The Original Thirteenth Amendment

Declaration of Independence - 1776
Articles of Confederation - 1777
The Constitution for the United States, Its Sources and Its Application
The Real Thirteenth Amendment: Titles of Nobility and Honour
The Latest Findings of the TONA Research Committee


The Original Thirteenth Amendment:
Titles of Nobility and Honour,
An Essay




Introduction

"In a Republic, Luxury and Corruption of Morals are said to be the invariable precursors of national dissolution," said Samuel F. Jarvis, in an address to the members of Phi Beta Kappa in 1806. "It is no less true that the perversion of national taste, and the disrelish for the solid attainments of science evince a degeneracy in Learning, Morals and Religion."

Four years after Mr. Jarvis made that speech, on the Thirtieth anniversary of the founding of Phi Beta Kappa, the State Legislature of Maryland was preparing to take an extraordinary step. Meeting on Christmas Day in 1810, this body ratified the original Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting Titles of Nobility and Honour and describing a Draconian penalty for its violation:

"If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive, or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office, or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince, or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them."

"The cause of learning is intimately connected to the cause of virtue," said Jarvis to the members of Phi Beta Kappa. Published by Oliver Steele & Company of New Haven, Jarvis' Oration is rather typical of the "federalist" thinking of the men of New Haven in this era, including both scholars and sailors who were prospering under the new Constitution. Seventeen states were now represented in Congress, and the frontier was at the border of the Indiana Territory and Ohio, which had been admitted to the union in 1803.

So, too, the town green and the New England town meeting were being replicated widely in Ohio, as was the principle of `republicanism'. Plain and simple manners, Bible-based education, and state governments drastically limited by local control and a profound concern for property rights, are the hallmarks of these frontier republicans."

That philosophy was carried forward into Ohio and Indiana by land-hungry pioneers and by itinerant preachers schooled at Yale, and Brown and Princeton -- and intent on setting up public education based on the common principles of Christian morality.

"Yet it is in America now that the clearest hope for a beginning of the [comprehensive] World Brain resides. A country habituated to the rapid development of vast commercial and industrial enterprises must surely be capable of attempting an intellectual and educational enterprise beyond the imagination of men bred in smaller and more tradition-ridden communities. So far it has been impossible to awaken any influential and resourceful people" wrote H.G. Wells, in 1939, about what he considered an "unprecedented necessity."

Wells is remembered now as the great science-fiction novelist, and his role as a proponent of world socialism -- and a tireless critic of the British ruling class and its Imperial ambitions -- is only revealed in little-known books like "The Fate of Man," as quoted above. In a bit of sublime irony, the establishment of the World Wide Web comes as close to Wells' vision of a World Brain as could ever possibly be, as a part of the neural network between colleges and universities known as the Internet, .

Fifty years after his call for construction of something like a World Brain, for the purpose of implementing socialism through pure democracy, the Internet and the Web are accelerating the decline of socialism and a concomitant rise in libertarian republicanism. That is, the whole network of advanced telecommunications -- programmable fax machines, cellular radio telephones, high speed computers with modems, and their long-line and satellite links that make it all work -- have combined to enable the common man or woman to have access to any great library and to send high-speed telegraph messages (e-mail) almost anywhere for just pennies! And, it is making state and local government both transparent and more accessible, to the citizen who is computer literate.

Furthermore, just as these United States in Congress assembled are entering the most crucial and dangerous period in our long history, this network and its resources have made it possible for the average citizen, who is willing to study the issues, to be part of representative self-government, in a way that Thomas Jefferson or George Mason would have approved. And, the surfacing of this missing Amendment, passed out of Congress in 1810 and properly ratified in 1819, is part of what the New England Federalists (referring to their political faction, now, and not just the philosophy), would have easily recognized as Divine Providence. How this Amendment was ratified, what it meant to the men of that era, and how it came to be suppressed and forgotten are the subjects of this essay.

And, what the loss of this Amendment has caused, and what its lawful restoration and placement in the proper order of Amendments means for the society of the United States, in the 1990s, in also addressed.

The reader may continue with:

Chapter 1 - The Prohibition of Titles of Nobility and Honour
Chapter 2 - Ratification: 1812-1820
Chapter 3 - Philadelphia Lawyers and a Mock Nobility
Chapter 4 - Panic, War & Opium.
Chapter 5 - One Hundred Years of Pain
Chapter 6 - The Secret Armies


Additionally in support of this essay:

A Table of Ratification and Publications,
The Utah Supreme Court decision on the flawed nature of the ratification of the Thirteenth Anti-Slavery and the Fourteenth Citizenship Amendments and
The Latest Findings of the TONA Research Committee, the continuing research and the most current data on the 13th Amendment.

Among those great thinkers consulted for the steel framework of this essay are: H.G. Wells on the Left, Albert Jay Nock on the Right, and Buckminster Fuller as the centrist.

Whenever possible, quotations are used, taken directly from people who were living the history discussed here. Key comments will often be set off in a separate block of text or highlighted in color. Special links to other sources of information on the World Wide Web will be noted.



End of Introduction


Richard C. Green
The Tenth Amendment Committee of Connecticut
April 12, 1997
West Haven, Connecticut
patriotlad@worldnet.att.net



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