetbaggers and subdued the scalawags and recaptured the State governments. Every one of those States, with one exception, promptly called a constitutional convention according to its own wishes in place of those imposed upon it by military might.

All struck the doctrine of human equality from their constitutions, except North Carolina. Why North Carolina should have retained that doctrine in her Bill of Rights is a mystery.  There it stands on parchments as a horrid fragment of feudal despotism imposed on a proud and helpless people by superior force."

(Equality Versus Liberty, the Eternal Conflict, R. Carter Pittman, August, 1960; www.rcarterpittman.org)