Word: jefferson
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...justice of the peace which Secretary of State Madison refused to deliver to him, gave Chief Justice Marshall a chance to set his Federalist stamp on U. S. history. For the first time he asserted the right of the Supreme Court to nullify Acts of Congress as "unconstitutional." Thomas Jefferson, Marshall's distant cousin and lifelong political foe, never acknowledged that claim. If it were correct, he declared in the first great anti-Supreme Court blast, "then indeed is our Constitution a complete felo-de-se [suicide...
Years later, still chafing at Federalist stumbling-blocks laid by the Court, ex-President Jefferson proposed a Constitutional amendment limiting the terms of Justices to six years. His Congressional followers wanted quicker action. Between 1821 and 1825 bills were introduced to curb the Court's power in Constitutional cases by giving the Senate appellate jurisdiction over it, by requiring a vote of five out of seven Justices, by "packing" it with three new Justices...
...President Andrew Jackson, who resented the Court as hotly as Thomas Jefferson had and Franklin Roosevelt does, struck at the foundation of its power by urging repeal of a crucial section of the Judiciary Act of 1789. Unsuccessful, and only partly mollified as death made vacancies for Democrats, the hard-bitten old Indian fighter crystallized his view of the Supreme Court in a traditional comment on the decision which first gave Indians their legal status as government wards, "John Marshall has made his decision," Jackson roared, "Now let him enforce...
Back in America he aided Jefferson in the Louisiana Purchase, tinkered with his bridge models, fell out with his few remaining friends, suffered his worst blow when the election-supervisors at New Rochelle barred him from voting, called him an alien. He moved to Greenwich Village, died there while fighting off the churchmen who flocked to his bedside hoping to save the blackest soul in U. S. history. Though he asked to be buried in a Quaker cemetery, not even the Quakers would receive him. Repentant Journalist Cobbett dug up Paine's bones, intending to transplant them to Liverpool...
When 37-year-old Tom Paine landed in America in November 1774 having failed in England as staymaker, sailor, schoolmaster, excise officer, husband, no man could have predicted the extent of the fame or the abuse that awaited him. Ranked by his contemporaries with Washington and Jefferson, he lived to see popular opinion of himself summed up by his onetime enemy, Journalist William Cobbett: "Men will learn to express all that is base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous by one single monosyllable-Paine." Mothers threatened their young, "If you're not good. Tom Paine will get you." A century...