American Minute with Bill Federer
Roger Sherman, & the importance of gold & silver
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He was the only person to sign all four of these America's founding documents:
- Articles of Association, 1774;
- Declaration of Independence, 1776;
- Articles of Confederation, 1777;
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Who was he?
Roger Sherman.
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At age 19,
Roger Sherman's
father died and he supported his family as a shoe cobbler, helping his two younger brothers to attend college and become clergymen.
Roger Sherman
was a surveyor and merchant, but when a neighbor needed legal advice, he studied to help, only to be inspired to become a lawyer.
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Sherman
was elected a state senator, a judge and a delegate to the
Continental Congress.
He was on the
Committee
to draft the
Declaration of Independence,
along with
Jefferson, Franklin, Adams,
and
Livingston.
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Roger Sherman
is pictured second from the left in John Trumbull's famous painting which hangs in the Capitol Rotunda.
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He helped draft the
Articles of Confederation
and helped draft the
instructions given to an embassy headed to Canada,
which stated:
"You are further to declare that
we hold sacred the rights of conscience,
and may promise to the whole people, solemnly in our name, the
free and undisturbed exercise of their religion.
And ... that
all civil rights
and the
right to hold office
were to be extended to
persons of any Christian denomination."
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On October 17, 1777, when news that
British General Burgoyne
had
surrendered 6,000 British troops
to American General Horatio Gates after the Battle of Saratoga,
Roger Sherman
exclaimed:
"This is the Lord's doing, and marvelous in our eyes!"
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Sherman
made 138 speeches at the
Constitutional Convention.
He helped to draft the
New Jersey Plan
and the
Connecticut Compromise,
which broke the deadlock between how the
large States
and
small States
would be
represented
in the new government.
Patrick Henry described Roger Sherman as one of the three greatest men at the Constitutional Convention.
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Roger Sherman
is the author of
Article 1, Section 10
of the
U.S. Constitution:
"No State shall ... make anything but
gold and silver coin
a tender in payment of debts."
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He wrote in
A Caveat Against Injustice or, An Inquiry into the Evils of a Fluctuating Medium of Exchange,
1752:
"Suppose a man comes to a trader's shop in this colony to buy goods, and the trader sells him a certain quantity of goods and tells him the price is so many pounds, shillings and pence ... to be paid at the expiration of one year ... but there is nothing said either by seller or buyer, what currency it is to be paid in ...
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... Now I ask: What does the creditor have a right to demand for a debt so contracted? ...
The debtor says that Bills of Credit on the neighboring governments have for many years passed promiscuously with the Bills of Credit on this colony as money ...
And the creditor ... says that such Bills of Credit are of no intrinsic value, and their ... value is fluctuating and very uncertain, and therefore it would be unjust that any person should be obliged to receive them in payment as money ...
for money ought to be something of certain value, it being that whereby other things are to be valued."
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James Madison
wrote:
"Paper money is unjust ... It is unconstitutional, for it affects the rights of property as much as taking away equal value in land."
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George Washington
wrote Thomas Jefferson, August 1, 1786:
"Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice."
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Jefferson
wrote to Colonel Edward Carrington, May 27, 1788:
"Paper is poverty ... it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself."
In 1817,
Jefferson
predicted paper money will bring:
"... abuses also are inevitable and, by breaking up the measure of value, make a lottery of all private property."
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Jefferson
insisted in 1784:
"If we determine that a Dollar shall be our Unit ... we must then say with precision what a Dollar is."
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In 1792, the
Coinage Act
declared a dollar worth 371.25 grains of pure silver or 24.75 grains of pure gold.
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In 1862, during the emergency of the Civil War,
Lincoln
issued
unbacked fiat "Greenback" currency.
When his cabinet asked if they should put
"In God We Trust"
on them, as was engraved on U.S. coins,
Lincoln
responded, "If you are going to put a legend on the greenbacks, I would suggest that of Peter and Paul,
'Silver and gold I have none, but such as I have I give to thee.'"
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On April 5, 1933,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
signed an
Executive Order
demanding that
everyone
in the nation
surrender their gold to the Federal Government.
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On August 15, 1971,
President Richard Nixon
ordered the treasury "to
suspend
temporarily" the
dollar being backed by gold,
which became permanent.
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Congressman Rep. Ron Paul
of Texas wrote:
"The Latin term
'fiat'
roughly translates to
'there shall be.'
When we refer to
fiat money,
we are referring to money that
exists because the government declares it into existence
...
Fiat money
is exchanged in the economy as long as there is
faith in the government that issues it
...
History has shown that
fiat money,
or 'faith-based currency'
always fails,
because when
governments
claim this power, they always
behave irresponsibly
..."
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He continued:
"When government has the ability to
create and spend all the money it wants
... budgeting, as most Americans know it,
loses all meaning.
Hand a teenager a credit card, and tell him there is
no limit
and
no accountability
for what he spends, and the effect would be the same.
The government becomes the reckless teenager
with the credit card, and in the end,
the taxpaying citizens get the bill
...
This is why our founding fathers considered, but decidedly rejected the creation of a national central bank.
They understood that ... even the best of governments, cannot control spending ..."
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Rep. Paul
concluded:
"Every dollar created
and spent by government
makes the dollars in your pocket worth less
and less.
Eventually
any currency controlled by government
will be
debased to worthlessness,
and will wipe out the savings of the citizens who put faith in that currency.
Hard currencies,
on the other hand, force governments to remain in check, strictly limited to the revenues they can raise from the country's economic health."
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Rolf Nef of Global Research
wrote "Falling Empires and their Currencies," January 15, 2007:
"When
empires fall,
their
currencies fall first
...
The common thing is that the currencies of each and every one of these
falling empires
lost dramatically in value ...
Authorities debased their currency
which presaged (warned of) the
fall of the Empire."
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Devalued currency and out-of-control debt contributed to the decline of:
- Kublai Khan's Yuan Dynasty;
- Spanish Hapsburg Dynasty;
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Newsweek
columnist
Niall Ferguson,
the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, wrote in
"How Economic Weakness Endangers the U.S."
(3/13/10):
"This is how
empires decline.
It begins with a
debt explosion
...
Habsburg Spain
defaulted on all or part of its
debt 14 times between 1557 and 1696
and also succumbed to
inflation
due to a surfeit of New World silver.
Pre-revolutionary France
was spending 62 percent of royal revenue on debt service by 1788.
The
Ottoman Empire
went the same way: interest payments and amortization rose from 15 percent of the budget in 1860 to 50 percent in 1875.
And ... the
last great English speaking empire
. By the interwar years, interest payments were consuming 44 percent of the British budget, making it intensely difficult to rearm in the face of a new German threat ...
Without radical fiscal reform, it could apply to America next."
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Richard W. Fisher,
President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, told the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco, May 28, 2008:
"We know from centuries of evidence in countless economies,
from ancient Rome to today's Zimbabwe,
that running the printing press to pay off today's bills leads to ...
inflation
that results from the
flood of money
into the economy (which) turns out to be
far worse
than the fiscal pain those countries hoped to avoid."
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Roger Sherman
wrote in
Caveat of Injustice,
1752:
"No government
has the right to
impose on its subjects
any ...
currency
to be received in payments as money which is
not of intrinsic value
...
because in so doing they would
oblige men to part with their estates
for that which is
worth nothing in itself
and which they don't know will ever procure him any thing."
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Support for a stable unit of financial exchange is in the
Old Testament Book of Leviticus,
which stated in verse 19:36:
"Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall ye have."
The
Book of Proverbs
stated in verse 11:1:
"A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight."
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Because of the irresponsibility of governments inflating their currencies, and because of international currency traders manipulating the value of nations' currencies, many have explored using Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
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In 1788, as a member of the
White Haven Congregational Church, Roger Sherman
was asked to use his expertise in revising the
wording of their creed.
In his own handwriting, he wrote:
"I believe ... that the
Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments
are a
revelation from God,
and a complete rule to direct us
how we may glorify and enjoy Him
...
That
He
made man at first perfectly holy, that the first
man sinned,
and ...
all became sinners
in consequence ... and on account of sin are liable to all the miseries of this life, to death, and to
the pains of hell forever.
I believe that
God
... did
send His own Son
to
become man, die in the room and stead of sinners
and thus to lay a foundation for the
offer of pardon and salvation to all mankind,
so as all may be
saved who are willing to accept the Gospel offer."
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Roger Sherman
helped convince the state of Connecticut to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
He was elected from Connecticut as a Representative to the first session of U.S. Congress.
When the First Amendment was introduced,
Sherman
thought it was unnecessary as
religion was under each individual States' jurisdiction.
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Elected as a U.S. Senator at age 70,
Roger Sherman
died JULY 23, 1793.
The State of Connecticut placed a statue of
Sherman
in the U.S. Capitol.
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Sherman's
statue is also on the Connecticut State Capitol in Hartford.
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Inscribed on
Roger Sherman's tomb
is:
"He ever adorned the
profession of Christianity
which he made in youth and ... died in the prospect of a blessed immortality."
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Schedule Bill Federer for informative interviews & captivating PowerPoint presentations: 314-502-8924
wjfederer@gmail.com
American Minute is a registered trademark of William J. Federer. Permission is granted to forward, reprint, or duplicate, with acknowledgment.
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https://newsmaven.io/americanminute/
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