Consequently, as Samuel Chase pointed out in the Maryland ratifying convention, the states would end up without power, or respect and despised—they will sink into nothing, and be absorbed in the gener...
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg—
These critics thought that the general commercialization of English life, including the rise of trading companies, banks, stock markets, speculators, and new moneyed men, had undermined traditional va...
The advice part of the Senate’s role in treaty making was dropped.125 When the president issued his Proclamation of Neutrality in 1793, he did not bother to ask for the consent of the Senate, and he t...
The Court had a rule that it would indulge in wine-drinking only if it were raining. Marshall would look out the window on a sunny day and decide that wine-drinking was permissible since our jurisdict...
The Baptists expanded from 94 congregations in 1760 to 858 in 1790 to become the single largest religious denomination in America. The Methodists had no adherents at all in 1760, but by 1790 they had...
Only those few, who being attached to no particular occupation themselves, said Smith, have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people.
Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina was only one of many Republicans who in the early months of 1812 voted against all attempts to arm and prepare the navy, who opposed all efforts to beef up the War De...
In a republic that depended on the intelligence and virtue of all citizens, the diffusion of knowledge had to be widespread. Indeed, said Noah Webster, education had to be the most important business...
173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one, wrote Jefferson in 1785 in his Notes on the State of Virginia. An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.31
Showing oneself eager for office was a sign of being unworthy of it, for the office-seeker probably had selfish views rather than the public good in mind.
Madison and other supporters of the Consitution--the Federalists as they called themselves--hoped that an expanded national sphere of operation would prevent the clashing interests of the society from...
The Federalists resisted every attempt by Northern artisans to organize, lest their success, as one Federalist writer put it, excite similar attempts among all other descriptions of persons who live b...
Most basic and dangerous of all was the Federalist creation of a huge perpetual federal debt, which, as New York governor George Clinton explained, not only would poison the morals of the people throu...
Life was theater, and impressions one made on spectators were what counted. Public leaders had to become actors or characters, masters of masquerade.
But what is worse than all, observed the English traveler Isaac Weld, these wretches in their combat endeavor to their utmost to tear out each other’s testicles.31
Jefferson’s extraordinary efforts to defend the rights of neutrals to trade freely drove the country into a deep depression and severely damaged his presidency. He ended up violating much of what he a...
Wilkinson remained a central figure in the Spanish Conspiracy even after he became a lieutenant colonel and later general and commander of the U.S. Army. Even without knowing that he was a paid agent...