Last Best Hope of Earth

Tag: James Madison

  • The Evil of Popular Despotism

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    James Madison. By: H.B. Grigsby.

    James Madison had extensive beliefs about the structure of American government and the sustainability of the system.

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  • The Inadequacy of the Confederation

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    John Jay. By: John Trumbull.

    By 1787, the strength and stability of the states was under scrutiny. Shays’ Rebellion had erupted, citizens had become more licentious, and state legislatures appeared to be running rampant, doing significant damage to the health of the country as a whole. See Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, 465.

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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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  • 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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  • Carrying Liberty to Excess

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    David Ramsay. By: Rembrandt Peale.

    While there were perceptions that America was suffering from a malaise in the 1780s, the political theory at the time had an explanation: licentiousness.

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  • Setting an Unshakeable Foundation

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    John Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. By: Henry Inman.

    In the first years of the American Republic, there were drastic changes in the law. The importance and organization of laws were coming into place. At the top were constitutional rights, which, as James Cannon explained “must be protected and defended ‘as the apple of your eye’ from danger ‘or they will be lost forever.’” Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, 293 quoting James Cannon, “Cassandra,” Apr. 1776, Force, ed., American Archives, 4th Ser., V, 1094, quoting from Hulme, Historical Essay, 143-44. Cannon continued, stating that constitutional rights must be set “on a foundation never more to be shaken,” meaning that constitutional rights “must be specified and written down in immutable documents. Id.

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  • Unalterable Constitutions

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    Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. By: Ferdinand Richardt.

    As the constitutions of the states were implemented and executed during the Revolutionary years, the population began holding conventions for amendment of those constitutions, believing that “Legislatures were incompetent” to do so. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, 306 quoting Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention, II, 91-93. In fact, James Madison believed that “it would be a novel and dangerous doctrine that a Legislature could change the constitution under which it held its existence.” Id.

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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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  • A First Principle of Free Government

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    The Signing of the Constitution of the United States.

    The separation of powers in the government of the United States has “come to define the very character of the American political system.” Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, 151. (more…)

  • Divided Sovereignty

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    Signing of the Constitution. By: Louis S. Glanzman.

    John Adams had strong opinions about federalism. He believed that the government should be structured similarly to the British Empire, given the British Empire’s extraordinary success.

    At the time of the signing of the Constitution, Adams firmly believed that the Constitution had secured a national government, as opposed to a government dividing its sovereignty into states and a federal government. Gordon Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, 191. (more…)