Allowing unelected judges to declare laws enacted by popularly elected legislatures unconstitutional and invalid seemed flagrantly inconsistent with free popular government. Such judicial usurpation,...
Americans became so thoroughly democratic that much of the period's political activity, beginning with the Constitution, was diverted to finding means and devices to tame that democracy.
After much jousting between the Congress and the president over the appointment of more officers, Madison by the end of the year had issued commissions to over eleven hundred individuals, 15 percent o...
In a republic, they believed, no person should be allowed to exploit the public’s authority for private gain.
Foreigners thought the Americans’ eating habits were atrocious, their food execrable, and their coffee detestable. Americans tended to eat fast, often sharing a common bowl or cup, to bolt their food...
By contrast, said Jefferson, the Southerners were fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attach...
As William Plumer of New Hampshire complained, It is impossible to censure measures without condemning men.
It seemed likely to slide them back into the traditional status of servants or slaves, into the older world where labor was merely a painful necessity and not a source of prosperity.
With every ordinary person now being told that his ideas and tastes, on everything from medicine to art and government, were as good as if not better than those of connoisseurs and speculative men who...
These multiplying societies treated the sick, aided the industrious poor, housed orphans, fed imprisoned debtors, built huts for shipwrecked sailors, and, in the case of the Massachusetts Humane Socie...
Private associations of men for the purpose of promoting arts, sciences, benevolence or charity are very laudable, declared Noah Webster, but associations formed for political purposes were dangerous...
By contrast with this extensive Republican use of the press, the Federalists did little. Presuming that they had a natural right to rule, they had no need to stir up public opinion, which was what dem...
Between 1798 and 1808 American colleges were racked by mounting incidents of student defiance and outright rebellion—on a scale never seen before or since in American history.
The land north of the Ohio River and west of the Appalachians was to be surveyed and marked off in a rectangular pattern—with east-west baselines and north-south ranges—before any of it was sold. This...
The Civil War was the climax of a tragedy that was preordained from the time of the Revolution. Only with the elimination of slavery could this nation that Jefferson had called the world’s best hope f...
It was the family, John Adams had said in 1778, that was the foundation of national morality.
Between 1803 and 1812 Britain and France and their allies seized nearly fifteen hundred American ships, with Britain taking 917 to France’s 558.
Although he trusted the good sense of the people in the long run, he believed that they could easily be misled by demagogues. He was a realist who had no illusions about human nature. The motives whic...
Yet the Pennsylvania radicals continued to assault judges for their abuse of discretionary authority.Judges, the popular radicals contended in 1807,very often discover that the law, as written, may be...
In 1788 Dr. Rush had told the clergy that, whatever their doctrinal differences, you are all united in inculcating the necessity of morals, and from the success or failure of your exertions in the cau...