William H. Seward Quotes
Simultaneously with the establishment of the Constitution, Virginia ceded to the United States her domain, which then extended to the Mississippi, and was even claimed to extend to the Pacific Ocean.
Seward, William H. The Works of William H. Seward. Edited by George E. Baker, vol. 1, Redfield, 1853, p. 78.
This appears to be one of the first uses of the word "United" with respect to what was to become the United States.
July 4 is celebrated today, but the exact day has varied.
Many of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had invested in land that had formerly belonged to the Iroquois Indians who had sided with the British in the Revolution and been driven up to Canada. They had paid very little and wanted to sell it at large profits. However, there was little gold and silver left in the colonies after the war and there was great reluctance in the rest of the world to lend gold and silver backed money to a new country that did not have a rule of law and courts to collect debts. For example, Madison and Monroe had formed a partnership and bought former Iroquois land near Rome, New York. There was idealism to be sure but there was also self-interest functioning in the secret Constitutional Convention.
It was commonly asked of Blacks applying to register. There are few people who could give a cogent response to this. What made it terrible was that the white racist registrars had the unilateral authority to determine whether or not the oral response was adequate. Recording of responses were prohibited so that no Black who was disenfranchised could ever appeal when he/she was rejected. This is one of the thousands of techniques that were used throughout the South to prevent Negro voting. They were so egregious that Lyndon Johnson was abe to force through Southern filibusters The Voting Rights Act which has eliminated the worst of the racist restrictions on Black voting. As the worst of the racist white generation has died off, Southern discrimination in voting has lessened and the situation is better each year. By 2012 there were some who claimed that the law was no longer necessary do to changes in attitude and practice, but others worried that if there were no longer any forms of discrimination in voting, why some wanted to repeal the Voting Rights Act.
The political battles over the ratification of the Constitution were vicious and brutal even by modern standards.
The founding fathers assumed that as the West was settled, there would be more states in the Union. However, Morris, a bit of a snob and an aristocrat, assumed that the Westerners would be a little rougher than the established Eastern States and in particular would be more inclined to use violence and engage in war. So he wanted some provision that the original “maritime” East Coast states could not be outvoted. He did not prevail and all states were treated as equal in the Senate, but he turned out to be right about the warlike propensity. Kentucky and other “Western” areas were strong advocates for the War of 1812. The Atlantic states were much more vulnerable to a British invasion and the Maritime States’ economy could be easily ruined (and was) by a naval blocade, where the Western states’ economics were not much affected by the war. The West was also more strongly for the Mexican War, the Indian Wars, and even the Mormon Wars.
William Henry Seward was United States Secretary of State from 1861 to 1869, and earlier served as governor of New York and as a United States Senator. A determined opponent of the spread of slavery in the years leading up to the American Civil War, he was a prominent figure in the Republican Party in its formative years, and was praised for his work on behalf of the Union as Secretary of State during the Civil War.
