The most RADICAL LIBERALS OF THEIR DAYS, weren't considered liberal by today's liberals? lol
Today, they would be considered 'Conservatives'.....they believed that government was necessary to preserve the liberties and freedoms for the people from outside influences and nations, but held to the belief that the citizens should make their own way in life, free of the obstacles and impediments placed upon them by a government that would, by its very nature, turn predatory.
They were right.
That is why the Constitution is a document that serves to limit the power of government in favor of the States; or the people themselves.
Just MORE right wing garbage, I'm shocked Conservative? lol
THEY CHOSE A STRONG FEDERAL GOV'T OVER THE WEAKER ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION
14. “Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”
~Founding Father Thomas Jefferson
“If I could conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded, that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.”
~Founding Father George Washington, letter to the United Baptist Chamber of Virginia, May 1789
“It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising the sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin. Let us, then, look to the great cause, and endeavor to preserve it in full force. Let us by all wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties.”
~Founding Father James Monroe, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1817
Take Alexander Hamilton, who exercised a profound influence on George Washington’s thought. Even though Hamilton is often invoked by populist conservatives, he was neither conservative nor a conservative when it came to nation building. Indeed, consider five ways that Hamilton was not conservative either in his day or ours. (1) He was a devotee of one of the most revolutionary thinkers of his day, Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations helped launch the permanent revolution that a later economist would famously characterize as “creative destruction.” (2) Moreover, Hamilton’s early opposition to slavery was a relative novelty in its day: he was on the side of the innovators, not the conservators, when it came to abolishing the peculiar institution. (3) It was also Hamilton’s idea to hold an extra-constitutional convention that would brazenly disregard the Confederation Congress’s instructions to the delegates, throw out America’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and write an entirely new charter. (4) Hamilton was "America's apostle of ultra-nationalism," notes Donald D'Elia. He wanted to locate the lion’s share of power in the national government. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, he asserted that the states should be reduced to provinces -- mere administrative arms of the national government. Tellingly, Hamilton's first articles in defense of the Constitution were submitted under the name of Caesar. (5) In the Federalist essays 30 and 31 that followed, he argued forcefully to empower the new national government to raise taxes without limit, if necessary, on citizens. (How many tea-party conservatives are aware of this fact?)
Like Hamilton, James Madison was neither conservative nor a conservative when it came to framing the new constitution. He was downright radical in his new formulation of the republic, and his Federalist Paper 37 argued forcefully for innovation: “The novelty of the undertaking [of founding the United States on the principles of a new constitution] immediately strikes us. It has been shown, in the course of these papers, that the other confederacies which could be consulted as precedents, have been vitiated by erroneous principles, and can therefore furnish no light than that of beacons, which give warning of the course to be shunned, without pointing out that which ought to be pursued.”
It is also worth pointing out, while dwelling on the Father of the Constitution, that of the 18 congressional powers enumerated in Article I, section 8, only half deal with foreign affairs and defense. The other half invite congressional domination over the states in many matters that the states believed they were competent to handle. This, among other things, is what so vexed and frightened the Anti-Federalists about the FederalistsÂ’ work in Philadelphia.
The other titans of the American founding also present problems for conservatives. Many see in George Washington the temperament of a conservative. To be sure his personal virtue and his love of AddisonÂ’s Cato were signs of his regard for classical republicanism. But anti-imperial conservatives sometimes overlook that Washington championed the idea of American empire.
.... It is odd that today's populist conservative ideologues lionize the most radical founders -- Hamilton, Madison, and the rest -- but ignore the true conservative of 1776, John Dickinson.
History Gadfly: American Founding (8): Conservatives or Radicals?