Who said constant vigilance

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Constant Vigilance. View source. History Talk 0. For this post-Fourth-of-July ramble, I'll follow in Berkes's footsteps, but add a different kind of detail. Specifically, I'll take a look at five notable earlier appearances of this phrase. My focus will is on what specifically were the early users of the quotation suggesting that we liberty-loving people need to be eternally vigilant about?

The first time that we know the terms "eternal vigilance" and "price of liberty" were used in close proximity was by an Irishman named John Philpott Curran in , discussing the rules for electing the Lord-Mayor of London.

The first time we know that the the entire phrase was used together was during in an discussion of how James Jackson helped fight off the "Yazoo land grab" in western Georgia. The first use by someone who would later be a US president was when James Buchanan applied the phrase to discussing the merits of the presidential veto. The use of the term in its more modern meaning, as pushing back against encroachments on personal liberty, in the speeches and writings of Frederick Douglass starting in and continuing to the years after the Civil War.

Example 1: John Philpott Curran and the rules for electing the Lord-Mayor of Dublin John Philpott Curran was a lawyer who is probably best-remembered today as an advocate for freedom in Ireland. At the time of the election of the Lord-Mayor of Dublin in , Philpott gave a speech pointing that while the Lord Mayor had traditionally been elected, a situation had evolved in which Alderman of the city had both become the only ones eligible for the position of Lord Mayor, but also decided among themselves who would hold that position.

The Aldermen, however, soon became jealous of this participation, encroached by degrees upon the Commons, and at length succeeded in engrossing to themselves the double privilege of eligibility and of election of being the only body out of which, and by which the Lord Mayor could be chosen. Nor is it strange that, in those times, a board consisting of so small a number as twenty-four members, with the advantages of a more united interest, and a longer continuance in office, should have prevailed, even contrary to so evident principles of natural justice and constitutional right, against the unsteady resistance of competitors so much less vigilant, so much more numerous, and, therefore, so much less united.

It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. T he condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance , which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt. In this state of abasement the Commons remained for a number of years; sometimes supinely acquiescing under their degradation; sometimes, what was worse, exasperating the fury, and alarming the caution of their oppressors, by ineffectual resistance.

The slave that struggles, without breaking his chain, provokes the tyrant to double it; and gives him the plea of self-defence for extinguishing what, at first, he only intended to subdue. The earliest use of the exact phrase, "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," dates to an book called The Life of Major General James Jackson , by Thomas U.

The specific issue here is the "Yazoo land fraud," in which the Georgia legislature--some of whom had been bribed--sold large quantities of land in the western part of the state. Jackson made a political issue of sale, was elected Governor, and overturned it, also using the opportunity to disgrace a number of his political opponents.