"Constitutional Convention" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... character to which problems appear as exercises in ingenuity rather than questions of right and justice. His greatest opportunity for constructive statesmanship was offered in the making of the New York State constitution. But when it became known that Mr. Root had dominated the Constitutional Convention, that the proposed constitution was Mr. Root's constitution, that was enough; the voters rejected ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... limited. The powers of the federal government were actually enumerated, and thus the states and the union were a check on each other. That principle of division was the most efficacious restraint on democracy that has been devised; for the temper of the Constitutional Convention was as conservative as the Declaration of ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... They chiefly framed the first laws of the state. Judge Burnet, one of them, had intrusted to him the preparation of most of the laws of the territorial government. The principal lawyers appeared in the constitutional convention and in the legislatures subsequent, and contributed more than their share in ingrafting upon our statutes the republican principles and ideas found in the first constitution and laws of the state. They shared with other settlers in all the hardships ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... small voice of conscience and commune with his Maker. In response, the Lord said to him: "The daughters of Zelophehad speak right, if a man die and leave no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to pass unto his daughters." It would have been commendable if the members of the late Constitutional Convention in New York had, like Moses, asked the guidance of the Lord in deciding the rights of the daughters of the Van Rensselaers, the Stuyvesants, the Livingstons, and the Knickerbockers. Their final action revealed the painful fact that they never thought ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... of useless speculation. In recognizing the institution of African slavery, with no provision for its ultimate removal, the Federal Union set out embodying the seeds of certain trouble. The wiser heads of the Constitutional Convention perceived this plainly enough; its dissonance to the logic of their movement; on the sentimental side its repugnancy; on the practical side its doubtful economy; and but for the tobacco growers and the cotton planters it had gone by the board. The North soon found ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... in the draft of the Constitution of Connecticut, reported to the convention which framed it in 1818; but on objection it was struck out.[Footnote: Journal of the Constitutional Convention of Connecticut, pp. 78, 55.] It was thought better to leave the relations of the departments to each other to be worked out in practice, and for nearly eighty years afterward the legislature continued to exercise some judicial ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... approval. Soon afterwards the convention adjourned, after providing for the calling of a new convention, to consist of five delegates from each county, who should give a name to the state, and prepare for it a constitution. The members of this constitutional convention were to be chosen by counties, and not by ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... time the Constitution was framed was that the consultative function would be exercised by the Senate, which together with the President would form the Administration. Upon this ground, Mason of Virginia refused to sign the report of the constitutional convention. It was owing to practical experience and not to the language of the Constitution that the President was soon repelled from using the Senate as his privy council and was thrown back upon the aid of the heads of the executive departments, who were thus drawn close to him as his Cabinet.[Footnote: ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... several American ports and the coast of Africa, Gibraltar, and England,—familiarly known as the "Ebony Line,"—has been strongly recommended to Congress by petitions from all quarters. The Legislature of Virginia, and the Constitutional Convention of the same State, now in session, have both passed resolutions in its favor. Several other States have done, or are about to do the same thing. The session is already so far advanced, however, that the subject will probably be left without ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... in Salt Lake City as a member of the constitutional convention, the next winter, Young treated him, at his house and elsewhere, with all the friendliness of old. No one conversant with the extent of Young's authority will doubt the correctness of Lee's statement ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... members of the Constitutional Convention declared in 1787, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," it is worthy of note that they were echoing the sentiments, and ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... states that had adopted the initiative and referendum (to 1917) only four were east of the Mississippi River (Maine, Maryland, Michigan, and Ohio). [Footnote: "The Initiative and Referendum," Bulletin No. 6, submitted to the Constitutional Convention of Massachusetts (1917) by the Commission to Compile Information and Data, p. 10.] The movement to increase popular control over government has always been stronger in the West, as we ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... held in Mississippi under the Reconstruction Acts took place in 1867, when delegates to a Constitutional Convention were elected to frame a new Constitution. The Democrats decided to adopt what they declared to be a policy of "Masterly Inactivity," that is, to refrain from taking any part in the election and to allow it to ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... making. In May, 1877, an election was held to determine the question, and in spite of considerable opposition, even in the Democratic party, the people decided, by nine thousand majority, to have a constitutional convention. ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... Madison seems to have been one of the many great Americans capable of changing his political views without losing public favor. Mr. Madison, as a delegate to the constitutional convention held at Philadelphia in May, 1787, was beyond question a Federalist. Of the convention, a writer of ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... Bank against Josiah Lamborn, a lawyer from Jacksonville.[33] For a young man he proved himself astonishingly well-informed. If the chronology of his autobiography may be accepted, he had already read the debates in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Federalist, the works of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... at the breaking out of the war, to Brooklyn, New York, where he was a pastor for four years; was sent by his Church as a missionary to the freedmen in South Carolina; was chosen a member of the Constitutional Convention of South Carolina; was elected a member of the State Senate from Charleston, and served two years; took charge of a republican newspaper in 1868; was elected a representative from South Carolina in the Forty-third Congress as a Republican, receiving 66,825 votes against 26,394 for Lewis E. Johnson, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... cases not only to withhold from the Negro settlers the exercise of the rights of citizenship but to discourage and even to prevent them from coming into their territory.[27] The question as to what should be done with the Negro was early an issue in Ohio. It came up in the constitutional convention of 1803, and provoked some discussion, but that body considered it sufficient to settle the matter for the time being by merely leaving the Negroes, Indians and foreigners out of the pale of the newly organized body politic by conveniently ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... convention of 1868, there were 8 Negro delegates, that is, J. W. Mason, Richard Samuels, William Murphy, Monroe Hawkins, William Grey, James T. White, Henry Rector and Thomas P. Johnson. (Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various |
