Ratification Quotes

“Wilson had to explain why the Constitution did not, like several state constitutions, include a bill of rights. The reason, he said in one of his most influential arguments, lay in a critical difference between the constitutions of the states and the proposed federal Constitution. Through the state constitutions, the people gave their state governments “every right and authority which they did not in explicit terms reserve.” The federal Constitution, however, carefully defined and limited the powers of Congress, so that body’s authority came “not from tacit implication, but from the positive grant” of specific powers in the Constitution.”
― Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788

“Universal experience,” he began, proved the necessity of “the most express declarations and reservations … to protect the just rights and liberty of Mankind from the Silent, powerful, and ever active conspiracy of those who govern.” The new Constitution should therefore “be bottomed upon a declaration, or Bill of Rights, clearly and precisely stating the principles upon which the Social Compact is founded.”
― Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788

“Hamilton, [Melancton Smith] said, spoke ‘frequently, very long, and very vehemently,’ and ‘like publius,’ had ‘much to say’ that was ‘not very applicable to the subject’ at hand.”
― Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788

“According to the legal historian Akhil Reed Amar, before the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868, “the Supreme Court never—not once—referred to the 1792 decalogue as ‘the’ or ‘a’ bill of rights.”
― Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788

“Adams began his reply with a devastating comment on the preamble to the Constitution: “I confess,” he said, “as I enter the Building I stumble at the Threshold. I meet with a National Government, instead of a federal Union of Sovereign States.”
― Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788

“See, for example, Humphreys to Washington, November 16, 1786, PGWCS IV: 373; Linda Grant De Pauw, The Eleventh Pillar: New York State and the Federal Convention (Ithaca, NY, 1966), 43, where she says the terms were used as “epithets as men discussed the [proposed federal] impost” but were not used to designate parties until September 1787, when “the Constitution became a subject of political controversy”; and also 170, where De Pauw suggests that the terms went back at least to 1785. Madison to Washington, New York, March 3, 1787, PGWCS V: 93, which refers to an “antifederal party” in New York; and also 103, where Humphreys, in a letter to Washington dated March 24, 1787, refers to “foederal” and “antifoederal” parties in Connecticut politics.”
― Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788

“Under the state constitutions, “every thing which is not reserved is given,” but under the federal Constitution “every thing which is not given, is reserved.”
― Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788

“If Lee discussed his proposals with Washington during a visit to Mount Vernon on November 11 and 12, he no doubt received a cold reception. Washington certainly did not take kindly to the constitutional objections that George Mason sent him on October 7, with no sense, it seems, of how much hostility they would provoke. Washington wrote Madison (who was attending Congress in New York) that Mason had carefully distributed his objections among the seceding members of the Pennsylvania assembly, who repeated them in their published “address.” Washington thought Mason was also behind Lee’s arguments. Mason, in short, had caused the opposition to the Constitution in both Congress and the Pennsylvania assembly, and for no good reason: Madison insisted that there was little if anything worthy of serious consideration in Mason’s objections, which he dismissed, one by one.”
― Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788

“Mason was responsible for giving Congress the power to “declare”—not “make”—war, which he saw as a way of “facilitating peace,” and supplied the phrase about giving the country’s enemies “aid and comfort” in the constitutional definition of treason.”
― Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788

“Only twelve of over ninety American newspapers and magazines published substantial numbers of essays critical of the Constitution during the ratification controversy.”
― Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788