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Book: Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
Quotes of Book: Empire of Liberty: A History
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  1. Gordon S. Wood _ Empire of Liberty: A History

    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 combining to create tyrannical majorities in the new national government.
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  2. Gordon S. Wood _ Empire of Liberty: A History

    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 through speculation but would also "add an artificial support to the administration, and by a species of bribery enlist the monied men of the community on the side of the measures of the government. . . . Look to Great Britain.
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  3. Gordon S. Wood _ Empire of Liberty: A History

    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 by manual labor."79
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  4. Gordon S. Wood _ Empire of Liberty: A History

    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 Department, who rejected all tax increases, and yet who in June 1812 voted for the war.
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  5. Gordon S. Wood _ Empire of Liberty: A History

    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 jurisdiction extends over so large a territory that the doctrine of chances makes it certain that it must be raining somewhere."11
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  6. Gordon S. Wood _ Empire of Liberty: A History

    It was the family, John Adams had said in 1778, that was the "foundation of national morality.
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  7. Gordon S. Wood _ Empire of Liberty: A History

    THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION of 1787 was designed in part to solve the problems created by the presence in the state legislatures of these middling men. In addition to correcting the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution was intended to restrain the excesses of democracy and protect minority rights from overbearing majorities in the state legislatures. But
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  8. Gordon S. Wood _ Empire of Liberty: A History

    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 of Spain, John Randolph of Virginia said that Wilkinson was the only man he ever knew "who from the bark to the very core was a villain.
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  9. Gordon S. Wood _ Empire of Liberty: A History

    Once the Constitution became a legal rather than a political document, judicial review, although not judicial supremacy, became inevitable.
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  10. Gordon S. Wood _ Empire of Liberty: A History

    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 of whom immediately declined them, followed by an additional 8 percent who resigned after several months of service.
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  11. Gordon S. Wood _ Empire of Liberty: A History

    Both Jefferson and Madison remained convinced to the end of their lives that all parts of America's government had equal authority to interpret the fundamental law of the Constitution-all departments had what Madison called "a concurrent right to expound the constitution.
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  12. Gordon S. Wood _ Empire of Liberty: A History

    Allowing unelected judges to declare laws enacted by popularly elected legislatures unconstitutional and invalid seemed flagrantly inconsistent with free popular government. Such judicial usurpation, said Richard Dobbs Spaight, delegate to the Constitutional Convention from North Carolina, was "absurd" and "operated as an absolute negative on the proceedings of the Legislature, which no judiciary ought ever to possess." Instead of being governed by their representatives in the assembly, the people would be subject to the will of a few individuals in the court, "who united in their own persons the legislative and judiciary powers," making the courts more despotic than the Roman decemvirate or of any monarchy in Europe.
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