Last Best Hope of Earth

Tag: Early Republic

  • The Erosion of Separation of Powers

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    Thomas Jefferson. By: Mather Brown. 1786.

    In the 1780s, there began to be a distinct erosion of the doctrine of separation of powers.

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  • Guarding Against an Evil

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    Benjamin Franklin. By: Joseph Siffred Duplessis.

    Americans’ political beliefs were rapidly changing as the American Revolution progressed into the early years of the Republic. In fact, those beliefs were “constantly in flux, continually adapting and adjusting to ever-shifting political and social circumstances.” Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, 438.

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  • The Genesis of the Bill of Rights

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    Magna Carta.

    Prior to the American Revolution, the colonists had become familiar with the concept of charters. Charters, whether royal, corporate, or proprietary, operated “as the evidence of a compact between an English King and the American subjects.” Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, 268; see also Leonard Krieger, The Politics of Discretion: Pufendorf and the Acceptance of Natural Law (Chicago, 1965), 121.

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  • A Check on Dangerous Usurpations

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    Samuel Chase. By: John Beale Bordley.

    While an upper house of state legislatures was desirable to some, as explained in The Birth of the Senate, it also had its detractors. Those detractors argued that it was a mere redundancy, wholly irrelevant to the founding of a stable government. In taking that position, the detractors ignored many of the benefits of having a second house in the legislature.

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  • A Moral Reformation

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    Patrick Henry. By: George Bagby Matthews.

    As eluded to in Virtue as a Principle and Foundation, vices had come to plague American society shortly after the American Revolution. Patrick Henry said, in 1780, that he “feared that our Body politic was dangerously sick,” as from top to bottom, society appeared to be embracing vice. Patrick Henry to Jefferson, Feb. 15, 1780, Boyd, ed., Jefferson Papers, III, 293.

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  • The Delegation of Sovereignty

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    Noah Webster. By: James Herring.

    Prior to the creation and ratification of the Constitution, Americans struggled with legislatures who had run rampant. This, however, was the doing of the people themselves.

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  • A Perceived Burden of Intolerable Evils

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    John Quincy Adams. By: John Singleton Copley.

    After the American Revolution and after the war with Britain, America was suffering what appeared to be a crisis.

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  • A Radical Political Experiment

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    Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. By: Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives.

    Pennsylvania was the home of the “most radical ideas about politics and constitutional authority voiced in the Revolution.” Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, 226. This resulted in a “comprehensive examination of assumptions about government that elsewhere were generally taken for granted” and it resulted in one of the greatest experiments in politics up to that time. Id.

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  • The Balance of Mixed Government

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    Alexander Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury. By: John Trumbull.

    Conservatives and liberals during the Revolutionary years realized that democracy must have power distributed throughout various sources, known as a mixed government, so as to survive.

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  • A Supreme Sovereign Power

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    Page 1 of the Articles of Confederation.

    Despite the fact that the Articles of Confederation loosely held the states together, there was still a remarkable union achieved. There were privileges and immunities granted, “reciprocity of extradition and judicial proceedings among the states,” no “travel and discriminatory trade restrictions between states, and the substantial grant of powers to the Congress in Article 9 made the league of states as cohesive and strong as any similar sort of republican confederation in history—stronger in fact than some Americans had expected.” Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, 359. (more…)