Founding fathers, Principles discussed at ICOW

Casper – Earl Taylor is the author of the workbook for book The 5000 Year Leap, and is touring the country to promote the book’s topics.
He spoke at the annual Independent Cattlemen of Wyoming (ICOW) meeting in Casper Nov. 12, and included in his speech were lessons the Founding Fathers of America learned in developing this country.
“There are about 200 nations in the world, at last count. Today 125 have written constitutions, and the oldest is America’s. One the youngest countries in the world has the oldest written constitution. Our Founding Fathers learned that if you want to preserve something, you better write it down,” noted Taylor.
“When the Declaration of Independence was signed, there were about three million English colonists in the new world, and they brought with them elements of the People’s Law. But, where did they get this? Their ancestors were known as Anglo Saxons, who came into Britain in 450 A.D., and set up a wonderful system of government. It lasted about 600 years, until 1066 A.D. when the Battle of Hastings occurred and the Saxon people were conquered and their form of government was corrupted and replaced with elements of Rulers Law.
“So, for centuries there were Norman Kings ruling over the Saxons… and for centuries the Saxons struggled to get their rights back. They never fully got them back, and after struggle, torture and imprisonment they eventually left and came to the New World,” explained Taylor.
“The bad news for us today is there’s no place left to go. We’re here, and have a particular challenge. We have to maintain this, we cannot lose it, and what we’ve lost already we have to recover,” said Taylor of modern American government.
He explained that when the English came to Jamestown in 1607 they were financed by a group of London businessmen, who laid down a set of rules for the pilgrims in their new homeland.
“The rules said nobody will own private property, and they would live in a commune and have a leader. He will assign their tasks, and everybody would know exactly what to do, and would live together and they wouldn’t have competition between each other and they will survive that way,” said Taylor of the rules. “That’s communal communistic form. That’s socialism.”
He added that the entire group almost died off, and would have, if they hadn’t broken out of that system.
“We know more about the pilgrims that came in 1620. They were financed by the same kind of London businessmen, who said they could make those same rules work because they were Christians, and they believed in brotherly love and having all things in common. Kind of a Christian communism, if there is such a thing,” explained Taylor.
“Governor William Bradford was one of their leaders, and we’re so indebted to him about this whole pilgrim experiment because he took meticulous notes on how it worked. That’s why Governor Bradford is referred to as the father of American history, because he took lots of notes.
“In The History of Plymouth Plantation you can read how Governor Bradford said he divided up all the work: fields to cultivate, food to cook, children to tend and clothes to wash. All the assignments were divvied up, then he said to go to work,” explained Taylor. “People kept giving excuses. He doesn’t list them, but you can imagine,”
“People were not going out to work and I had to make them work and that’s not why we came over here, and furthermore we were starving. The people who made the most excuses about not being able to work during the working time were in the front of the line with the biggest baskets at harvest time,” wrote Governor Bradford in the book.
“So, he got all the men together and said, ‘We came over here to get away from tyranny, and you’re making me a tyrant, and I’m not going to be a tyrant anymore.’ So he divvied up the land by the size of families – divided the seed quota, the tools, everything. He said, in effect, ‘Brother, from here on out, it’s root, hog or die,’” said Taylor.
“He went out to his field the next season to work his plot, and he could hardly believe what he saw, and he wrote about it, saying, ‘This new system had very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.’ He was saying, it’s working,” noted Taylor.
“It worked because they were on their own, and knew that whatever they produced they could keep. If someone wanted to share, that was up to them. They knew that when they produced something, somebody wasn’t going to come along and take it, and re-distribute to everybody. We’ve all heard that reasoning,” said Taylor.
“When people know that they will be protected in their property and in their labor, most people will work hard – harder than if you were driving them with a whip. This is an amazing story, and as you know, Plymouth became a success,” commented Taylor.
“These are the beginning seeds of lessons that our Founding Fathers learned, so they wrote it down: don’t ever do that communal stuff, don’t ever do that socialism stuff, don’t ever do that re-distribution stuff. This is in their writings, and it all started with Jamestown and continued until the year the Constitution was written in 1787,” said Taylor.
For more information on topics covered in The Making of America, The Founder’s Principles of Liberty and the Meaning of the Constitution Seminar, visit nccs.net. Heather Hamilton is editor of the Wyoming Livestock Roundup and can be reached at heather@wylr.net.