William Tecumseh Sherman Quotes
If secession were allowed, the U. S. Constitution would be a mere rope of sand that would break with the first pressure.
William Tecumseh Sherman, 1820-1891, General of the Army & Indian Peace Commissioner, 1861, Quoted in C-SPAN, The Meaning of the Civil War, May 3, 2014
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
President John Adams Alien and Sedition Acts were amongst the worst laws ever passed in America. It totally violated the First Amendment but at the time the Supreme Court had not ruled on the laws which prohibited criticizing the government. Ironically, it was Adams’s son, John Quincy Adams who finally led the repeal effort.
The 10th Amendment was created to take care of this objection which Jefferson and many others had.
In response to South Carolina's nullification of the Tariff Act of 1832, President Jackson proclaimed:
On June 12, 1789 a Senate committee proposed a federal court system for the nation. Maclay described it as:
Most of the states would not ratify the proposed 1787 constitution as it was. Congress then added a version of what became known as the Bill of Rights in order to obtain the required concurrence of the people. Most scholars look at the 1787 Constitution and observe how little trust it had in the men who would rule and implement it. However, the people in general were even more skeptical than the intellectual leaders who drafted the Constitution and wanted even more assurances. Many people believed that most of the issues in the Bill of Rights were either implicit in the original 1787 draft or were unnecessary to spell out, but Congress had to sell the Constitution to the people as a whole and it took some very specific text to get people to believe that their rights would be protected.
Mason’s view prevailed. What is interesting is that Mason saw the State as the State Legislature as opposed to the people of the state directly voting for the Senators as we do today.
This is an important quotation because it shows that slavery was the principle reason that the South succeeded and began their rebellion. In the early 20th century, there was a movement to make the Confederacy and the rebellion more noble by promoting the idea that the Civil War was fought by the South for more lofty reasons such as States Rights, Original Construction, different economic philosophies and the like. This was a more noble cause then the right to deny other human beings their rights, to own other human beings who they could beat, torture, sexually use and even murder them was a pretty selfish and demeaning reason to have started a rebellion that would then cost more Americans their lives than any other American conflict. The succession documents and others of the Southern States and the Confederacy make it clear that slavery was THE issue and fleeting references to any of the others were only made to complain about the potential effect on abolition and the refusal of the abolitionist states to cease aiding and protecting fugitive slaves.
In the related quote, Jackson makes the case against the South Carolina argument for nullification. Here he makes his threat which was very successful in ending the notion of “nullification”. The extensive quotation is given as it summarizes the entire issue that was one of the crises of early America.
William Tecumseh Sherman was an American soldier, businessman, educator, and author. He served as a general in the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861–1865), receiving recognition for his command of military strategy as well as criticism for the harshness of the scorched earth policies he implemented in conducting total war against the Confederate States. British military theorist and historian B. H. Liddell Hart declared that Sherman was "the first modern general".
