Last Best Hope of Earth

Tag: Benjamin Lincoln

  • Constitution Sunday: David Ramsay to Benjamin Lincoln

    Charleston, South Carolina

    January 29, 1788

    A letter from a South Carolinian to a Massachusettsan—and from a budding historian to a Revolutionary War hero—captured the spirit of the moment as South Carolina was preparing to assemble its convention to consider the Constitution. David Ramsay, who would soon publish a two-volume book about the American Revolution, wrote to Benjamin Lincoln of the recent happenings in South Carolina’s legislature and the tenor of the time as states were analyzing the potential for coexisting with a federal government.

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  • The Two Scales and the Hand that Holds it

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    Benjamin Lincoln. By: John Singer Sargent.

    Benjamin Lincoln wrote a series of articles in the Boston Magazine and Independent Chronicle that would touch on many of the same subjects as John Adams in his Defence of the Constitution. See Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, 576.

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  • The Selection of Senators

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    Benjamin Lincoln. By: Charles Willson Peale.

    As explained in The Birth of the Senate, the states’ creation of an upper house of Congress set the precedent for a fully functioning, bicameral legislature in most states and the federal government. However, the selection process of who should be a senator was another subject for debate.

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