A “monstrous collection of platitudes”? Harry Paget Flashman makes some modest remarks on the founding documents of the United States of America…
I hope that by now you all subscribe to the excellent quarterly magazine Slightly Foxed – the real reader’s quarterly. If The Dabbler has a soulmate in quarterly printed form then Slightly Foxed might well be it, and what’s more in a future issue (date as yet unknown) you’ll be able to read a lengthy and action-packed article I’ve submitted on George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series. Imagine that!
Anyway, while researching this article, I was struck by a passage from Flashman and the Angel of the Lord (in which our anti-hero becomes embroiled in abolitionist John Brown’s botched raid at Harper’s Ferry). Never one to mince his words, Flashman opines on the founding documents of the USA thus:
…Point out [to an American] that Canada and Australia managed their way to peaceful independence without any tomfool Declarations or Bunker Hills or Shilohs or Gettysburgs, and are every bit as much “the land of the free” as Kentucky or Oregon and all you’ll get back is a great harangue about “liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, damn your Limey impudence…You might as well be listening to an intoxicated Frog.
It’s understandable, to be sure: they have to live with their ancestors’ folly and pretend it was all for the best, and that the monstrous collection of platitudes which they call a Constitution, which is worse than useless because it can be twisted to mean anything by crooked lawyers and grafting politicos, is the ultimate human wisdom. Well it ain’t, and it wasn’t worth one life, American or British, in the War of Independence, let alone the vile slaughter of the Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Celtic race in the Civil War.
Hmmm. I suppose if you fancied an exciting evening when in American company, perhaps in a rowdy bar, you could try repeating the above theory. But it might be advisable to check that your companions weren’t carrying any concealed firearms before you made the attempt…
Well technically Australia and Canada aren’t independent yet, so there’s always time for them to stockpile some muskets and recruit Mel Gibson to lead a ragtag group of poor farmers to take on the entire British army and win
What? Again? How many times is that Mel?
There was a serious Canadian insurrection in the 1830s, at which time Winfield Scott took a good deal of trouble tamping down American aid to the insurgents. I’d be happy to assure HF and the Dabblers that this, and the acquisitive US across the border, had nothing to do with Canada acquiring dominion status, but I’m not so sure. The odd thing is that the longest-serving Canadian prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, was named after a leader of that rebellion.
And by the way, the prairie provinces have now and then made noises about seceding from Canada to join the US.
“Well it ain’t, and it wasn’t worth one life, American or British, in the War of Independence, let alone the vile slaughter of the Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Celtic race in the Civil War.”
The Constitution was drafted some years after the War of Independence concluded, so I have to agree with the “wasn’t” there.