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There had been an amendment process in the Articles of Confederation. It required that all states agree to an amendment. Rhode Island famously blocked adoption of an amendment to give Congress power to levy tariffs, and the result was the Philadelphia Convention (in which Rhode Island, note, opted not to participate).

The amendment process only seems difficult if one approaches it from the perspective of one who wants amendment to be easier than now. If one approached it from the perspective of, say, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris, James Wilson, or someone else who had wanted to give Congress a tariff power under the Articles, today’s amendment process–which has been used successfully 27 times–seems much easier.

No, there’s no evidence for that last idea. In fact, it’s contrary to what the Federalists in several states told their state electorates and ratification conventions: that the Constitution meant what it said and warnings the Federal Government would grab more power were unfounded.

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We don’t know why the Senate added that, because the Senate met in secret for its first five years. I suppose perhaps they were mistakenly taking “the states” in the House draft to refer to the state governments.

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Who said Marbury v. Madison was a power grab? Not I.

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I’m not sure what the point is. I thought you were asking the question.

Thank you for the endorsement.

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See Article VII and Madison’s explanation of the term “states” in the Virginia Report of 1800.

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In Virginia, he thought it should be chosen by members of the bar. He approved of the method of choosing members of the federal judiciary, though he became quite unhappy with the omission of a check on overreaching by federal judges. He concluded that that was “a solecism in politics.”

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You’re welcome.

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Hoo-boy.

Well, the short of it is that Louis XVI bankrupted his kingdom helping the American Revolutionaries win their independence, and so he called for the first meeting of the French Parliament — les Etats-Generaux — in 150 years. When the parliament met, it soon requested various reforms — elected officials levying taxes, a bill of rights, etc. — which Louis generally accepted. Jefferson was on the ground, even assisting, in the earliest stages, and he hoped that his friends such as Lafayette would succeed in their reform efforts.

After a few years, however, radicals took over, deposed the king, killed the king and his wife (perhaps his heir apparent too), and responded to other countries’ hostility to the establishment of the First Republic and attacks on it by conquering their immediate neighbors. Domestically, the Revolution embarked upon a course of changes in government, each ruling party more radical than the one before, culminating in the infamous Jacobin dictatorship and Napoleon’s overthrow of the civilian government. You can of course find a detailed account of these matters in the Liberty Classroom Course “Western Civilization Since 1500.”

Jefferson seems to have remained confident that all would work out for the best even into the Napoleonic period, which was long after essentially all other prominent Americans had been disabused of that view by events.

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One tiny clarifcation: the UK included all of Ireland until 1922.

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A quick glance at his oeuvre on Amazon(dot)com’s Web site shows him asserting that there was never real slavery in America, the Emancipation Proclamation was intended to be temporary, there were a substantial number of blacks in Confederate armies, and other such stuff. These assertions are just false.

I’ll say no, this isn’t accurate.

You’re welcome.

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Michael F. Holt, unquestionably the foremost expert on antebellum political history, told me so.

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As Madison had it, a league was an agreement among sovereigns, while a constitution made a single entity. The former could be dissolved by the sovereigns, while the latter could not.

Note that this was not the explanation of the Constitution given by the Federalists in the Virginia Ratification Convention. They described it as Vattel described federal constitutions in his highly influential treatise on the law of nations. See my account of Nicholas’s speech in the Richmond Convention’s waning hours.

(A compact could be either a league or a federal constitution. The point of using that word is to convey the fact that there is more than one party.)

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Two suggestions. You’re welcome.

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Though long said to have been quite efficacious, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been shown by recent research to have had little effect. There’s little by way of correspondence to congressmen about it, for example.

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Jefferson did not oppose private property, he opposed artificial concentration of it in his Virginia (where ~85 families owned about 2/3 of today’s state).

I recommend, by the way, that you check out Phil Magness’s several blogs demonstrating that Piketty’s statistics are completely mistaken.

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