The Foreign Policy of George Washington

By |2021-04-22T19:27:52-05:00August 20th, 2017|Categories: Alexander Hamilton, American Founding, Constitution, Featured, Federalist Papers, George Washington, James Madison, War|

The war between France and Great Britain was the first major crisis faced by the country under the new Constitution. It was a test that the Washington Administration helped the nation pass with flying colors. The following essay is an examination of the Washington administration’s handling of the first major foreign policy crisis facing the [...]

The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding

By |2021-05-03T16:20:37-05:00August 15th, 2017|Categories: American Founding, Books, History, James Madison|

Lance Banning’s portrayal of James Madison as a son of the Virginia piedmont, consistent advocate of states’ rights, and strict constructionist does much to aid our understanding of the Father of the Constitution. The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic by Lance Banning (Cornell University Press, 1995) Historians [...]

James Madison & the Compound Republic

By |2020-03-15T14:44:36-05:00May 28th, 2017|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Constitution, Featured, James Madison, Kevin Gutzman, Timeless Essays|

A devoted American nationalist, James Madison often knowingly worked backstage to make the United States more national—less federal—than his fellow Virginians were willing to endure. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Kevin Gutzman as he examines the complex role James Madison played in the American Founding.  —W. Winston Elliott [...]

American Eden: The Rise and Fall of New World Man

By |2021-04-29T17:35:30-05:00March 12th, 2017|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Featured, Federalist Papers, James Madison, Literature, Mark Malvasi, Thomas Jefferson|

Americans transcribed the Edenic myth and heralded the supremacy of the New World over the Old. Yet, many could not suppress the fear that they were already losing their sense of purity, innocence, and power, and would in time come face to face with the disappointments of history, the sorrows of the human condition, and [...]

James Madison & the Dynamics of the Constitutional Convention

By |2022-02-23T10:11:22-06:00January 29th, 2017|Categories: American Founding, Constitution, Featured, James Madison, Timeless Essays|

No one came to the Convention with his thought more thoroughly in order than James Madison. His participation in the framing was the challenge he required in order to produce a democratic classic… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Lance Banning as he studies the role James Madison played [...]

Should We Trust James Madison?

By |2016-08-25T16:46:41-05:00July 13th, 2016|Categories: American Founding, Constitution, Featured, History, James Madison|

James Madison has long been treated as a neutral authority on early American history, a kind of Great Sage of, among other things, the U.S. Constitution. Thus, in a notable book on the ratification campaign of 1787-90—during which the states agreed to live under the Philadelphia Convention’s handiwork—a prominent historian said that the best way [...]

Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments

By |2021-06-22T08:08:09-05:00June 24th, 2016|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Featured, Founding Document, Freedom, Freedom of Religion, James Madison, Liberty, Statesman|

The Religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by [...]

The Necessity of the Bill of Rights

By |2023-06-08T11:01:52-05:00June 8th, 2016|Categories: American Founding, James Madison, Liberty, Quotation, Rights|

It may be said, indeed it has been said, that a bill of rights is not necessary, because the establishment of this Government has not repealed those declarations of rights which are added to the several State constitutions; that those rights of the people, which had been established by the most solemn act, could not [...]

James Madison on Representation & the Branches of Government

By |2021-03-15T15:19:14-05:00May 25th, 2016|Categories: American Founding, Constitutional Convention, Featured, James Madison|

“Mr. Madison considered an election of one branch, at least, of the Legislature by the people immediately, as a clear principle of free government; and that this mode, under proper regulations, had the additional advantage of securing better representatives, as well as of avoiding too great an agency of the State Governments in the general [...]

Why the Bill of Rights Is a Failure

By |2020-11-19T15:31:20-06:00November 23rd, 2015|Categories: American Founding, Bruce Frohnen, Constitution, Featured, James Madison|

The Constitution cannot provide absolute protection for individual rights for the simple reason that rights are not absolute. Its more essential purpose is to set out a form of government and to provide for ordered liberty. I have often thought that Americans believe the Framers of their Constitution actually bequeathed to them a bill of [...]

Is There a Wall of Separation Between Church and State?

By |2015-10-09T18:05:25-05:00September 20th, 2015|Categories: Bruce Frohnen, Constitution, Featured, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson|

Until 1947, few Americans knew about Thomas Jefferson’s comment, made in a private letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, that the First Amendment’s guarantee against a federally established church made a “wall of separation between church and state.” It was in that year, in the case of Everson v. Board of Education, that the Supreme [...]

The Ethical Center of American Constitutionalism

By |2018-11-24T13:18:32-06:00August 5th, 2015|Categories: American Founding, Constitution, Featured, Federalist Papers, James Madison, Modernity, Morality, Thomas Jefferson|

Much has been written in the past century about the state of American constitutionalism and the political culture that serves as its animating force. Some scholars have argued that American constitutionalism has evolved so far from its founding principles that political practice today would be unrecognizable by the eighteenth-century Framers. These critics submit that the [...]

The Declaration of Independence: Translucent Poetry

By |2023-05-21T11:31:37-05:00July 4th, 2015|Categories: American Founding, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, E.B., Eva Brann, Featured, James Madison, Samuel Adams, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Thomas Jefferson|

Section I  The Legacy of the Declaration When American schoolchildren first discover that they have a place in the world they sometimes give their addresses a wonderful form. Transformed for our case, it would be: “Proper Name, St. John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland, the United States of America, the North American continent, the Earth, the Solar System.” [...]

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