I was recently in a discussion about this in another thread.
I had originally thought that Thomas Jefferson had the best ideas of the Founders, and at one point I admired him very much. However, he did own slaves, he violated the property rights of Indians, and overall, seemed to be pretty hypocritical. There were a lot of other Founders who were the same way.
I know that there’s no such thing as a perfect person, or more specifically, a perfect leader. But with the slavery issue, there were, back then, talks of abolitionism, so it wasn’t like it was completely unheard of. And plus, was it not Thomas Jefferson who was so enthusiastic about private property being a natural right?
So far, the only Founder that I have found who I can identify with the most and who has the least hypocritcal record is John Adams. Who does everyone here believe is the best founder, and who was the worst? I think the worst was Hamilton, from everything that I’ve seen.
P. S. I know the majority of us on the forums don’t believe in government altogether, including myself. This is just a thread finding the founder who agrees with the principles of anarchism the most, and who actually has a valid record of following those principles.
Aaron Burr, the one that basically stole money (he cut corners on a water infrastructure project then used the “leftover” money) to start a bank and annex part of the northwest expansion?
Hamilton might have been a d-bag, but Burr was worse. Jefferson wanted him hanged, but couldn’t convince Marshall.
Patrick Henry: The one that wanted certain religions taxed in Virginia? Not his though. His was the official religion of VA.
To be fair, the OP merely stated that Adams was the most consistent…this is true. He never made bones about the possibility that the government may need more power than the Founders were conceiving in it.
Warren G. Harding, then a Republican Senator from Ohio, coined the phrase “Founding Fathers” in his keynote address to the 1916 Republican National Convention. He used it several times thereafter, most prominently in his 1921 inaugural address as President of the United States.[5]
The Founders weren’t even dead before succeeding politicians started holding them and their writings as appeals to authority concerning political authority or legal precedent.
Within the large group known as the “Founding Fathers”, there are two key subsets: the Signers of the Declaration of Independence (who signed the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776) and the Framers of the Constitution (who were delegates to the Constitutional Convention and took part in framing or drafting the proposed Constitution of the United States). A further subset is the group that signed the Articles of Confederation.[2]
Only the Fed papers authors are really well known. The Anti-fed papers were written by some people who you don’t really hear too much about that often.
Wheylous, here’s a quote you may not have seen from Franklin.
“All the Property that is necessary to a man, for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species, is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the publick, who, by their laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the publick shall demand such disposition. He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages.”