William Tecumseh Sherman Quotes
It is useless to talk about Constitutional means for a condition of things never contemplated by any constitution.
Great crises like wars, frequently and great scientific and technical breakthroughs produce many situations that were never envisioned by the founding fathers when they drafted The Constitution. The Civil War had many of these.
William Tecumseh Sherman, 1820-1891, General of the Army & Indian Peace Commissioner, Letter, November 2, 1862
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation is an excellent statement of the argument of interpreting a constitution—in this case Wisconsin’s—in light of modernity or to only interpreted consistent with the original intent and mindset.
Powell was the Secretary of State and Addington kept advising the administration that as long as the President was acting in defense of the country in his capacity as Commander in Chief, he did not have to obey any existing laws that had been Constitutionally passed which in the opinion of the President restricted or limited the President or the executive branch. Addington was an attorney and Assistant to the Vice President, but he was given much responsibility for administration policy. Powell the Secretary of State of the Administration could not have disagreed more and although most politicians including Republicans disagreed with the Addington thesis, Powell was one of the few Republicans to criticize the Addington position.
From this quotation, {615902} and {615901} it is clear that the framers of the Constitution intended the treaty making powers to be shared by the President and the Senate. In practice, in modern times treaties are usually initially negotiated by diplomats under the supervision of the President and the Senate gets to concur or not in the ratification process. However, there have been a number of treaty failures including the League of Nations where the lack of coordination has resulted in a situation where the Senate had to accept or reject something which the President had negotiated and the Senate rejected the treaty.
The Chief Justice at the time was an ultra-conservative judge, who together with his 8 colleagues—all conservative—had blocked much of the democratic and progressive legislation that the Congress had passed. FDR had a much different legal and philosophical view of the Constitution than the Chief Justice, and the court would declare much of his New Deal legislation, passed in the emergency of the Great Depression, unconstitutional. Almost all of those “unconstitutional” things were years later passed again and this time a more modern court found they were Constitutional.
In modern times almost all countries have written constitutions. And almost all of those constitutions appear to be democratic. Many have been taken from the United States Constitution. However, most of the countries are not real democracies as they do not enforce their own constitutions. For example, in Egypt, the constitution guarantees women equal rights to men. There are many female attorneys. However, the notion of a female judge is too much for the sexist culture. So regardless of what the constitution says, it is not enforced with respect to female judges. When Smyth gave his lecture, constitutions were just getting popular. He was prescient enough to realize that a constitution to be effective must conform to the belief structure of most of the population and the constitution most be administered as well as written.
Franklin wrote the speech, but was too old and ill to deliver it personally. James Wilson of Pennsylvania did the honors for him.
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".
