Massachusetts COS State Director Michael Arnold recently recorded and distributed this short video as part of an effort to recruit veterans who have signed the COS petition to consider becoming district captains in the Commonwealth.
In it, he and other Mass COS volunteers declare "I am Levi Preston."
Who is Levi Preston and what is the significance of such a declaration?
Preston was a farmer from Massachusetts who left his fields to join the strife at Concord on April 19, 1775. As recounted here by Brett Sterley, Preston was interviewed about his decision to fight the British forces as part of research being conducted by historian Mellen Chamberlain.
During his discussion, Preston -- then 91 years of age -- told Chamberlain that he never did see any of the stamps nor drank any of the tea that the British taxed.
The extent of his education was the Bible, songs and hymns, and, as he put it, "the Almanack." Yet his reasoning for taking up arms against the mightiest military force in the world stands through the ages as much as anything written in elegant script on parchment:
"Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn't mean we should."
Article V of the Constitution allows for self-governing citizens of this republic to circumvent a bloated, corrupt, faraway central government, and return power where it was always meant to be held -- with the sovereign citizens who elect and work with the representatives to secure and advance the blessings of hard-won liberty.
You, as a supporter of the Convention of States movement, mean to govern yourself.
In that effort, you are not merely like Levi Preston, you are Levi Preston.
