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That’s funny, I just posted asking for this kind of stuff, and this shows up.
Thanks, and please add me to the list.
Please add my nom de plume. Many thanks.
There’s another Madison quote about ‘widows and orphans’ from the Revolutionary War. Wonder if you have a link to that one. iirc, Davey Crockett invoked the quote after the War between the States, for the same reason.
Please add me to the list. Thanks.
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Conscience is the most sacred of all property.
-- James Madison, National Gazette, March 29, 1792,
In 1794, during debate on a bill that would appropriate $15,000 for French refugees from San Domingo, James Madison, then a representative from Virginia said:
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on the objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
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In January 1800, the entire House went to the state legislature of Virginia. Both Virginia and Kentucky had petitioned the new federal government that the recent Alien and Sedition Act was unconstitutional. Madison wrote the report James Madison, Report on the Virginia Resolutions
it was constantly justified and recommended on the ground that the powers not given to the government were withheld from it; and that, if any doubt could have existed on this subject, under the original text of the Constitution, it is removed, as far as words could remove it, by the 12th amendment, now a part of the Constitution, which expressly declares, "that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
(snip)
However true, therefore, it may be, that the judicial department is, in all questions submitted to it by the forms of the Constitution, to decide in the last resort, this resort must necessarily be deemed the last in relation to the authorities of the other departments of the government; not in relation to the rights of the parties to the constitutional compact, from which the judicial, as well as the other departments, hold their delegated trusts. On any other hypothesis, the delegation of judicial power would annul the authority delegating it; and the concurrence of this department with the others in usurped powers, might subvert forever, and beyond the possible reach of any rightful remedy, the very Constitution which all were instituted to preserve.