Good afternoon.  

It is our pleasure to be with you today in this historic Union Mills homestead of six generations of the Shriver family.^[1]

https://www.newstimes.com/local/article/r-sargent-shriver-built-roots-at-new-milford-s-1025181.php

My first official contact with a member of the Shriver family came one day when I was sitting in for the receptionist in our Congressional office in Washington.  I had volunteered to help out in the office while I was a student at American University.  A distinguished looking person arrived at the door for an appointment with the Congressman and announced himself as Sergeant Shriver.  Being new at the job and not quite certain who he was and what I was supposed to do, I stuck out my hand and introduced myself, which took him somewhat aback.  He recovered as did I, and I took him into the office to lobby for the Peace Corps.^[2]

Today we reside in a cottage at the Broadmead Retirement Community that was formerly occupied by our long time neighbors in Roland Park, the Forsters.   Elborg Forster has moved into assisted living at Broadmead,  and with her we read  her granddaughter’s  blog from Africa where she is a member of Sergeant Shriver’s Peace Corps. She writes wonderfully, reminding us of one of the key components of out reach in a Democracy such as ours.  You must teach to learn and write to persuade.

https://unionmills.org/hard-hitting-early-19th-century-politics/ 

Permit me to begin this afternoon by congratulating you on your efforts through your website to teach and lobby Americans to  sustain the principles of our Republic for which David Shriver, Sr. and others of the Revolutionary Generation gave so much of their waking hours.

For example the page on Hard-Hitting Early 19th Century Politics is most helpful for its insights.  It calls to mind the similar efforts at the Maryland State Archives to encourage teachers and students to read and to write about how a government of the people was constructed,  and to learn that  the essential  component of sustaining that government is through adherence to the rule of the written law.  

In any form of government, politics will be messy and battles among factions and parties hard fought, often to extremes, like the election of 1803 involving David Shriver Sr. and Roger Brooke Taney, later Chief Justice of the United States. The Union Mills  website narrates it well and is well worth repeating, bearing  in mind that the character of early political rhetoric was not how parents expected their children and those who were chosen as their leaders to actually behave.  

To quote your website:

Political dialog back then was strained, to say the least — both nationally and in Maryland. Republicans noted in a Frederick newspaper “incontestable proof of the designs of this Federal Faction to overturn our present form of Government, and build a Monarchy on its ruins.” In the Frederick-Town Herald, a Federalist paper, an 1802 piece mocked Thomas Jefferson’s promise “to restore harmony to social intercourse” and “to consider Americans as “all Federalists and all Republicans,” declaring that “[i]nstead of the smiling aspect of harmony we behold the Demon of Discord in all his horrors.”

…

In the fall of 1803, the Shrivers’ father, David Shriver, Sr., was on the ballot for House of Delegates. Among his opponents was Roger Brooke Taney, who would eventually become Chief Justice of the United States. In the lead-up to the election, the Republican Advocate accused Taney of leading a “cavalcade” of Federalists into Frederick “in a most riotous manner” where at the Court House they “through intoxication or design vomited forth a thousand curses against the republicans and violently assaulted and most shamelessly proceeded to beat a respectable young German.”

Taney had recently moved to Frederick County and was making his first attempt at elected office. The Republicans questioned why he had been run out of Calvert County and attacked him unmercifully, calling him (among other things) a “bladder of wind.”

…

The 1803 election devolved into unvarnished class warfare in the local papers. The Advocate chastised the “rich and purse-proud aristocrats” who were attempting to “influence or over-awe the Republicans, who in general consist of mechanics, plain Dutch farmers, and men in middling stations in life.”

Just days before the election, the Advocate accused Charles Carroll of Carrollton, “that hoary headed aristocrat,” of attempting to sway votes in favor of the Federalists. The Advocate asked, “[s]hall the people be dictated to by this lordly nabob… [h]as he more virtue, more honor, or more honesty, than a good, industrious farmer? Dares he, with his British monarchical and artistocratical politics, come into Frederick county to cajole, to swindle the people out of their rights… Citizens of Frederick county, set Charles Carroll at defiance.”

The Republicans (including David Shriver, Sr.) went on to win the election in 1803, proudly claiming that their efforts in expanding voting rights led to the victory. The Republicans crowed, “The neck of Federalism is broken in Frederick County and the beast is dying meanwhile it groans tremendously.”

Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, Ladies Home Journal? From clipping saved by a family member found among her papers.

But despite the rhetoric of elections, both David Shriver and Roger Brooke Taney believed that ultimately it was essential in a Democracy that existing laws should be honored and implemented through the operation of a Judicial system created by the state and federal constitutions. Both would serve as judges and do their best to administer the law.

Apart from  the bluster and at times the mean violence of electioneering, when change was deemed necessary by the electorate David Shriver, Sr. 's generation believed it should be accomplished through the deliberative actions of legislative bodies, not by the arbitrary actions of politicians wielding executive power.

There were then and always have been calls for the political  rhetoric to be more civil and that even if adults behaved badly, their children should learn the rules of civility in the hopes that they and those selected at the polls as leaders would abide by them.

Americans chose as their first president a person who wrote out his own maxims of behavior based on an English translation of a French book of instructions and spent his public and private life attempting to live by them.

I am particularly fond of what he copied into his rule number 49:

The founding generation, in which David Shriver Sr, played a significant role,  not only believed in the rules of civility, it believed in debating civilly in convention and writing down the framework of how government should work not only in terms of the structure, but also in terms of the rights and privileges reserved to the governed.

In 1977 with a reprint  of the 1787 edition of the Convention journal, and again in document packets for the classroom first published online in 1993, the Maryland State Archives set out to focus attention on the efforts of David Shriver, Sr. and 77 others to write a constitution for Maryland.  It would prove an arduous exercise that would lead to a further effort at the National level to articulate and incorporate  the rights of the governed into the fabric of the new Republic.

The Decisive Blow is Struck

Maryland’s constitutional convention convened in Annapolis on August 14, 1776.  David Shriver Sr.  and three others represented the Middle District of Frederick County which in 1837 became part of the new Carroll County.

1977 reprint of the proceedings of the 1776 Constitutional Convention of Maryland

published by the Maryland State Archives

The title was taken from a letter from Samuel Chase to John Adams written from Annapolis on July 5, 1776, containing a warning about trusting tyrants with a curious spelling of Friday.

Annapolis. July. 5th. 1776

Fryday Afternoon

My Dear Sir

Your Letter of the 1st. conveys both pleasure and Grief. I hope eer this Time the decisive blow is struck. Oppression, Inhumanity and Perfidy have compelled Us to it. Blessed be Men who effect the Work, I envy You! How shall I transmit to posterity that I gave my assent? Cursed be the Man that ever endeavors to unite Us. I would make Peace with Britain but I would not trust her with the least particle of Power over Us, she is lost to every Virtue and corrupted with every Vice. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0148

Courtesy of the Maryland State Archives, https://guide.msa.maryland.gov/pages/item.aspx?ID=S500-1479 

When Congress met in Baltimore between December 1776 and February 1777, after abandoning Philadelphia in fear of a British attack,  they called upon Mary Katherine Goddard, the printer and publisher of one of  the local newspapers to be the official printer of Congress and  to print  what is the first copy of the Declaration of Independence containing all the names of the signers.   Not yet with a written constitution for the nation, a process that would come after independence was won,  each new State in the union was sent a copy including to Annapolis which had just witnessed the writing of a Constitution and Declaration of Rights.  Maryland’s original copy of the Goddard printing is now safe and conserved in the State Archives, clearly showing the wear from its long history of prominent display on the walls of the State House.^[3]

In 1993 the State Archives published online a document packet for use in the schools that explored the care and the controversy that went into the writing of Maryland’s first State Constitution in which David Shriver, Sr. participated.   It is still relevant today, even more so now that reading cursive writing is no longer taught in the schools.

https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/000203/html/index.html

The introduction goes into some detail about the three months of deliberations that ended with the approval of Maryland’s  Constitution and Declaration of Rights on November 8, 1776.  Delegate David Shriver, Sr., paid close attention to it all and in the end voted for adoption of both carefully worded documents, although he was not always on the winning side of the debates over content.  For example when Delegate Fitzhugh, in the closing days of the convention proposed the amendment “that the following be added to the 53d article of the form of government “that lawyers fees ought to be ascertained and limited by law "", he found himself on the losing side.  Some might argue that perhaps it is time for the amendment to be revived, along with a careful review of the Revolutionary process of writing it all down.

The debate over the National form of government and how it should work in practice is far from over.  Perhaps it is time to reflect on how much care went into creating a government with checks and balances, a government that was meant to effectively resist singular exertions of uninhibited executive power.  Samuel Chase’s warning was clear:

 I would make Peace with Britain but I would not trust her with the least particle of Power over Us, she is lost to every Virtue and corrupted with every Vice.

If we take the time to learn from the past, making a concerted effort to follow existing laws, thinking clearly as we advocate change, arguing with civility in public discourse as well as private, and above all  taking the time to carefully write it all down like the Revolutionary Generation did, there is a good chance the Republic will survive and flourish for another 250 years.

At a concert recently given at Broadmead by the Choral Arts Society of Baltimore one of the pieces sung with inspired brilliance sent me back to a poem by George Joseph Moriarty, composition date unknown:

And so the Fates are seldom wrong

No matter how they twist and wind

It is you and I who make our fates

We open up or close the gates

On the road ahead or the road behind.

Thank you.