What is Tennessee Waiting for…
The Second coming of John Sevier?
In 1780 the government sent word to the inhabitants of what would become Tennessee that they must “desist from their opposition to British arms” or they would “march over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country to waste with fire and sword.”
John Sevier, William Campbell, Joseph McDowell, William Hill, Edward Lacy, Benjamin Cleveland, Joseph Winston, William Chronicle and Isaac Shelby said make me…any Tennessee Legislator that does not know these names should vacate their seats. Patrick Henry said in St. John’s Church, March 23, 1775,
“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.”
Failure to know our history is an abomination and a dereliction of duty in my opinion. Can a representative serve without knowing how we arrived as a state and Republic?
These men used their privately owned rifles, hatchets, knives and clubs wielded by hands and driven by minds longing for freedom to destroy the tyrants set on keeping them in thrall. Just ordinary men who simply wanted to be left alone to order their own lives under Liberty, wresting it from a tyrannical government through sacrifice of blood and treasure.
Now we have a state government that seeks to disarm their generations for reasons I can not fathom unless it be for total control of every aspect of life, posing that government is the answer, when in truth it is the problem.
We build monuments to our Founders, name building in our capital cities after them with no regard for the real intent of their actions in freeing their issue from bondage.
Today we have the Governor’s seat, the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, a Supermajority of the Legislature, the Speakers of both chambers, every committee chair in each, the “Caucus” Leaders and chairs, all under control of Republicans and yet we sponsor and worship a Jim Crow restraint, intended by Democrats to disarm the freed Black slaves of the 1860s from 1871, and yet it hangs like a yoke on the shoulders of every citizen today, over a century later.
Tennesseans, if your Representatives and Senators refuse to restore the God-given, natural right to arms stolen by their predecessors…get new ones.