“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” – Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison, January 1787
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.” – Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William Smith, November 1787
THE LIMITS OF REPUBLICAN EXPERIMENTATION (233) Aha. Your text mentions that “political leadership fell increasingly to men convinced that republican experimentation had gone too far.” That says a lot, doesn’t it? Conservatism is back, as I said it would be. Your text gives the example of Pennsylvania and how it changed. Think of how the 20th century saw changes in political leadership from Democrats to Republicans.
SHAYS’S REBELLION (233) We know what happened in Shays’s Rebellion. For more information, check out these sites (site one and site two). Now, all that’s left is the consequences. Well it’s a rebellion. What are the effects of that? One is that more people could join in the rebellious fun. That did happen to a small extent, but the threat of danger was greater than the actual rebellions. The Constitutional Convention took everyone’s attention away from the violence and onto creating a new republic. That’s the second effect: counter-revolution. That’s one interpretation of the convention. Your text seems to agree, but what about Thomas Jefferson and his quotes up above at the top of this post? Does revolution have to be self-sustaining to be effective? Is a little rebellion necessary to keep government on its toes? Does the tree of liberty need the blood of patriots too? This is a very important topic in light of other rebellions around the world. With the Chinese in the 1930′s, the Cubans in the 1950′s, the French in the 1790′s, the Russians in the 1920′s and so on all faced these questions. Some with worse results (by far) than the US’s experience. Something to think about…
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