Category: - Bryan William Brickner

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank Revisit Mount Horeb: Thomas Sumpter (also Sumter)

10/3/2019

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank RMH: Thomas Sumpter (also Sumter)

Part 10 of 13

“… Cannon without carriage.”
“Battle’s over.”
“There’s another thing about 9 April 1792 Gus.”
“What Johnny?”
“Fort Sumter.”
“What about Fort Sumter?”
“The fort was named after Thomas Sumpter.”
“With a P?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s he?”
“American revolutionary.”
“Knew Morgan?”
“Definitely, as Sumpter was from Virginia and, like Morgan, fought the British in South Carolina.”
“What’s Sumpter got to do with Usurpation Day?”
“Sumpter was in the House with Gerry.”
“Representing Virginia?”
“South Carolina.”
“Go on.”
“The British general Morgan defeated at Cowpens gave Sumpter a nickname.”
“What?”
“Carolina Gamecock.”
“Fighter.”
“Thomas Sumpter voted Against the usurpation on 9 April.”
“Supported Washington’s veto.”
“And the Constitution.”
“Unlike Gerry.”
“Fact.”
“And then you rebels, ordered by Jefferson Davis, fire on Sumpter’s namesake, Fort Sumter.”
“April 1861.”
“What’s the Latin mean?”
“This is about Cowpens.”
“Duci Ex- I can’t make it out Reb.”
“Duci Exercitis … Translates as leader of armies (or army leader).”
“Who’s the native?”
“Uh … let’s step over here.”
“Why Reb? …”

*Next Up: 6 October and part 11 of Johnny Reb and Gus Yank Revisit Mount Horeb: Hellenistic.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank Revisit Mount Horeb: Truths

9/26/2019

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank RMH: Tell

Part 6 of 13

“… Here we are Reb.”
“Perfect.”
“Almost.”
“What Yank?”
“No goddess.”
“Like before.”
“Slab’s still there.”
“And Thunderbolt’s in the shadows.”
“Reb – what were you gonna say about Tell-Lie-Vision and the thirty Thousand?”
“That Tell-Lie-Vision is now our ally.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No.”
“Why now Reb?”
“It needs the truth.”
“It tells lies with visions.”
“Yet lies need truths.”
“An example.”

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank: Lie

“Camp life Gus.”
“Rife with rumors.”
“Twenty-four seven.”
“Things that disturb.”
“And entertain.”
“With nonsense.”
“Those are Tells Gus.”
“The camp takes on the Tells.”
“Everyone gets all Telled-up.”
“And then?”
“The Tell becomes real.”
“The Lie becomes real Reb.”
“Correct.”
“Camp gets mutinous.”
“Sound familiar?”
“Does Johnny.”

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank RMH: Vision

“Then the Vision.”
“Like fire you said.”
“Spreads like that Gus.”
“And?”
“The whole camp gets to believing the Lie.”
“A correction coming.”
“That’s how Tell-Lie-Vision will help us in the future.”
“Sounds like a fulcrum.”
“Nice.”
“And the Lies have the Truths stuck in the air.”
“And all constitutional questions begin and end with the thirty Thousand.”
“It’s We the People Reb.”
“It’s the Electoral College Yank.”
“The Seventh Amendment.”
“Article the first of the Bill of Rights.”
“The first veto and Usurpation Day.”
“And 17 September.”
“Good thinking Reb.”
“Thanks Yank.”
“Where’d our sign go?”
“The goddess?”
“Yeah …”

*Next Up: 27 September and part 7 of Johnny Reb and Gus Yank Revisit Mount Horeb: Daniel Morgan.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

United We Stand 2020: Part 2 of Hannah Arendt, American Greatness and Constitutio Libertatis

7/20/2019

George Hammer and Ida Schiekoff's Wedding Day

Celebrate the Seventh Amendment on 7/20

Whatever great means, it includes the idea of something worth passing on.

George Hammer, my maternal great-grandfather, was born American from German immigrants.

George’s mother was born in Massbach, Bavaria, Germany and immigrated to the United States and Illinois’ Jo Daviess County with her family as a teenager in 1865.

George’s father came here as a five-year old from Zeitfeld Province, Germany (which is hard to find on a map) in the early 1850s as part of an immigrant family of five; they stayed with fellow Mennonites in New York for three years before homesteading in Jo Daviess County.

The land both families homesteaded was available because of the end of “Indian” hostilities in Illinois after the Black Hawk War. I’ve published a pamphlet that excerpts an Illinois history book (1878) with some details on how that war started and ended: see Fire-Water Ignites Black Hawk War of 1832 (and other things).

George, Ida and family (around 1920)

George wrote a few letters to a German woman in Canada named Ida Schiekoff; Ida was born in Arnhausen, Germany (in 1945 the village became Lipie, Poland) and immigrated to Canada as an 18 year-old in 1891. The two met by reading the same German newspaper and became pen pals. George then went to meet Ida and her family in Canada a couple of times; they soon got engaged, married, and moved to the family farm in Illinois. They lived a simple farm life, nothing fancier than good shelter and plenty of food, as there wasn’t any extra coin. Money showed up later, in the next generation, when their son and my grandfather, Willis (the child in the picture without a jacket), told me they started making money off the farm by selling surplus milk.

Maybe right there is a glimpse of the constitutional right within the Seventh Amendment and why it is there; it isn’t written for the rich in coin, or they would have used it: it’s there for the poor. It’s also constitutionally connected to the thirty Thousand, as the usurpation has organized the judiciary and our American sense of justice; the time to review (and amend) the Seventh Amendment, thus bringing to life its constitutional social justice bearing, is when We the People are represented according to numbers (say in 2021 or ‘22).

The same commentator that noted Arendt’s Constitutio Libertatis and honoring of the founders, also pointed out that she only thought the founders were a partial success; that is because, according to the commentator, the founders didn’t create space for We the People to participate. I don’t agree and think the evidence, our Constitution, shows otherwise; the thirty Thousand, the Enumeration, and the Seventh Amendment do provide ways for citizens to participate in their government at a “local” federal level via small districts augmented every ten years. It’s the usurpers fault, not the founders, who are keeping We the People from our constitutional greatness: us too, the people, as we haven’t shown vigilance until now.

Great means that something is worthy of being passed on, of giving to others as a legacy. The former Germans Hannah Arendt and Ida Schiekoff, and the children of German immigrants, like George Hammer, left us an American legacy. American immigrants are greater than the usurpers, and the usurpation of our right to representation, according to numbers, keeps us from our constitutional legacy … and that ain’t great America.

*Next Up: 17 September, US Constitution Day 2019, and Johnny Reb and Gus Yank Revisit Mount Horeb.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

2020: Part 1 of Hannah Arendt, American Greatness and Constitutio Libertatis

6/9/2019

American Greatness

Hannah Arendt said she wasn’t German.

The Germans didn’t want her anymore, ‘cuz, you know, they went nuts.

Why’d they go nuts?

One reason for sure is that American greatness was ignored.

Ask yourself, “How did Hitler come to power?” And the answer has to include the constitution Woodrow Wilson offered to Germany at the end of World War I.

Why didn’t Wilson offer the Germans a constitution like ours, like the one George Washington and the founders made?

Where’s the thirty Thousand?

Where’s the Enumeration?

Not in Wilson’s constitutional offering, so how could it be great? This is no small matter, given what happened to Hannah Arendt and millions of others.

When Arendt got to America she wrote about revolution. One commentator noted something new about her thoughts: “The new paradigmatic political actors are the American Founders, whose debates and deliberations concerning the drafting and adoption of the Constitution are presented by Arendt as every bit as exemplary as anything in Homer or Thucydides.”

As exemplary as anything in Homer or Thucydides: in other words, American greatness is not found in the boom-boom of rebellion and the 4th of July; American greatness is found in the law of revolution, the US Constitution, and 17 September.

*Next Up: A celebration of the 7th Amendment on 7/20 with Part 2 of Hannah Arendt, American Greatness and Constitutio Libertatis.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

2020: We the People and the Actual (Cat) Enumeration, not Census or Questioning

5/9/2019

Cat Enumeration

There is one cat in the picture.

That is the actual (cat) enumeration.

Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution details the purpose for taking the “actual Enumeration,” the formal count of the people of the several states, and it doesn’t mention a census or the logic for asking the people questions. It simply states:

“The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every …”

Congress does the count, the enumeration, by law.

Then Congress is to divide by thirty Thousand, by law and as Washington taught in the first veto, for a state’s federal representation.

That aggregate creates the House of Representatives for We the People.

No questions asked.

We the People represented according to numbers is constitutional fact, just like there’s one cat in the picture.

One people.

One constitution.

One cat.

2020.

*Next Up: 9 June and a 2020 update focusing on Hannah Arendt, American Greatness and Constitutio Libertatis.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

We the People and Usurpation Day 2019

4/9/2019

George Washington's Textbook

Today is Usurpation Day, which first happened on 9 April 1792, when the US House of Representatives broke their word and usurped a power not granted by law.

What created that usurpation moment was President Washington’s first veto, which was also the first veto ever under our Constitution.

President Washington, being a surveyor and Freemason, knew numbers; he also knew the Constitution, which he helped write, and which clearly states: “shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand” (Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3).

What shall not exceed thirty Thousand? That would be the number of Representatives due a state for its enumeration.

In the first attempt to use the enumeration, Congress sent President Washington a bill that dropped the fraction; if a state had thirty Thousand and one, they were due, according to the phrase “shall not exceed,” another Representative. Instead, Congress dropped the fraction and did not give certain states another Representative.

Washington vetoed the bill.

The House of Representatives, unable to override President Washington’s veto, passed a new bill for representation on 9 April 1792, the first usurpation law, and used a divisor of “thirty-three” Thousand for representation instead.

President Washington also knew of the Bill of Rights and its Article the first, the one about moving said representation ratio to forty and then fifty Thousand. Washington either let the new representation bill become law without signing it, or signed it knowing he had made his point and believing this issue would be resolved with the passage of Article the first: this has yet to happen.

Washington was a creator of We the People and the idea of representing ourselves according to numbers. Twenty-twenty is the next enumeration. Why not now ‘Merica? Why not you? Time we did it, time to count the people, divide by thirty Thousand like George taught, and see what We the People really look like … according to numbers.

*Next Up: 9 May and a 2020 We the People update.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner
~.~
“Those who toy with life never attain mastery. Self-discipline and courageous contemplation are necessary steps to understanding. However, do not become overzealous and drill yourself into the ground.”

From Brian Browne Walker’s The I Ching or Book of Changes: A Guide to Life’s Turning Points (1992)

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank On Our Way: To Prevent Hogs Running At Large

3/15/2019

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank OOW: Burgess

Part XII of XIII

“… See here?”
“George the Burgess.”
“Elected 24 July 1758.”
“Who’s on the horse Johnny?”
“The founder of Winchester.”
“They all look happy.”
“They do.”
“Reb?”
“Yeah.”
“Says George: ‘poured out barrels of rum, wine and beer on Election Day.’”
“A rather traditional way of electioneering Gus.”
“Just it’s George getting them drunk.”
“Winner.”
“Loyalist.”
“True.”
“When did George marry Martha?”

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank OOW: Winchester

“In 1759.”
“Ah hah!”
“Ah hah what Gus?”
“George begins his rebellion.”
“With Martha you mean?”
“Frontier George becomes Tidewater George.”
“From loyalist to revolutionary.”
“Martha.”
“Like a fulcrum?”
“Yes.”
“I get it.”
“What’s with the hogs Johnny?”
“George’s first contribution to new laws.”
“Keeping hogs from running at-large in Winchester?”
“To protect the drinking water.”
“Environmental George.”
“Shall we move on Yank?”
“Mount Horeb maybe?”
“Let’s …”

Next Up: 22 March and the winter series finale, Johnny Reb and Gus Yank On Our Way: Mount Horeb.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank On Our Way: Survey

3/8/2019

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank OOW: Hello

Part XI of XIII

“… You weren’t.”
“Young George Gus.”
“It’s like he’s saying hello.”
“‘Hey Gus and Johnny.’”
“Hey George.”
“Like that Yank?”
“Just like that.”
“Seems so.”
“When did George own slaves?”
“Age eleven.”
“What?”
“His father, Augustine Washington, died and George inherited ten slaves.”
“Ten people.”
“At age eleven.”
“When did George get to Winchester?”
“Says here …”

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank OOW: Surveyor

“… 1748.”
“Just a kid Reb.”
“Yup.”
“So before coming here, George had owned people for five years.”
“Correct.”
“Then the 16 year-old George went to Winchester, or Frederick Town, to survey.”
“Frederick was the eldest son of King George the second.”
“The future king?”
“Would’ve been, but Frederick died in 1751.”
“Colonial George was a loyal subject Johnny.”
“He was Gus.”
“Slaving, surveying and serving.”
“And then George was elected Burgess.”
“Is that good Reb?”
“Yes.”
“What’d he do?”
“Represented this area in assembly.”
“Early political career, eh?”
“Well …”

Next Up: 15 March and part XII of the winter series Johnny Reb and Gus Yank On Our Way: To Prevent Hogs Running At Large.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank On Our Way: Truckin’

3/1/2019

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank OOW: Truckin'

Part X of XIII

“… Still playing Gus.”
“Folksy tune.”
“Grateful as well.”
“An intersection.”
“It is.”
“What do you call those things?”
“Horse-less carriages.”
“The crows call’em trucks.”
“Right.”
“Yup.”
“The crows are correct.”
“In the song Reb.”
“Yeah.”
“Why they getting their doors kicked-in?”
“Another war Gus.”
“Sounds like ‘Mericans, you know, in all them cities.”
“True.”
“Lightin’ issues, travelin’ tired, tryin’ souls …”
“… Sounds like kin.”
“Does.”

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank OOW: Trippin'

“Look at George Gus.”
“What?”
“That’s older George.”
“Not Winchester George.”
“Right.”
“George had a strange trip.”
“Kept on truckin’ though.”
“Doubt he knew in the beginning what kind of trip it would be.”
“Just like us.”
“Just like We the People.”
“Agreed.”
“That song sings about gettin’ goin’.”
“‘Out the door and down the street.’”
“When did George get to Winchester?”
"Gus, there’s young George over there.”
“Don’t George joke Reb.”
“I ain’t.”
“Well …”

Next Up: 8 March 2019 and part XI of the winter series Johnny Reb and Gus Yank On Our Way: Survey.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank On Our Way: Washington’s Office

2/22/2019

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank OOW: Washington's

Part IX of XIII

“… More George Johnny.”
“Builder too.”
“George … working for The Man.”
“King George.”
“That might’ve rubbed.”
“Might’ve.”
“More Earl too.”
“The 4th Earl of Loudoun was George’s commander and governor.”
“Our George or King George?”
“Both.”
“Right.”
“The Earl wasn’t liked much in the colonies Gus.”
“Yet they named a fort for him.”
“Two in fact.”
“Two?”
“One here and one south of here.”
“Where Reb?”

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank OOW: Office

“West of the Appalachian Mountains Yank.”
“Future Tennessee.”
“Cherokee then.”
“Who built that Fort Loudoun?”
“Colonies of Virginia and South Carolina.”
“What happened?”
“Built in 1756, defeated in 1760.”
“Cherokee?”
“Correct.”
“And this Fort Loudoun, George’s?”
“Not much Gus.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“That is soldiering sometimes.”
“Monotonous.”
“Yupper.”
“George was young then.”
“Twenty-four in ’56.”
“You hear that?”
“Do.”
“Let’s step this way Reb.”
“Let’s …”

Next Up: 1 March 2019 and part X of the winter series Johnny Reb and Gus Yank On Our Way: Truckin’.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner