|
CONSTITUTION
/ UNITED STATES / IMPLEMENTATION UNDER LAW
I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our
new constitution by nine States. It is a good canvass, on which some
strokes only want retouching. What these are, I think are
sufficiently manifested by the general voice from north to south,
which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty generally
understood, that this should go to juries, habeas corpus, standing
armies, printing, religion and monopolies. I conceive there may be
difficulty in finding general modifications of these, suited to the
habits of all the States. But if such cannot be found, then it is
better to establish trials by jury, the right of habeas corpus,
freedom of the press and freedom of religion, in all cases, and to
abolish standing armies in time of peace, and monopolies in all
cases, than not to do it In any. The few cases wherein these things
may do evil, cannot be weighed against the multitude wherein the
want of them will do evil. In disputes between a foreigner and a
native, a trial by jury may be improper. But if this exception
cannot be agreed to, the remedy will he to model the jury, by giving
the mediatas linguae, in civil as well as criminal cases.
Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? The
parties who may be arrested, may he charged instantly with a
well-defined crime; of course, the judge will remand them. If the
public safety requires that the government should have a man
imprisoned on less probable testimony, in those than in other
emergencies, let him be taken and tried, retaken and retried, while
the necessity continues, only giving him redress against the
government, for dam-ages. Examine the history of England. See how
few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law, have
been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treason,
wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham
plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected.
Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus
has done real good, that operation is now become habitual, and the
-minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant
suspension. A declaration, that the federal government will never
restrain the presses from printing anything they please, will not
take away the liability of the printers for false facts printed. The
declaration, that religious faith shall be unpunished, does not give
impunity to criminal acts, dictated by religious error. The saying
there shall be no monopolies, lessens the incitements to ingenuity,
which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as
of fourteen years; but the benefit of even limited monopolies is too
doubtful, to be opposed to that of their general suppression. If no
check can be found to keep the number of standing troops within safe
bounds, while they are tolerated as far as necessary, abandon them
altogether, discipline well the militia, and guard the magazines
with them. More than magazine guards will be useless, if few, and
dangerous, if many. No European nation can ever send against us such
a regular army as we need fear, and it is hard, if our militia are
not equal to those of Canada or Florida. My idea then, is, that
though proper exceptions to these general rules are desirable, and
probably practicable, yet if the exceptions cannot be agreed on, the
establishment of the rules, in all cases, will do ill in very few. I
hope, therefore, a bill of rights will be formed, to guard the
people against the federal government, as they are already guarded
against their State governments, in most instances. The abandoning
the principle of necessary rotation in the Senate, has, I see, been
disapproved by many; in the case of the President, by none. I
readily, therefore, suppose my opinion wrong, when opposed by the
majority, as in the former instance, and the totality, as in the
latter. In this, however, I should have done it with more complete
satisfaction, had we all judged from the same position.
|
James
Madison
31 Jul 1788 |
CONSTITUTION
/ UNITED STATES / NEED FOR INFORMED CITIZENRY
Our new Constitution, of which you speak also,
has succeeded beyond what I apprehended it would have done. I did
not at first believe that eleven States out of thirteen would have
consented to a plan consolidating them as much into one. A change in
their dispositions, which had taken place since I left them, had
rendered this consolidation necessary, that is to say, had called
for a federal government which could walk upon its own legs, without
leaning for support on the State legislatures. A sense of necessity,
and a submission to it, is to me a new and consolatory proof that,
whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with
their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to
attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.
You say you are not sufficiently informed about the nature and
circumstances of the present struggle here. Having been on the spot
from its first origin, and watched its movements as an uninterested
spectator, with no other bias than a love of mankind, I will give
you my ideas of it. Though celebrated writers of this and other
countries had already sketched good principles on the subject of
government, yet the American war seems first to have awakened the
thinking part of this nation in general from the sleep of despotism
in which they were sunk. The officers too who had been to America,
were mostly young men, less shackled by habit and prejudice, and
more ready to assent to the dictates of common sense and common
right. They came back impressed with these. The press,
notwithstanding its shackles, began to disseminate them;
conversation, too, assumed new freedom; politics became the theme of
all societies, male and female, and a very extensive and zealous
party was formed, which may be called the Patriotic party, who,
sensible of the abusive government under which they lived, longed
for occasions of reforming it. This party comprehended all the
honesty of the kingdom, sufficiently at its leisure to think; the
men of letters, the easy bourgeois, the young nobility, partly from
reflection, partly from mode; for those sentiments became a matter
of mode, and as such united most of the young women to the party. .
. |
Dr.
Price
8 Jan 1789 |
CONSTITUTION
/ UNITED STATES / OBJECTIONS TO
The conduct of Massachusetts has been noble.
She accepted the constitution, but voted that it should stand as a
perpetual instruction to her Delegates, to endeavor to obtain such
and such reformations; and the minority, though very strong both in
numbers and abilities, declared viritim and seriatim,
that acknowledging the principle that the majority must give the
law, they would now support the new constitution with their tongues,
and with their blood, if necessary. I was much pleased with many and
essential parts of this instrument, from the beginning. But I
thought I saw in it many faults, great and small. What I have read
and reflected has brought me over from several of my objections of
the first moment, and to acquiesce under some others. Two only
remain, of essential consideration, to wit, the want of a bill of
rights, and the expunging the principle of necessary rotation in the
offices of President and Senator. At first, I wished that when nine
States should have accepted the constitution, so as to insure us
what is good in it, the other four might hold off till the want of
the bill of rights, at least, might be supplied. But I am now
convinced that the plan of Massachusetts is the best, that is, to
accept, and to amend afterwards. |
William
Carmichael
27 May 1788 |
CONSTITUTION
/ UNITED STATES / ORIGINAL INTENT
On every question of construction (of the
Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the
Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the
debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of
the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in
which it was passed. |
William
Johnson
12 Jun 1823 |
CONSTITUTION
/ UNITED STATES / PRESERVATION OF
I do then, with sincere zeal, wish an
inviolable preservation of our present federal Constitution,
according to the true sense in which it was adopted by the States,
that in which it was advocated by its friends, and not that which
its enemies apprehended, who therefore became its enemies; and I am
opposed to the monarchizing its features by the forms of its
administration with a view to conciliate a first transition to a
President and Senate for life and from that to a hereditary tenure
of these offices, and thus to worm out the elective principle.
|
Elbridge
Gerry
26 Jan 1799 |
CONSTITUTION
/ UNITED STATES / PRESIDENCY
My latest American intelligence is of the 24th
of June, when nine certainly, and probably ten States, had accepted
the new Constitution, and there was no doubt of the eleventh (North
Carolina), because there was no opposition there. In New York,
two-thirds of the State were against it, and certainly, if they had
been called to the decision in any other stage of the business, they
would have rejected it; but before they put it to the vote, they
would certainly have heard that eleven States had joined in it, and
they would find it safer to go with those eleven, than put
themselves into opposition, with Rhode Island only. Though I am much
pleased with this successful issue of the new Constitution, yet I am
more so, to find that one of its principal defects (the want of a
declaration of rights) will pretty certainly be remedied. I suppose
this, because I see that both people and conventions, in almost
every State, have concurred in demanding it. Another defect, the
perpetual re-eligibility of the same President, will probably not be
cured during the life of General Washington. His merit has blinded
our countrymen to the danger of making so important an officer
re-eligible. I presume there will not be a vote against him in the
United States. It is more doubtful who will be Vice-President. The
age of Dr. Franklin, and the doubt whether he would accept it, are
the only circumstances that admit a question, but that he would be
the man. After these two characters of first magnitude, there are so
many which present themselves equally, on the second line, that we
cannot see which of them will be singled out. John Adams, Hancock,
Jay, Madison, Rutledge, will all be voted for. Congress has acceded
to the prayer of Kentucky, to become an independent member of the
Union. A committee was occupied in settling the plan of receiving
them, and their government is to commence on the 1st day of January
next. |
William
Carmichael
12 Aug 1788 |
CONSTITUTION
/ UNITED STATES / SEDITION LAW
You seem to think it devolved on the judges to
decide on the validity of the Sedition Law. But nothing in the
Constitution has given them a right to decide for the executive,
more than to the executive to decide for them. Both magistrates are
equally independent in the sphere of action assigned to them. The
judges, believing the law constitutional, had a right to pass a
sentence of fine and imprisonment; because the power was placed in
their hands by the Constitution. But the executive, believing the
law to be unconstitutional, were bound to remit the execution of it;
because that power has been confided to them by the Constitution.
That instrument meant that its coordinate branches should be checks
on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right
to decide what laws are constitutional, and what not, not only for
themselves in their own sphere of action, but for the legislature
and executive also, in their spheres, would make the judiciary a
despotic branch. Nor does the opinion of the unconstitutionality,
and consequent nullity of that law, remove all restraint from the
overwhelming torrent of slander, which is confounding all vice and
virtue, all truth and falsehood, in the United States. The power to
do that is fully possessed by the several State legislatures. It was
reserved to them, and was denied to the general government, by the
Constitution, according to our construction of it. While we deny
that Congress has a right to control the freedom of the press, we
have ever asserted the right of the States, and their exclusive
right, to do so. They have accordingly, all of them, made provisions
for punishing slander, which those who have time and inclination,
resort to for the vindication of their characters. In general, the
State laws appear to have made the presses responsible for slander
as far as is consistent with its useful freedom. In those States
where they do not admit even the truth of allegations to protect the
printer, they have gone too far. |
Abigail
Adams
11 Sep 1804 |
CONSTITUTION
/ UNITED STATES / SEPARATION OF POWERS
I go further than you do, if I understand
rightly your quotation from the Federalist, of an opinion that "the
judiciary is the last resort in relation to the other
departments of the government, but not in relation to the rights
of the parties to the compact under which the judiciary is derived."
If this opinion be sound, then indeed is our Constitution a complete
felo de se. For intending to establish three departments,
coordinate and independent, that they might check and balance one
another, it has given, according to this opinion, to one of them
alone, the right to prescribe rules for the government of the
others, and to that one too, which is un-elected by, and independent
of the nation. For experience has already shown that the impeachment
it has provided is not even a scare-crow; that such opinions as the
one you combat, sent cautiously out, as you observe also, by
detachment, not belonging to the case often, but sought for out of
it, as if to rally the public opinion beforehand to their views, and
to indicate the line they are to walk in, have been so quietly
passed over as never to have excited animadversion, even in a speech
of any one of the body entrusted with impeachment. The Constitution,
on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the
judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.
It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics,
that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute
also; in theory only, at first, while the spirit of the people is
up, but in practice, as fast as that relaxes. Independence can be
trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently
independent of all but moral law. My construction of the
Constitution is very different from that you quote. It is that each
department is truly independent of the others, and has an equal
right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the Constitution
in the cases submitted to its action; and especially, where it is to
act ultimately and without appeal. |
Spencer
Roane
6 Sep 1819 |
CONSTITUTION
/ UNITED STATES / SEPARATION OF POWERS
You seem . . . to consider the judges as the
ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous
doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of
an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more
so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power,
and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is boni judicis
est ampliare jurisdictionem, and their power the more dangerous
as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other
functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has
erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands
confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would
become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal
and co-sovereign within themselves. The judges certainly have more
frequent occasion to act on constitutional questions, because the
laws of nieum and tuum and of criminal action,
forming the great mass of the system of law, constitute their
particular department. When the legislative or executive
functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the
people in their elective capacity. The exemption of the judges from
that is quite dangerous enough. I know no safe depository of the
ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we
think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a
wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to
inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of
abuses of constitutional power. Pardon me, Sir, for this difference
of opinion. My personal interest in such questions is entirely
extinct, but not my wishes for the longest possible continuance of
our government on its pure principles; if the three powers maintain
their mutual independence on each other it may last long, but not so
if either can assume the authorities of the other. |
William
Charles Jarvis
28 Sep 1820 |
CONSTITUTION
/ UNITED STATES / TAXATION AND WAR
I have seen, with infinite pleasure, our new
Constitution accepted by eleven States, not rejected by the twelfth;
and that the thirteenth happens to be a State of the least
importance. It is true, that the minorities in most of the accepting
States have been very respectable; so much so as to render it
prudent, were it not otherwise reasonable, to make some sacrifice to
them. I am in hopes, that the annexation of a bill of rights to the
Constitution will alone draw over so great a proportion of the
minorities as to leave little danger in the opposition of the
residue; and that this annexation may be made by Congress and the
Assemblies, without calling a convention, which might endanger the
most valuable parts of the system. Calculation has convinced me that
circumstances may arise, and probably will arise, wherein all the
resources of taxation will be necessary for the safety of the State.
For though I am decidedly of opinion we should take no part in
European quarrels, but cultivate peace and commerce with all, yet
who can avoid seeing the source of war, in the tyranny of those
nations, who deprive us of the natural right of trading with our
neighbors? The produce of the United States will soon exceed the
European demand; what is to be done with the surplus, when there
shall be one? It will be employed, without question, to open, by
force, a market for itself, with those placed on the same continent
with us, and who wish nothing better. Other causes, too, are
obvious, which may involve us in war; and war requires every
resource of taxation and credit. The power of making war often
prevents it, and in our case would give efficacy to our desire of
peace. If the new government wears the front which I hope it will, I
see no impossibility in the availing ourselves of the wars of
others, to open the other parts of America to our commerce, as the
price of our neutrality. |
James
Madison
18 Nov 1788 |
CONSTITUTION
/ UNITED STATES / THREATS TO
Behold you, then, my dear friend, at the head
of a great army, establishing the liberties of your country against
a foreign enemy [Austria]. May heaven favor your cause, and make you
the channel through which it may pour its favors. While you are
exterminating the monster aristocracy, and pulling out the teeth and
fangs of its associate, monarchy, a contrary tendency is discovered
in some here. A sect has shown itself among us, who declare they
espoused our new Constitution, not as a good and sufficient thing in
itself, but only as a step to an English constitution, the only
thing good and sufficient in itself, in their eye. It is happy for
us that these are preachers without followers, and that our people
are firm and constant in their republican purity. You will wonder to
be told that it is from the eastward chiefly that these champions
for a king, lords and commons come. They get some important
associates from New York, and are puffed up by a tribe of agitators
which have been hatched in a bed of corruption made up after the
model of their beloved England. Too many of these stock-jobbers and
king-jobbers have come into our legislature, or rather too many of
our legislature have become stock-jobbers and king-jobbers. However,
the voice of the people is beginning to make itself heard, and will
probably cleanse their seats at the ensuing election.
|
Marquis
de Lafayette
16 Jun 1792 |
CONSTITUTION
/ UNITED STATES / THREATS TO FREEDOM
The attempt which has been made to restrain the
liberty of our citizens meeting together, interchanging sentiments
on what subjects they please, and stating their sentiments in the
public papers, has come upon us a full century earlier than I
expected. To demand the censors of public measures to be given up
for punishment is to renew the demand of the wolves in the fable
that the sheep should give up their dogs as hostages of the peace
and confidence established between them. The tide against our
Constitution is unquestionably strong, but it will turn. Everything
tells me so, and every day verifies the prediction. Hold on then
like a good and faithful seaman till our brother sailors can rouse
from their intoxication and right the vessel. Make friends with the
trans-Alleghanians. They are gone if you do not. Do not let false
pride make a tea-act of your excise-law. |
William
Branch Giles
17 Dec 1794 |
CONSTITUTION
/ VIRGINIA / AMENDING
I received in due time your favor of the 12th,
requesting my opinion on the proposition to call a convention for
amending the constitution of the State. That this should not be
perfect cannot be a subject of wonder. …The basis of our
constitution is in opposition to the principle of equal political
rights, refusing to all but freeholders any participation in the
natural right of self-government. It is believed, for example, that
a very great majority of the militia, on whom the burden of military
duty was imposed in the late war, were men unrepresented in the
legislation which imposed this burden on them. However nature may by
mental or physical disqualifications have marked infants and the
weaker sex for the protection, rather than the direction of
government, yet among the men who either pay or fight for their
country, no line of right can be drawn. The exclusion of a majority
of our freemen from the right of representation is merely arbitrary,
and an usurpation of the minority over the majority; for it is
believed that the non-freeholders compose the majority of our free
and adult male citizens. |
John
Hambden Pleasants
19 Apr 1824 |
CORNWALLIS
You ask, in your letter of April the 24th,
details of my sufferings by Colonel Tarleton. I did not suffer by
him. On the contrary, he behaved very genteelly with me. On his
approach to Charlottesville, which is within three miles of my house
at Monticello, he despatched a troop of his horse, under Captain
McLeod, with the double object of taking me prisoner, with the two
Speakers of the Senate and Delegates, who then lodged with me, and
of remaining there in vidette, my house commanding a view of
ten or twelve miles round about. He gave strict orders to Captain
MeLeod to suffer nothing to be injure4. The troop failed in one of
their objects, as we had notice of their coming, so that the two
Speakers had gone off about two hours before their arrival at
Monticello, and myself, with my family, about five minutes. But
Captain McLeod preserved everything with sacred care, during about
eighteen hours that he remained there. Colonel Tarleton was just so
long at Charlottesville, being hurried from thence by the news of
the rising of the militia, and by a sudden fall of rain, which
threatened to swell the river, and intercept his return. In general,
he did little injury to the inhabitants, on that short and hasty
excursion, which was of about sixty miles from their main army, then
in Spottsylvania; and ours in Orange. It was early in June, 1781.
Lord Cornwallis then proceeded to the Point of Fork, and encamped
his army from thence all along the main James River, to a seat of
mine called Elk-hill, opposite to Elk Island, and a little below the
mouth of the Byrd Creek. (You will see all these places exactly laid
down in the map annexed to my notes on Virginia, printed by
Stockdale.) He remained in this position ten days, his own head
quarters being in my house, at that place. I had time to remove most
of the effects out of the house. He destroyed all my growing crops
of corn and tobacco; he burned all my barns, containing the same
articles of the last year, having first taken what corn he wanted;
he used, as was to be expected, all my stock of cattle, sheep and
hogs, for the sustenance of his army, and carried off all the horses
capable of service; of those too young for service he cut the
throats; and he burned all the fences on the plantation, so as to
leave it an absolute waste. He carried off also about thirty slaves.
Had this been to give them freedom, he would have done right; but it
was to consign them to inevitable death from the small pox and
putrid fever, then raging in his camp. This I knew afterwards to be
the fate of twenty-seven of them I never had news of the remaining
three, but presume they shared the same fate. When I say that Lord
Cornwallis did all this, I do not mean that he carried about the
torch in his own hands, but that it was all done under his eye; the
situation of the house in which he was, commanding a view of every
part of the plantation, so that he must have seen every fire. I
relate these things on my own knowledge, in a great degree, as I was
on the ground soon after he left it. He treated the rest of the
neighborhood somewhat in the same style, but not with that spirit of
total extermination with which he seemed to rage over my
possessions. Wherever he went, the dwelling houses were plundered of
everything which could be carried off. Lord Cornwallis' character in
England, would forbid the belief that he shared in the plunder; but
that his table was served with the plate thus pillaged from private
houses, can be proved by many hundred eye-witnesses. From an
estimate I made at that time, on the best information I could
collect, I supposed the State of Virginia lost, under Lord
Cornwallis' hands, that year, about thirty thousand slaves; and that
of these, about twenty seven thousand died of the small pox and camp
fever, and the rest were partly sent to the West Indies, and
exchanged for rum, sugar, coffee and fruit, and partly sent to New
York, from whence they went, at the peace, either to Nova Scotia or
England. From this last place, I believe they have been lately sent
to Africa. History will never relate the horrors committed by the
British army in the southern States of America. They raged
in Virginia six months only, from the middle of April to the middle
of October, 1781, when they were all taken prisoners; and I give you
a faithful specimen of their transactions for ten days of that time,
and on one spot only. Ex pede Herculem. I suppose their
whole devastations during those six months, amounted to about three
millions sterling. |
Doctor
Gordon
16 Jul 1788 |
CORRUPTION
/ THE CONGRESS
I think it is Montaigne who has said, that
ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head. I
am sure it is true as to everything political, and shall endeavor to
estrange myself to everything of that character. I indulge myself on
one political topic only, that is, in declaring to my countrymen the
shameless corruption of a portion of the Representatives to the
first and second Congresses, and their implicit devotion to the
treasury. I think I do good in this, because it may produce
exertions to reform the evil, on the success of which the form of
the government is to depend. |
Edmund
Randolph
3 Feb 1794 |
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