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What Is John Winthrop's Idea Of A City Upon A Hill

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In John Winthrop’s sermon he states that, “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us…” (188). To Winthrop this meant that they needed to prove that it is possible to live a true Christian life. To Thomas Jefferson the idea of the “city upon a hill” meant something different. Throughout his “Notes On the State of Virginia,” Jefferson emphasizes the importance of maintaining the new government. At the end of one his notes he states, “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in its vigor” (721). This “pure government” to Jefferson is Americas
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In the early years, after winning independence from Great Britain, the American colonies set up their government in accordance with their first constitution, the Articles of Confederation. This means that the majority of the power laid in the hands of the states and Congress, “the only institution of national authority” (Brinkley 151) at that time, had very little power. This distribution of authority was the manifestation of the American’s fear of a strong, central government. However, as time passed, more and more people came to agree that the national government was too weak and needed to be strengthened.

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Gordon Wood achieved great success among his peers with the publication of his book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, for which he was awarded the Bancroft Prize, as well as the John H. Dunning Prize, both in 1970. In it, Dr. Wood breaks down the process of how American political thought developed from early protests against British measures in the construction of the world's first federal republic. He does so by giving us in detail using a number of different sources, historical information on the reasoning behind the revolution. Dr. Wood walks us through how our government started with a monarchical society which was hierarchical, and later transformed, and emerged as a more recognizable modern society, in where a more commercially oriented and capitalistic government came to light. Wood writes, “[Americans] learned how to define the rights of nature, how to search into, to distinguish, and to comprehend, the principles of physical, moral, religious, and civil liberty, how, in short, to discover and resist the forces of tyranny before they could be applied.

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Jefferson also said how it was wrong to require a public official to be of a certain religion, much like how the Baptists were afraid the John F. Kennedy would gain presidency then hand over the power to the catholic church, Jefferson also said that a man brought to power specifically for religious reasons tend to be “corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage,” the official becomes very bias to that church that he is representing. The man elected to office by religion can then suddenly start judging others and deciding things that are right with the church he is representing, not the U.S. constitution or any other laws that could contradict the rules from his church. Jefferson closes the article by stating how his state, the state of Virginia, will not compel or require any citizen to attend, worship, support, or minister any church or religion that that specific citizen did not choose to do so.

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After a fiercely fought revolution, the newly independent American nation struggled to establish a concrete government amidst an influx of opposing ideologies. Loosely tied together by the Articles of Confederation, the thirteen sovereign states were far from united. As growing schisms in American society became apparent, an array of esteemed, prominent American men united in 1787 to form the basis of the United States government: the Constitution. Among the most eminent members of this convention were Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. These men, held to an almost godly stature, defined the future of the nation; but were their intentions as honest as they seemed?

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He had always been a strong supporter of states’ rights and a major critic of Federalist policies. Clearly, reaching into his early political career of being president in 1801, he seemed to have instituted a couple of hypocritical

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To them a weak government is a bad government, as stated by Hamilton in Federalist No. 69 "A feeble executive implies ...a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must be, in practice, a bad government." A common idea among them was that the strong government allowed there to be freedoms and liberties for the people because without this government, the people would turn against themselves due to humanities ingrained hostility and mistrust. With this strong government the laws could actually be enforced and provide safety to the common good, providing justice to those whose rights were being diminished by others' destructive manners. The government for

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The American government acts as the beating heart of the body. The heart allows blood to flow throughout the whole system. Without a heart, blood would remain unable to move as a collective whole. Both authority and its citizens must work simultaneously; one cannot function without the other. Jefferson expands upon the symbiotic relationship and reveals the ideal partnership between the people’s rights and the state.

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