February 27 is:
National Chili Day
National Strawberry Day
National Kahlua Day
Publication of Federalist Paper #62: The Senate written by James Madison in 1788.
Madison names five areas to be considered in regards to the Senate: Qualifications, Selection, Equality of Representation, Number of Senators and Term of office, and the powers of the Senate.
In Federalist #62 he addresses the first four of these concerns.
Quotes from Federalist #62:
“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.”
“No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.”
“Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue; or in any manner affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change and can trace its consequences; a harvest reared not by themselves but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few not for the many.”
1801 The District of Columbia Organic Act was placed under the jurisdiction of Congress. Article One, Section Eight, of the Constitution permits the establishment of a “District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States”. However, the Constitution does not specify a location for the capital. In what is now known as the Compromise of 1790, Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson came to an agreement that the federal government would pay each state’s remaining Revolutionary War debts in exchange for establishing the new national capital in the southern United States. Formed from land donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia, Congress passed the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801 that officially organized the District and placed the entire territory under the exclusive control of the federal government. Further, the unincorporated area within the District was organized into two counties: the County of Washington to the east of the Potomac and the County of Alexandria to the west. After the passage of this Act, citizens living in the District were no longer considered residents of Maryland or Virginia, which therefore ended their representation in Congress. The portion of the District of Columbia ceded by Virginia was returned to that state in 1846-47.
Birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807), American poet, author of Paul Revere’s Ride, The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline.
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
On February 27, 1864, American Civil War: The first Northern prisoners arrive at the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia.
Birthday of John Steinbeck , (February 27, 1902), author of Tortilla Flat (1935), Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Red Pony (1937) as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939),
1951 – The Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution, limiting Presidents to two terms, is ratified.
Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Section 2. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission to the States by the Congress.
In 1991 U.S. President George H. W. Bush announced that “Kuwait is liberated”.