Sublime

The Senate, William S. White, the body’s most prominent chronicler, wrote in 1956, is “the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg.”

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foresee that if the peaceable empire of the majority be not founded amongst us in time, we shall sooner or later arrive at the unlimited authority of a single despot.

As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was to write: The Founding Fathers appear to have envisaged the treaty-making process as a genuine exercise in concurrent authority, in which the President and Senate would collaborate at all stages.… One third plus one of the senators … retained the power of life and death over the treaties.

After starting out with 55 delegates—all of them white and male, and many affluent—the convention had suffered a high rate of attrition, with only 42 present at the end; of those, 39 signed the document. Eleven states approved the Constitution; Alexander Hamilton signed individually as the sole remaining delegate from New York. Rhode Island had boy

it’s important to understand a bill passed by Congress in 1787: the Northwest Ordinance.

THOMAS JEFFERSON HOSTED JAMES MADISON and Alexander Hamilton one evening in 1790. The dinner was an occasion for dealmaking. In exchange for siting the nation’s capital along the Potomac River, the Southern states would pay the Revolutionary War debts of the Northeast colonies. The Residence Act was approved by the Senate and House in July. Jeffers

Lyndon Johnson, who as President just a few years later would do so much to end the racial discrimination that was a keystone of the South’s way of life, who would do more to end racial discrimination than any other President of the twentieth century, was being given a crucial boost toward the presidency by the South’s own senators, fervent believe