Thomas Drummond Quotes
Property has its duties as well as its rights.
Thomas Drummond, 1797-1840, English Colonial Administrator & Undersecretary of State for Ireland, Letter to the Earl of Donoughmore, May 22, 1838
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This was written and adopted by Vermont a decade before the United States Constitution the ideas for which were in existence in America before the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
He was executed by the English for his part in the Easter Uprising. Given to his daughter Nora Connolly on eve of his execution by the British.
In many countries, the king received all land and most property upon the death of a landowner.
The Diggers were a religious-economic movement that even today would be considered very radical. They advocated the right of the poor to go onto public lands and farm them—thus the name “Diggers.” Beyond their opposition to the private ownership of land to the exclusion of the poor, Winstanley and the Diggers promulgated another very modern doctrine: That the poor should take the responsibility and have the right to determinine how the society should provide for the poor. A version of this became one of the Mottos of the Poverty Program of 1964. See {616966}.
The political conflict between the right of the slave to liberty and the right of the slave owner to his property made the immediate abolition of slavery very difficult after the Spanish had been overthrown in South America.
Hopkins was complaining about the fact that England could tax the colonies and thereby take their property without their consent made the American colonists in the “miserable condition of slaves.” Essentially the fundamental complaint of the Americans was this and in a decade it would erupt as the American Revolution. At the same time, Hopkins was a slave owner and yet saw nothing wrong with that.
This quotation is classic in that it illustrates a fundamental difference between a political and religious view of rights. Politically a citizen is entitled to rights with no requirement or condition of responsibility. Politically, we may desire and applaud or even reward responsible behavior, but we may not condition the rights on someone’s version of responsible use of the rights. Indeed, the real test is if people have rights who are generally thought to be irresponsible. See {633640} .
What was particularly interesting about this quotation is that Pinkney was a political leader of Maryland, a slave state. He saw the injustice and immorality of slavery but like many others of our founding fathers assumed that ending slavery would infringe on the property rights of the slave holders. Others argued that there can be no right to deny others their basic rights—property and wealth are subordinate to natural rights. See {632258} and {632259} for more on this point.
Executed by the English for his part in the Easter Uprising.
To the pro-slavery politician, abolition was an abdication of government to fulfill it’s 3 major responsibilities. Slaves were private property and government had to safeguard the owner’s right to own that property. Slave owners had always been free in America to hold slaves, and abolition impinged on that freedom. And the slavery advocates knew better than the abolitionists how cruelly the slaves had been treated. They reasoned—that if anyone had treated them that way, they would if they could take revenge and kill the slave owners. Therefore, abolition threatened the lives of Southern citizens. Of course, Brown and his fellow slave-owners did not consider the fact that they had interfered with the right of the slave to own property, they denied him freedom, and in many cases killed slaves as examples or out of neglect. Their “logic” was that slaves were not citizens and therefor were not entitled to these protection.
It was drafted by John Adams. 9 Years later the French in their Revolution used the first clause in their Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—See Quotation 602404 For an opposite point of view see Quotation 635927.
Captain Thomas Drummond, from Edinburgh was a Scottish army officer, civil engineer and senior public official. He used the Drummond light which was employed in the trigonometrical survey of Great Britain and Ireland. He is sometimes mistakenly given credit for the invention of limelight, at the expense of Sir Goldsworthy Gurney. It was Drummond, however, who realised its value in surveying.
