MAGNA CARTA TO 14th AMENDMENT
The Magna Carta of 1215 required that King John of England capitulate to the combined force of the nobility by extending certain previously exclusive, royal privileges and prerogatives to his barons, to his English aristocracy, before risking the loss of them all.
Better than four centuries later, Oliver Cromwell and his Protestants wrangled the crown from the Catholic King Charles I in 1649, in the English Civil War, whom he also conveniently beheaded , thereby he secured additional concessions for his "nobility" --landowners--and for himself. "The Protector" was Oliver Cromwell's nomen in the "Commonwealth era." The common man under Oliver Cromwell, as also under the Magna Carta's resultant baronial aristocracy, got nothing.
Following form, including a fashion of the earlier English civil war, with Oliver Cromwell, the American colonies under George Washington, in 1789 ratified a United States Constitution that granted privileges and immunities to its own "aristocracy" sans titled honorifics. A Bill of Rights was added, in 1791, as a sop, almost an afterthought, containing the first ten Constitutional Amendments.
A truer Civil War a mere seventy years later, 1861-1865, not only freed the class of African slaves who had been imported in chains to hew from this land's vestigial forests: tobacco, rice, indigo, cotton, sugar, other cash crops for export to English capitalists and to Europe; but their "Freedom War" brought about the 13-14-15th Amendments to the Constitution.
The 14th Amendment with its Due Process and Equal Protection Clause provisions was that which made the "Bill of Rights" apply to the states' actions and actors. First ratified for now-African Americans, but later deemed to apply to all citizens "white people" too! The latter people benefit far more from the 14th Amendment than do the blacks, for whom it was ratified!
So, ironically those individual rights that first began to be extended to the nobility of England in 1215, did not finally find their full expression, or common, general amenability to all, until well within the 20th-21st centuries in the United States of America, through the agency of laws intended to benefit colored descendants of the formerly enslaved, legally repressed, faithful dutiful, absolutely-essential, mainly Protestant, African Americans.
MAGNA CARTA TO 14th AMENDMENT
The Magna Carta of 1215 required that King John of England capitulate to the combined force of the nobility by extending certain previously exclusive, royal privileges and prerogatives to his barons, to his English aristocracy, before risking the loss of them all.
Better than four centuries later, Oliver Cromwell and his Protestants wrangled the crown from the Catholic King Charles I in 1649, in the English Civil War, whom he also conveniently beheaded , thereby he secured additional concessions for his "nobility" --landowners--and for himself. "The Protector" was Oliver Cromwell's nomen in the "Commonwealth era." The common man under Oliver Cromwell, as also under the Magna Carta's resultant baronial aristocracy, got nothing.
Following form, including a fashion of the earlier English civil war, with Oliver Cromwell, the American colonies under George Washington, in 1789 ratified a United States Constitution that granted privileges and immunities to its own "aristocracy" sans titled honorifics. A Bill of Rights was added, in 1791, as a sop, almost an afterthought, containing the first ten Constitutional Amendments.
A truer Civil War a mere seventy years later, 1861-1865, not only freed the class of African slaves who had been imported in chains to hew from this land's vestigial forests: tobacco, rice, indigo, cotton, sugar, other cash crops for export to English capitalists and to Europe; but their "Freedom War" brought about the 13-14-15th Amendments to the Constitution.
The 14th Amendment with its Due Process and Equal Protection Clause provisions was that which made the "Bill of Rights" apply to the states' actions and actors. First ratified for now-African Americans, but later deemed to apply to all citizens "white people" too! The latter people benefit far more from the 14th Amendment than do the blacks, for whom it was ratified!
So, ironically those individual rights that first began to be extended to the nobility of England in 1215, did not finally find their full expression, or common, general amenability to all, until well within the 20th-21st centuries in the United States of America, through the agency of laws intended to benefit colored descendants of the formerly enslaved, legally repressed, faithful dutiful, absolutely-essential, mainly Protestant, African Americans.
