80 Quotes by Joseph J. Ellis

As far as his contemporaries were concerned, there was no question about his stature in American history. In the extravaganza of mourning that occurred in more than four hundred towns and hamlets throughout the land, he was described as the only indisputable hero of the age, the one and only “His Excellency.

Over the ensuing decades and centuries, to be sure, the Bill of Rights has ascended to an elevated region in the American imagination. But in its own time, and in Madison’s mind, it was only an essential epilogue that concluded a brilliant campaign to adjust the meaning of the American Revolution to a national scale.

For Adams it was especially distressing to witness such conspicuous failure “in the first formation of Government erected by the People themselves on their own Authority, without the poisonous Interposition of Kings and Priests.” There was, to be sure, such a thing as “The Cause,” but the glorious potency of that concept did not translate to “The People of the United States.”16.

Pitt and Burke were two of the most eloquent and respected members of Parliament, and taken together, by early 1775, they were warning the British ministry that it was headed toward a war that was unwise, unnecessary, and probably unwinnable.

It is richly ironic that one of the few original intentions they all shared was opposition to any judicial doctrine of “original intent.” To be sure, they all wished to be remembered, but they did not want to be embalmed.

There was in Madison’s critical assessment of the state governments a discernible antidemocratic ethos rooted in the conviction that political popularity generated a toxic chemistry of appeasement and demagoguery that privileged popular whim and short-term interests at the expense of the long-term public interest.

Contemporaries of Alexander Hamilton noticed “his conspicuous sense of self-possession, his unique combination of serenity and energy.

Physically as well as psychologically, Dickinson was the opposite of Adams: tall and gaunt, with a somewhat ashen complexion and a deliberate demeanor that conveyed the confidence of his social standing in the Quaker elite and his legal training at the Inns of Court in London.