| [107] | Of these twelve proposed amendments, ten were ratified in 1791. They form a Bill of Rights. A few years later an eleventh was added in order to prevent states from being sued by citizens, and a twelfth, as we shall soon see, in order to avoid deadlocks in the election of a President. At this point the practice of amending the Constitution stopped until after the Civil War. Cumbrous formalities had to be gone through, and it was soon found that the decisions of the Supreme Court in constitutional questions were the best means of making the Constitution a flexible instrument capable of adapting itself to the changing needs of the country. |
| [108] | Jefferson wrote that they were pitted against each other like cocks in a cockpit. |
| [109] | In Albemarle County, Virginia. |
| [110] | Born, 1745; died, 1829. Graduated at King’s (now Columbia) College, 1766; member of committee of correspondence and of the First Continental Congress, 1774; wrote Address to the People of Great Britain in 1774; was member of the Second Congress, and was chief justice of New York in 1777; was associated with Franklin and Adams in negotiating treaty with France; secretary of foreign affairs, 1784–1789; wrote at least five of the essays in The Federalist; member of the New York Constitutional Convention, 1788; appointed by Washington first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1789; after negotiating “Jay’s Treaty,” was governor of New York, 1795–1801. |
| [111] | The internal revenue tax on spirits still produces lawlessness among the mountaineers of the Southern states. |
| [112] | To Governor Trumbull of Connecticut, who had urged Washington to run for a third term, the President replied that if the Democrats were to put up a broomstick against him as candidate they would be victorious. See Fisher’s Life of Trumbull, Appendix. |
CHAPTER XIV.
the administration of john adams, 1797–1801.
A PERIOD OF DISSENSIONS.
