A Piece of History – Lucy E. Parsons (1895)

From ‘The Rebel: An Anarchist-Communist Journal‘, Vol.1, No.2, Boston, Mass., October 20, 1895

Among all the nations, the United States alone has passed the opportunity for developing a representative form of government. Separated as it is by two vast Oceans, comparatively secure from sudden invasion, the capacity for republican government to minister to the welfare, peace and happiness of its citizens has been fairly tested.

Free government, a free people, was the talismanic charm which caused the immigrant to abandon the old world and hasten to the new, in search of happiness under “Free” government. Let the history of the last hundred years, which forms the record from which the living present learns its lesson of the past, show how far has this dream been realized? Let the prophecy of Lord Macauley answer. In May, 1857, he wrote: “As long as you (Americans) have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land, your laboring population will be far more at ease than the laboring population of the old world, and while that is the case the Jeffersonian politics may continue to exist without causing any fatal calamity. But the time will come when New England will be as thickly populated as old England, wages will be low, and will fluctuate with you as well as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams and hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented… The day will come when in the state of New York there will be a multitude of people, none of whom have not had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner… What is the workingman likely to do when he hears his children cry for bread?”

Alas, for the laborer, the day has come; the prophecy has proven true!

What was this “Jeffersonian politics”? It was sounded in the Declaration of Independence, (Jefferson being the author) as the inalienable rights of man, but this high-sounding assertion was soon nullified in the “Star Chamber” debates which followed between the Anarchists Paine, Jefferson and others upon the question of slavery, and John Adams’ definition of what constituted slavery adopted. He said: “What matters it whether you give the food and clothes direct to the slave, or whether you just give him enough in wages to purchase the same?” It was here the rights of property triumphed, and the rights of man were lost sight of. We still had political, but not economic rights. This was because the United States government, in common with all other governments, rests upon the wage-system of labor. And the propertyless class — the wage-earners are compelled by competition to sell their labor themselves to the lowest bidder, or starve.

Is it not clear then, that, “the best government that the sun ever shone upon”, does just what all the other governments have done, simply rob its subjects.

Paine was correct when he said in his “Rights of Man”: “It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter [government] gives rights; its effect is to the contrary — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherent in all the inhabitants, but charters, by annulling those rights in the majority, leave the rights by exclusion in the hands of the few.”

The great struggle of this age is to be between the governing few and the governed many. The billows of discontent will roll up from among the masses, the ruling class will attempt to drive them back in a sea of blood, but the pages of history show how futile has ever been this attempt, when those billows were along the lines of evolution. The people will yet learn to look away from government for relief; then they will have severed the last chain which binds them to a dark past.

Lucy E. Parsons

Chicago, October

Appendix:

(For reference and context on Jefferson and Paine’s anti-Indigenous and anti-Black politics
– M.Gouldhawke)

Excerpt from ‘President [Thomas] Jefferson’s Letter to William Henry Harrison’, February 27, 1803

“In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States or remove beyond the Missisipi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves. But in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be fool-hardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe and driving them across the Missisipi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.”

Grievance 27 from the ‘United States Declaration of Independence’ (1776)

“He [the King of Great Britain] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”

Excerpt from ‘Common Sense’ by Thomas Paine (1776)

“There are thousands, and tens of thousands, who would think it glorious to expel from the continent, that barbarous and hellish power [Britain], which hath stirred up the Indians and Negroes to destroy us, the cruelty hath a double guilt, it is dealing brutally by us, and treacherously by them.”