American Beginnings: Formating a New Land

American Beginnings: Formating a New Land
a. Self Reliance ( Ralph Waldo Emerson )
In facing the reality we should keep firm on our own heart. The deepest believe will comes true to the real life. We half expresses of ourselves. Nothing can bring peace but ourselves. Nothing can bring peace except our principles.
It is easy to see that the greatest self reliance must work a revolution in all offices and relation of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.
1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly.
2. It is for want of self culture that the superstition of travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans.
3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action.
4. As our Peligion, our education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society.
b. Resistance to Civil Government ( Henry David Thoreau )
As the citizen we should be man first, and subjects afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. All men recognize the right revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to and to resist the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. A wise man will not leave the right to mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.
In 1847 Thoreau was imprisoned briefly for refusing to pay tax while the government supported a war he considered unjust. His refusal was disobedience to protest government. He was also strongly opposed to slavery.
c. A Disquisition on Government (John C. Calhoun)
Calhoun had two efforts-unflagging defense of slavery and slave holder political interests and the contrivance of a governmental structure that would protect those interest while, if possible, preserving the American union.
d. Abraham Lincoln (Speech at Peoria, Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Second Inaugural)
Abraham Lincoln was a political moralist. Lincoln’s egalitarian philosophy was complicated by his commitment to a semi historicist and sometimes mystical conception of democratic union. His concept of mind is that slavery is immoral. Lincoln maneuvered through Congress a bill for reopening the entire Louisiana purchase to slavery and allowing the settlers of Kansas and Nebraska (with “popular sovereignty”) to decide for themselves whether to permit slaveholding in those territories.
Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society Lincoln stated two theories “mud-still” and “free labor”. Mud still theory insist that there is not, of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life.