Albert Beveridge

To such lengths can popular demand, however unjust, drive even cold, unemotional, and upright men who are politically ambitious.

The whole proceeding on the part of the Government was conspicuously marked by a reliance upon public sentiment to influence court and jury through unceasing efforts to keep burning the fires of popular fear and hatred of Burr, first…

Nearly all the depositions procured by Hay under Jefferson's orders demonstrated that Burr had not the faintest intention of separating the Western States from the Union, or even of attacking Mexico unless war broke out between Spain and…

I would as soon have thought of taking possession of the moon and informing my friends that I intended to divide it among them." To a man, his most intimate friends believed this statement to be true.

When a law is in its nature a contract, when absolute rights have vested under that contract, a repeal of the law cannot divest those rights.

The vast sweep of territory stretching from Georgia to the Father of Waters, the best cotton land in the world, thus rose in value as if the wand of a financial deity had been waved over it.

Peck was one of the first steps toward the settling of the law of public contract in the riotous young Republic--one of the earliest and strongest judicial assertions of the supremacy of Nationalism over Localism.

Since before the Revolution, all men had fixed their eyes, hopes, and purposes upon land.

Not the humble and needy only, but the high-placed and opulent, had looked to the soil--the one as their chief source of livelihood, and the other as a means of profitable speculation.

Indeed, dealing in land was the most notable economic fact in the early years of the American Nation.

It denounced the land sale act as a violation of both State and National Constitutions, as the creation of a monopoly, as the dismemberment of Georgia, as the betrayal of the rights of man.

Such was the law which John Marshall was to declare invalid in one of the most far-reaching opinions ever delivered from the Supreme Bench.

Some one gifted with dramatic genius suggested that the funeral pyre of such unholy legislation should not be lighted by earthly hands, but by fire from Heaven.

If this legislation were valid, all would lose heavily; some would be financially ruined.

Hamilton declared this latter act to be invalid because it plainly violated the contract clause of the Constitution.

It is our duty to decide upon the rights but not upon the speculations of parties.

Failure to do this would have been to sanction Georgia's rescinding act, to encourage other States to take similar action, and to render insecure and litigious numberless titles acquired innocently and in good faith, and multitudes of…

A weaker man than John Marshall, and one less wise and courageous, would have dismissed the appeal or decided the case on technical points.

Also it taught the people to be careful in the choice of their representatives in all legislative bodies; if citizens will not select honest and able men as their public agents, they must suffer the consequences of their indifference to…

Whatever may be thought of other aspects of this case, it must be conceded that Marshall could not have disobeyed the plain command of the Constitution which forbids any State to impair the obligation of contracts.

Thus, sir, by a maxim of English law are the rights and liberties of the people of this country to be corruptly bartered by their Representatives.

It is this decision of the Judges which has been made the basis of the bill on your table--a decision shocking to every free Government, sapping the foundations of all your constitutions, and annihilating at a breath the best hope of man.

It is this monstrous and abhorrent doctrine which must startle every man in the nation, that you ought promptly to discountenance and condemn.

Why ... do the judges who passed this decision live and live unpunished?...

The foundations of the Republic are shaken and the judges sleep in tranquillity at home....