The British kill Jefferson

[Kuralyov]

except that in OTL the free USA lead to the French Revolution which lead to Napoleon which lead to a unified Germany which lead to Hitler and the Holocaust.

The French Revolution also lead to Jews being granted full citizenship, for the first time in most cases (including France), in France and all the areas conquered by her during the Revolutionary/Napoléonic Wars. It also resulted in the abolition of slavery, and the granting of citizenship to blacks and women (for a while, at least) in said areas.

 

[MerryPrankster]

Michael,

Are you perchance a Fabian? I read that ideology supported larger and larger states ultimately leading to a one-world government. You've stated earlier you've supported a one-world government and keeping the US part of the British Empire would certainly contribute to fewer polities on the Earth.

No offense.

 

[robertp6165]

Without that nitwit America would have been much better off. The only thing he did right was the Louisiana purchase...

Actually, in my opinion, the Louisiana Purchase was the worst mistake Jefferson made as President. Jefferson, up until that time, had been a "strict constructionist" with regard to the Constitution. The Constitution does not give Congress the power to appropriate money for the purchase of territory from foreign powers. By violating his own principles and asking Congress to do something which it, in fact, constitutionally had no power to do, he set the precedent which would be used by future Presidents (such as Abe Lincoln, FDR, and all the the Presidents who followed FDR) and Congresses to expand federal power. The land COULD have been constitutionally acquired (the Constitution could have been amended to allow the federal government to make such purchases), but it would have taken much more time. Jefferson was simply not willing to wait. If Jefferson had resisted the temptation to usurp powers which did not rightfully belong to him, we would all be a lot more free today.

...and the only reason he did that was to prevent the formation of a French sanctuary for slaves.

Wrong again. Jefferson made the purchase because it seemed too good a deal to refuse. It gave the U.S. complete control of the Mississippi River, and nearly doubled the size of the country at a cost of a few cents an acre. Jefferson was also at heart a scientist, and the unknown wonders to be found in these virtually unexplored regions were very tempting for him personally (which is why just about the first thing he did after he made the purchase was to organize the Lewis and Clark expedition, with orders to carefully document all the geology, flora and fauna they encountered on the journey west to the Pacific).

...Without Jefferson we would have had a decent navy and the British wouldn't have kept enslaving Yankee sailors. .

Wrong again. The problem which kept us from having a strong navy was a penny-pinching Congress which would not invest the necessary funds to build one. There is no way we could have built a navy which would have worried the British at that point in history, anyway. We simply did not have the population, industry, or financial resources to do so. And Jefferson did recognize the value of a strong Navy...it was he, after all, who completed our wars with the Barbary Pirates.

...Even then the southerners hated the northerners for getting rich without slaves.

Oh? And on what do you base this remarkable assertion? The South at this time was the wealthiest region in the country...a situation which continued until after 1860 (Hmmm, can anyone guess why this suddenly changed after 1860?). Most northerners who were wealthy during the years Jefferson served as President were wealthy because of their involvement in the slave trade...either directly as ship-owners or indirectly because they produced rum and other items for export to Africa, to be traded for slaves. There was very little other industry in the North producing income during this time period. And plantation agriculture based on slavery still existed in the North at this time, too.

 

[Mark Ford]

Fabius Maximus Rocks

Michael,

Are you perchance a Fabian? I read that ideology supported larger and larger states ultimately leading to a one-world government. You've stated earlier you've supported a one-world government and keeping the US part of the British Empire would certainly contribute to fewer polities on the Earth.

No offense.

I doubt that Michael is a Fabian, most Fabians would describe the world described in the "Two Georges" as worse not better. And as for keeping the USA in the British Empire, that isn't a left wing view at all. When the British recognised US Independance, it was after a change of government from Conservatives who waged the war to Liberals who wanted to expel America from the Empire before 1776. And a one world government would be hard to achieve when it was Fabians who pioneered the dismantling of the British Empire in the first place. Trying to get a bit back to the late 1700s and early 1800s: the British weren't enslaveing American sailors, they were executing them instead. Since the American sailors being executed were all born in the UK and former British sailors, the British looked on them as deserters and treated them as such. When the US government demanded that the British cease, the British complied. Unfortunately this was after Jefferson ceased to be President of the USA. The truth is I don't know that much about Thomas Jefferson, but as a Fabian I thought there were a few points that needed responding to.

 

[MerryPrankster]

Mark,

Okay.

The people discussing Fabians on the site I visited were venting their spleens on the policy of refusing to recognize secessionists in the post-colonial African states (Katanga, Biafra, Somalia); they claimed the UN was run by "Fabian socialists" and this attitude was part of a long-time strategy to unite the world. They might have been a trifle biased.

I brought this up on the old board and a different Fabian said that yes he believed in one-world federal government, but "false federalism" (Yugoslavia, the USSR, the African states, etc) needed to be done away with first.

Cool.