The Original Thirteenth Amendment.... Is Not The Abolishment of Slavery

 The Titles of NOBILITY and HONOUR

"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.