Truly, God's country!!
Posted on 03/16/2016 11:22:41 AM PDT by Vigilanteman
George Washington, our first president, is probably our greatest and most decent statesman. We celebrate Washington's Birthday each February. But March 16th marks the birthday of probably the second-most important and decent American, James Madison.
Madison became our fourth president, but his presidency is not the chief source of his greatness. There would have been an entirely different America without Madison's enormous input and foresight at the contentious 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. There were 55 delegates to the convention. Like Madison, some had a formal college education, while others did not. From Madison's notes about the quality of the debates and discourse, one could not tell who was college-educated and who was not. Their ages ranged from 26 (Jonathan Dayton) to 81 (Benjamin Franklin), with the average age being 42.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
Historians love to hate the last two. But I will rank them way ahead of either FDR or Andrew Jackson, whom they love to include.
No one will ever equal or surpass George Washington.
The thing that endears Madison most to me is his
Federalist #46 in which he gloats about the private
ownership of firearms by Americans.
Happy Birthday Jim!
No probably to it, Washington was without a doubt our greatest President.
Though I have a personal great fondness for Coolidge.
Amen. He rose to an occasion in which hardly more could be asked of a man.
Truly, God's country!!
Aye, laddy. Happy Birthday, Wee Jemmy!
My toughest calls were between #7 and #8, and between #9 and #10.
Ultimately, I gave Cleveland the nod over Teddy because he not only was the first president to draw a clear line between government and crony capitalism, he did it in a far less ham-handed way than egotistical Teddy.
Fillmore, OTOH, gets a slight edge over Coolidge because he not only forestalled a domestic crisis which America wasn't prepared to deal with at the time, but he also had an oversized impact on the history of Asia by bringing Japan, kicking and screaming, into the modern world. Since 1945, Japan has been a tremendous force for good in the world and even for the 80 years from 1853-1933, it has been more positive than negative.
His greatest contribution in the drafting of the Constitution was his devotion to republicanism, going back to that remarkable history of all the republics that the world had ever known at that time that he authored in that extra year under Witherspoon at Princeton. Witherspoon’s great interest as a Christian scholar was the Hebrew Republic and he passed on that interest to his students, of whom, including Madison, there were some 37 or so in the constitutional convention.
He did a nice job giving the founders realistic personalities of men who sometimes didn't see eye to eye at all but who found a way to make it work in spite of their differences.
In the book Roger Sherman was a weary, older man who saw that the different factions would never get all that they wanted and he set out to forge a compromise path. Madison he portrayed as an idealistic youth opposed to compromise as he felt his plan already was the fairest possible compromise available. The rest of the book is the story of all the back and forth and how each man came to appreciate the gifts of the other. I really enjoyed it.
If you have Kindle Unlimited you can read it for free. I bought during a one-day giveaway; maybe it will be one again someday.
I understand. Coolidge’s virtues were of the negative sort, negative not as in “bad” but as in “not active”. It was what he didn’t do that I appreciate, which is a lost and gone mentality among politicians of every stripe these days. They always have to “do something”. I suppose that’s the only way to build legacies, but it certainly doesn’t do our freedom any favors.
What is happening with Montpelier? I read a few years ago that it was in disrepair and they were try to raise money to renovate it.
Thanks to “Little Jim’’ as he was known we have a Second Amendment.
They have done quite a lot of restoration work and the building and grounds are beautiful. . .it is well worth the trip to visit the facility. Beautiful countryside in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
George Washington, if I recall, was 6'2", the same height as me and was said to be a towering figure for the time. Nowadays, that is just a little taller than average for grown men.
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