Thomas Jefferson Would Have Liked Biggerpockets...

[Tim Porsche]

So I was just reading through the book Battle Cry of Freedom by James Mcpherson about the Civil War, and came across this section and thought it was interesting how many people's mindset in the early years of our country seems to have been similar in some ways to the folks here at BP who are pursing or have achieved financial freedom :).  Just thought I would pass it on for anyone interested in American history. 

"Although the working poor of New York would explode into the worst riot of American history in 1863, these people did not provide the cutting edge of labor protest in the antebellum era. It was not so much the level of wages as the very concept of wages itself that fueled much of this protest. Wage labor was a form of dependency that seemed to contradict the republican principles on which the country had been founded. The core of republicanism was liberty, a precious but precarious birthright constantly threatened by corrupt manipulations of power. The philosopher of republicanism, Thomas Jefferson, had defined the essence of liberty as independence, which required the ownership of productive property. A man dependent on others for a living could never be truly free, nor could a dependent class constitute the basis of a republican government. Women, children, and slaves were dependent; that defined them out of the polity of republican freemen. Wage laborers were also dependent; that was why Jefferson feared the development of industrial capitalism with its need for wage laborers. Jefferson envisaged an ideal America of farmers and artisan producers who owned their means of production and depended on no man for a living. But the American economy did not develop that way." - James Mcpherson, Battle Cry of Freedom