By Madame Publius | FreedomTalk Magazine, October, 2026
When people refer to Franklin’s comment that the Framers gave us a Republic only if we can keep it, it is usually spoken with the idea in mind that we are currently in danger of losing our Republic. Yet, few, if any, will also refer to is Franklin’s prediction that he made at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in 1787—“I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults—if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that it is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”[i]
History actually proves that Franklin was prescient in his remarks. We’re not about to lose our Constitutional Republic. Our Constitutional Republican Form of Government mandated in Article IV, section 4, has been completely lost beginning in 1824 just a “course of years” from the time Franklin made his prediction.
Interestingly enough, the fall of our Republican Form of Government came about exactly as James Madison, aka the Father of our Constitution being its chief architect warned as well—“there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations.” [ii]
Winston Churchill once said that “History is written by the victors.” The communist victors who destroyed our Constitutional Republic have fed us a false narrative through the media, history books, and our educational system. Even now, during this 250th celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the communist victors are still selling us false narratives but here is the actual lamentable constitutional history over the last 250 years.
1824: Democratization of The Republic
The communist victors have lulled us into believing that our Constitution is still intact, while placating us with the lie that the actual words don’t really matter. It’s the principles they say that are important and not the words. They also tell us that we have a “democracy” or something analogous to it like a “democratic republic.” Either way, these are all lies.
In our original “compound republic,” as Madison termed it, “The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.”[iii] He referred to this as a “double security.” We completely destroyed this “double security” with our unconstitutional democratization of the Presidential, Senatorial elections, and with every state and local officials throughout the Union.
By 1824, a majority of states began using the unconstitutional winner-takes-all democratically controlled presidential elections thereby making the Electoral College nothing more than a rubber stamp for the democratically controlled majority. With this unconstitutional change, the states lost their ability to control the national government thereby giving the oligarchy of the political parties the power to control the national government.
Hamilton explains how it was supposed to work. Presidential Electors were to be selected by the legislatures of each state and then they were to meet and vote without influence from the “tumult and disorder” of a democratically controlled popular election, because the Electors would be the “most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station [of the President].”[iv] By 1913, the democratization of our Republic culminated with the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913 taking the constitutional power of the state legislatures to appoint Senators’ and giving it to the democratic mob.
These two changes took the power of the states to control the national government and put it into the hands of the corrupt political parties. As such, Madison’s “double security” was lost forever. The power to control the upper level of government by the hands of the lower level was lost throughout the United States. Even though the U.S. Constitution mandates a Republican Form of Government in every state of the Union so that the states would control the national government, the counties would control the state governments, the towns would control the counties and so forth right on down to the individual neighborhoods, every state in the Union has now become a democracy as well.
Democracy is the tool of the communists. The Communist Manifesto actually declares that “the first step in the [communist] revolution is . . . to win the battle of democracy” in order to put communists into “the position of [the] ruling ruling class.”[v] Just as Madison warned, once they put their people in office through the unconstitutional democratic process we now operate under, they then use the power of their office “to wrest, by degrees, all capital . . . [and] to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State.”[vi]
February 25, 1862: Destruction of the Money of the Constitution
In 1844, SCOTUS explained in Gwin v Breedlove (hereinafter Gwin), that the only money allowed under the U.S. Constitution was gold and silver—“By the Constitution of the United States, gold and silver coins made current by law can only be tendered in payment of debts.”[vii] For nearly 100 years from our Founding, everyone understood this historical fact.
Madison wrote in his notes taken during the Constitutional Convention that the U.S. Constitution would “cut off the pretext for a paper currency, and particularly for making the bills a tender for public or private debts.”[viii] The Framers viewed paper money as a “wicked project” and a pestilence that would destroy us.[ix] Many others expressed this truth publicly including greats like Daniel Webster. He declared in a speech on the Senate Floor that Congress “clearly has no power to substitute paper, or anything else, for coin, as a tender in payment of debts and discharge of contracts.”[x]
In spite of this understanding, for the first time since our Founding, Congress passed a bill to allow for the printing of paper money in 1862. The justification for this patently unconstitutional action was justified as a “measure of necessity” for the “war.” This occurred even though it was well understood by everyone at the time that paper money was patently unconstitutional.
Paper money was introduced in 1862 for one purpose only and that was to fund war. This was the single most destructive action taken by the anti-Republican forces, who would not be denied of their lust for a paper currency. “These are extraordinary times,” Elbridge Gerry Spaulding, the sponsor of the Bill, argued, “and extraordinary measures must be resorted to, in order to save our government.” After all, the politicians’ creed has always been to never let a crisis go to waste. The Spaulding Bill was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Lincoln on February 25, 1862, otherwise was known as the Legal Tender Act.[xi]
December 18, 1863-1871: Destruction of the Rule of Law
There was only one attorney, who actually believed in our Constitution, who filed a lawsuit in New York to challenge the constitutionality of Spaulding’s paper money Act. Even though it was well settled law that paper money was patently unconstitutional, the New York Supreme Court ruled that the Legal Tender Act was constitutional and this is where the story turns even darker. The attorney appealed the New York Court’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court where the lawyers for the money interests argued without shame that SCOTUS “lacked jurisdiction to hear the appeal because it could not review a decision by the highest court of any state that upheld a federal statute.”[xii] Every first-year law student knows that the final say on federal law is SCOTUS. Clearly, they had no sound legal argument to use so they just made one up.
On December 18, 1863, SCOTUS agreed with the insane argument that SCOTUS lacked the jurisdiction to hear a case where an inferior state court had basically overturned SCOTUS’ decision in Gwin. One of the Justices on the Court at the time, apparently trying to justify SCOTUS’s betrayal of the Constitution, would later argue that their decision was a “judicial dodge.” It was a “fortuitous reprieve,” he continued, because “the rebellion would have triumphed…the national government would have perished, and, with it, the Constitution.”[xiii]
Of course, his justification was nothing more than poppycock, since it is impossible to actually know if the South’s rebellion would have triumphed if the North had not started printing paper money. It is pure speculation. One thing is certain, since that decision, we have seen the national government become all-powerful, and the U.S. Constitution itself has become nothing more than a piece of parchment to which the judges began amending by court opinion.
Paper money was challenged once again after the Civil War ended. This time SCOTUS took up the case to make it official. They did not even address the well known history or the constitution itself. They based their ruling on the idea that if “legal tender notes are rendered unavailable” then “ruinous sacrifices, general distress, and bankruptcy may be expected.”[xiv] With that decision, SCOTUS began rewriting our U.S. Constitution by court opinion only to be legitimized by convenience.
1919-1970: Destruction of the Few and Defined Powers
Power does not emanate from the national government. Under our Constitution, It’s just the reverse. The national government only has the specific “few and defined” powers delegated to it by our Constitution. Madison explained that these “few and defined” powers are confined mainly to “war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce.”[xv]
The Tenth Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights to try and solidify this fact. As such, the U.S. Constitution is a document that contains a specific list of powers that have been granted to the national government from the people. Consequently, if a power is not specifically listed in the Constitution, then it doesn’t exist.
The last time the federal government actually recognized the limitation of its powers was in 1919 during the ratification of the 18th Amendment. The period of time covered by the 18th Amendment has come to be known as the period of “Prohibition.” This Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified by the necessary number of states on January 19, 1919. It has been referred to as “Prohibition” simply because it prohibited the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcoholic beverages within the United States.
By 1970, however, Congress decided it was not bound by the U.S. Constitution any longer. Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) which prohibited “the manufacture, importation, possession, use and distribution” of basically every drug known to man on various schedules identified by the Congress. This is almost the exact same language as the 18th Amendment. In 1919, Congress understood that the U.S. Constitution did not give them power to regulate a single drug so they amended the constitution to give them power to regulate a single drug, otherwise known as alcohol, but in 1970 they passed the CSA that regulated every known drug on the planet without feeling the need to amend the constitution. With that decision, Congress now regulates anything and everything. There are no more “few and defined powers.” Their limited powers have transformed into the communist’s dream of unlimited powers.
Just as Franklin and Madison predicted, our Constitutional Republican Form of Government has ended and has been replaced by the centralized, despotic control of communists otherwise masquerading under the façade of political parties.
Madame Publius
[i] Benjamin Franklin, Speech in the Constitutional Convention, at the Conclusion of its Deliberations, Delivered September 17, 1787.
[ii] June 6, 1788, at the Virginia Constitutional Convention during the debates on ratification.
[iii] Madison, The Federalist Papers, Letter 51, ¶9.
[iv] The Federalist Papers, Letter 68
[v] The Communist Manifesto, pp. 26-27.
[vi] Id.
[vii] Gwin v. Breedlove, 43 U.S. (2 How.) 29 (1844)
[viii] https://fee.org/articles/the-constitution-and-paper-money/
[ix] Madison, The Federalist Papers, Ltrs.10,¶22;44,¶4
[x] Daniel Webster, in a speech before the Senate on December 21, 1836.
[xi] https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/the-birth-of-the-greenback/
[xii] https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/the-birth-of-the-greenback/
[xiii] Id.
[xiv] Knox v. Lee, 79 U.S. 457,531 (1871)
[xv] Madison, The Federalist Papers, Ltr. 45, ¶6
