On this day 250 years ago in Williamsburg, Clementina Rind’s Virginia Gazette published in its lead article the following revolutionary sentiments:
American freedom will soon be annihilated, unless we unitedly exert our utmost virtue and firmness; nothing less can recue our liberties, now eagerly grasped by the ruffian hand of power. . . .
As the people are the fountain of power and authority, the original seat of majesty, the authors of laws, and the creators of officers to execute them, if they shall find the powers they have conferred abused by their trustees, their majesty violated by tyranny, or by usurpation, their authority prostituted to support violence, or screen corruption, the laws grown pernicious through
accidents unforeseen, or unavoidable, or rendered ineffectual through the infidelity and corruption of the executors of them, then it is their right, and what is their right is their duty, to resume that delegated power, and call their trustees to an account, to resist the usurpation and extirpate the tyranny, to restore their sullied majesty and prostituted authority, to suspend, alter, or
abrogate, those laws, and punish their unfaithful and corrupt officers; nor is it the duty only of the united body, but every member of it ought, according to his respective rank, power, and weight, in the community, to concur in advancing and supporting those glorious designs.
. . .
How must every one . . . love a constitution in which the majesty of the people is, and has been, frequently recognized, in which kings are made and unmade by the choice of the people, laws enacted, or annulled only by their own consent, and for their own good, in which none can be deprived of their property, abridged of their freedom, or forfeit their lives without an appeal to the laws, and the verdict of their peers or equals; a constitution, in fine, the nurse of heroes, the parent of liberty, the patron of learning and arts, the dominion of laws, the pride of Briton, the envy of her neighbors, and their sanctuary too! How dissolute and execrable must their character and conduct be who, instead of sacrificing their interest and ambition, will not part with the least degree of either, to preserve inviolate, and entail in full vigour to their posterity, such a glorious constitution, the labour of so many ages, and price of so much blood and treasure, but would chuse rather to sacrifice if, and all their own independency, freedom, and dignity, to personal power and hollow grandeur, to any little pageant of a king, who should prefer being the master of slaves to being the guardian of freemen, and consider himself as the proprietor, not the father, of his people?
On This Day In The Revolution 