Mr. Madison was appointed one of the commissioners of Virginia to the meeting at Annapolis. There he met Hamilton, who came meditating nothing less than the general revision of the whole system of the Federal Union, and the formation of a new government. Mr. Madison, although less confident than the great statesman of New York as to the measures that ought to be taken, had yet for several years been equally convinced that the perpetuity and efficacy of the existing system could not be confided in. He therefore concurred readily in the report recommending a general convention of all the States; and when that report was received in the legislature of Virginia, he became the author of the celebrated act which passed that body on the 4th of December, 1786, and under which the first appointment of delegates to the Convention was made. It was also chiefly through his exertions, combined with the influence of Governor Randolph, that General Washington's name was placed at the head of the delegation, and that he was induced to accept the appointment. Mr. Madison himself was the fourth member of the delegation.
In the Convention, his labors must have been far more arduous than those of any other member of the body. He took a leading part in the debates, speaking upon every important question; and in addition to all the usual duties devolving upon a person of so much ability and influence, he preserved a full and careful record of the discussions with his own hand. Impressed, as he says, with the magnitude of the trust confided to the Convention, and foreseeing the interest that must attach to an authentic exhibition of the objects, the opinions, and the reasonings from which the new system of government was to receive its peculiar structure and organization, he devoted the hours of the night succeeding the session of each day to the preparation of the record with which his name is imperishably associated. "Nor was I," he adds, "unaware of the value of such a contribution to the fund of materials for the history of a Constitution on which would be staked the happiness of a people, great even in its infancy, and possibly the cause of liberty throughout the world."[414]
As a statesman, he is to be ranked, by a long interval, after Hamilton; but he was a man of eminent talent, always free from local prejudices, and sincerely studious of the welfare of the whole country. His perception of the principles essential to the continuance of the Union and to the safety and prosperity of the States, was accurate and clear. His studies had made him familiar with the examples of ancient and modern liberty, and he had carefully reflected upon the nature of the government necessary to be established. He was one of the few persons who carried into the Convention a conviction that an amendment of the Articles of Confederation would not answer the exigencies of the time. He regarded an individual independence of the States as irreconcilable with an aggregate sovereignty of the whole, but admitted that a consolidation of the States into a simple republic was both impracticable and inexpedient. He sought, therefore, for some middle ground, which would at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and leave the local authorities in force for their subordinate objects.
For this purpose, he conceived that a system of representation which would operate without the intervention of the States was indispensable; that the national government should be armed with a positive and complete authority in all cases where a uniformity of measures was necessary, as in matters of trade, and that it should have a negative upon the legislative acts of the States, as the crown of England had before the Revolution. He thought, also, that the national supremacy should be extended to the judiciary, and foresaw the necessity for national tribunals, in cases in which foreigners and citizens of different States might be concerned, and also for the exercise of the admiralty jurisdiction. He considered two branches of the legislature, with distinct origins, as indispensable; recognized the necessity for a national executive, and favored a council of revision of the laws, in which should be included the great ministerial officers of the government. He saw also, that, to give the new system its proper energy, it would be necessary to have it ratified by the authority of the people, and not merely by that of the legislatures.[415]
Such was the outline of the project which he had formed before the assembling of the Convention. How far his views were modified by the discussions in which he took part will be seen hereafter. As a speaker in a deliberative assembly, the successive schools in which he had been trained had given him a habit of self-possession which placed all his resources at his command. "Never wandering from his subject," says Mr. Jefferson, "into vain declamation, but pursuing it closely, in language pure, classical, and copious, soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and softness of expression, he rose to the eminent station which he held in the great national Convention of 1787; and in that of Virginia which followed, he sustained the new Constitution in all its parts, bearing off the palm against the logic of George Mason and the fervid declamation of Mr. Henry. With these consummate powers were united a pure and spotless virtue, which no calumny has ever attempted to sully."[416]
Mr. Madison's greatest service in the national Convention consisted in the answers which he made to the objections of a want of power in that assembly to frame and propose a new constitution, and his paper on this subject in the Federalist is one of the ablest in the series.
As this work is confined to the period which terminated with the adoption of the Constitution, it is not necessary to examine those points on which the two principal writers of the Federalist became separated from each other, when the administration of the government led to the formation of the first parties known in our political history. These topics it may become my duty to discuss hereafter, should I pursue the constitutional history of the country through the administration of Washington. At present, it may be recorded of both, that, upon almost all the great questions that arose before the Constitution was finally adopted, the single purpose of establishing a system as efficient as the theory of a purely republican government would admit, was the object of their efforts; and that, although they may have differed with regard to the details and methods through which this object was to be reached, the purpose at which they both aimed places them in the same rank at the head of those founders of our government, towards whom the gratitude of the succeeding generations of America must be for ever directed.[417]
CHAPTER X.
Franklin.
The Convention was graced and honored by the venerable presence of Dr. Franklin, then President of the State of Pennsylvania, and in his eighty-second year. He had returned from Europe only two years before, followed by the admiration and homage of the social, literary, and scientific circles of France; laden with honors, which he wore with a plain and shrewd simplicity; and in the full possession of that predominating common-sense, which had given him, through a long life, a widely extended reputation of a peculiar character. The oldest of the public men of America, his political life had embraced a period of more than half a century, extending back to a time when independence had not entered into the dreams of the boldest among the inhabitants of the English Colonies. For more than twenty years before the Revolution commenced, he had held a high and responsible office under the crown, the administration of which affected the intercourse and connection of all the Colonies;[418] and more than twenty years before the first Continental Congress was assembled, he had projected a plan of union for the thirteen Provinces which then embraced the whole of the British dominions in North America.[419] Nearly as long, also, before the Declaration of Independence, he had become the resident agent in England of several of the Colonies, in which post he continued, with a short interval, through all the controversies that preceded the Revolution, and until reconciliation with the mother country had become impossible.[420]
Returning in 1775, he was immediately appointed by the people of Pennsylvania one of their delegates in the second Continental Congress. In the following year, he was sent as commissioner to France, where he remained until he was recalled, and was succeeded by Mr. Jefferson, in 1785.
With the fame of his two residences abroad—the one before and the other after the country had severed its connection with England—the whole land was filled. The first of them, commencing with an employment for settling the miserable disputes between the people and the Proprietaries of Pennsylvania, was extended to an agency for the three other Colonies of Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, which finally led him to take part in the affairs of all British America, and made him virtually the representative of American interests. His brief service in Congress, during which he signed the Declaration of Independence, was followed by his appointment as Commissioner at the Court of Versailles, which he made the most important sphere that has ever been filled by any American in Europe, and in which that treaty of alliance with France was negotiated which enabled the United States to become in fact an independent nation.
His long career of public service; his eminence as a philosopher, a philanthropist, and a thinker; the general reverence of the people for his character; his peculiar power of illustrating and enforcing his opinions by a method at once original, simple, and attractive,—made his presence of the first importance in an assembly which was to embrace the highest wisdom and virtue of America.
It is chiefly, however, by the countenance he gave to the effort to frame a Constitution, that his services as a member of this body are to be estimated. His mind was at all times ingenious, rather than large and constructive; and his great age, while it had scarcely at all impaired his natural powers, had confirmed him in some opinions which must certainly be regarded as mistaken. His desire, for example, to have the legislature of the United States consist of a single body, for the sake of simplicity, and his idea that the chief executive magistrate ought to receive no salary for his official services, for the sake of purity, were both singular and unsound.
But there were points upon which he displayed extraordinary wisdom, penetration, and forecast. When an objection to a proportionate representation in Congress was started, upon the ground that it would enable the larger States to swallow up the smaller, he declared that, as the great States could propose to themselves no advantage by absorbing their inferior neighbors, he did not believe they would attempt it. His recollection carried him back to the early part of the century, when the union between England and Scotland was proposed, and when the Scotch patriots were alarmed by the idea that they should be ruined by the superiority of England, unless they had an equal number of members in Parliament; and yet, notwithstanding the great inferiority in their representation as established by the act of union, he declared, that, down to that day, he did not recollect that any thing had been done in the Parliament of Great Britain to the prejudice of Scotland.[421]
Although he spoke but seldom in the Convention, his influence was very great, and it was always exerted to cool the ardor of debate, and to check the tendency of such discussions to result in irreconcilable differences. His great age, his venerable and benignant aspect, his wide reputation, his acute and sagacious philosophy,—which was always the embodiment of good sense,—would have given him a controlling weight in a much more turbulent and a far less intelligent assembly. When—after debates in which the powerful intellects around him had exhausted the subject, and both sides remained firm in opinions diametrically opposed—he rose and reminded them that they were sent to consult and not to contend, and that declarations of a fixed opinion and a determination never to change it neither enlightened nor convinced those who listened to them, his authority was felt by men who could have annihilated any mere logical argument that might have proceeded from him in his best days.
Dr. Franklin was one of those who entertained serious objections to the Constitution, but he sacrificed them before the Convention was dissolved. Believing a general government to be necessary for the American States; holding that every form of government might be made a blessing to the people by a good administration; and foreseeing that the Constitution would be well administered for a long course of years, and could only end in despotism when the people should have become so corrupted as to be incapable of any other than a despotic government, he gladly embraced a system which he was astonished to find approaching so near to perfection.
"The opinions I have had of its errors," said he, "I sacrifice to the public good. Within these walls they were born, and here they shall die. If every one of us, in returning to our constituents, were to report the objections he has had to it, and endeavor to gain partisans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received, and thereby lose all the salutary effects and great advantages, resulting naturally in our favor, among foreign nations as well as among ourselves, from our real or apparent unanimity. Much of the strength and efficiency of any government in procuring and securing happiness to the people depends on opinion,—on the general opinion of the goodness of the government, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its governors. I hope, therefore, that for our own sakes as a part of the people, and for the sake of posterity, we shall act heartily and unanimously in recommending this Constitution (approved by Congress and confirmed by the conventions) wherever our influence may extend, and turn our future thoughts and endeavors to the means of having it well administered."[422]
And thus, with a cheerful confidence in the future, sustaining the hopes of all about him, and hailing every omen that foretold the rising glories of his country,[423] this wise old man passed out from the assembly, when its anxious labors had been brought to a close with a nearer approach to unanimity than had ever been expected. He lived, borne down by infirmities,
for nearly three years after the Convention was dissolved; but it was to see the Constitution established, to witness the growing strength of the new government, and to contemplate the opening successes and the beneficent promise of Washington's administration. Writing to the first President in 1789, he said: "For my own personal ease, I should have died two years ago; but though those years have been spent in excruciating pain, I am pleased that I have lived them, since they have brought me to see our present situation."[424]
CHAPTER XI.
Gouverneur Morris.
This brilliant, energetic, and patriotic statesman was born in the Province of New York, at Morrisania,—the seat of his family for several generations,—in the year 1752. He was educated for the bar; but in 1775, at the age of three-and-twenty, he was elected a member of the Provincial Congress of New York, in which he became at once distinguished. When the recommendation of the Continental Congress to the Colonies, to organize new forms of government, was received, he took a leading place in the debates on the formation of a new constitution for the State; and when the subject of independence was brought forward, in order that the delegates of New York in the Continental Congress might be clothed with sufficient authority, he delivered a speech of great power, of which fragments only are preserved, but which evidently embraced the most comprehensive and statesmanlike views of the situation and future prospects of this country. Speaking of the capacity of America to sustain herself without a connection with Great Britain, he said:—
"Thus, Sir, by means of that great gulf which rolls its waves between Europe and America; by the situation of these Colonies, always adapted to hinder or interrupt all communication between the two; by the productions of our soil, which the Almighty has filled with every necessary to make us a great maritime people; by the extent of our coasts and those immense rivers, which serve at once to open a communication with our interior country, and to teach us the arts of navigation; by those vast fisheries, which, affording an inexhaustible mine of wealth and a cradle of industry, breed hardy mariners, inured to danger and fatigue; finally, by the unconquerable spirit of freemen, deeply interested in the preservation of a government which secures to them the blessings of liberty and exalts the dignity of mankind;—by all these, I expect a full and lasting defence against any and every part of the earth; while the great advantages to be derived from a friendly intercourse with this country almost render the means of defence unnecessary, from the great improbability of being attacked. So far, peace seems to smile upon our future independence. But that this fair goddess will equally crown our union with Great Britain, my fondest hopes cannot lead me to suppose. Every war in which she is engaged must necessarily involve us in its detestable consequences; whilst, weak and unarmed, we have no shield of defence, unless such as she may please (for her own sake) to afford, or else the pity of her enemies and the insignificance of slaves beneath the attention of a generous foe."[425]
In 1778, Mr. Morris was chosen a delegate to the Continental Congress from the State of New York. His reputation for talent, zeal, activity, and singular capacity for business, had preceded him. On the very day when he presented his credentials, he was placed upon a committee to proceed to Valley Forge, to confer with General Washington on the measures necessary for a reorganization of the army. He remained in Congress for two years, discharging, with great ability and high patriotism, the most important functions, and subjected all the while to the most unjust popular suspicions of his fidelity to the cause of the country. Few of all the prominent men of the Revolution sacrificed or suffered more than Gouverneur Morris. The fact that all the other members of his family adhered to the royalist side, and an ineffectual effort which he once made to visit his mother, at his ancestral home, then within the British lines, gave his enemies the means of inflicting upon him a deep injury in the popular estimation. He was not re-elected to Congress; but short as his career in that body was, it was filled with services inferior to those of none of his associates.
Before he left Congress, in February, 1779, he made—as chairman of a committee to whom certain communications from the French minister in the United States were referred—a report which became the basis of the peace that afterwards followed; and when the principles on which the peace was to be negotiated had been settled, he drew the instructions to the commissioners, and they were unanimously adopted without change.[426]
On leaving Congress, Mr. Morris took up his residence in Philadelphia, and resumed the practice of the law. His remarkable talent for business, however, and his intimate knowledge of financial subjects, led to his appointment as Assistant Financier with Robert Morris. In this capacity, he suggested the idea of the decimal notation, which was afterwards made the basis of the coinage of the United States.[427]
Having been appointed one of the delegates from the State of Pennsylvania to the Convention for forming the Constitution of the United States, Mr. Morris attended the whole session, with the exception of a few days in June, and entered into its business with his accustomed ardor. To remove impediments, obviate objections, and conciliate jarring opinions, he exerted all his fine faculties, and employed his remarkable eloquence. But he is chiefly to be remembered, in connection with the Constitution, as the author of its text. To his pen belongs the merit of that clear and finished style,—that lucidus ordo,—that admirable perspicuity, which have so much diminished the labors and hazards of interpretation for all future ages.[428]
The character of Gouverneur Morris was balanced by many admirable qualities. His self-possession was so complete in all circumstances, that he is said to have declared, that he never knew the sensation of fear, inferiority, or embarrassment, in his intercourse with men. Undoubtedly, his self-confidence amounted sometimes to boldness and presumption; but we have it on no less an authority than Mr. Madison's, that he added to it a candid surrender of his opinions, when the lights of discussion satisfied him that they had been too hastily formed.[429] He was a man of genius, fond of society and pleasure, but capable of prodigious exertion and industry, and possessed of great powers of eloquence.
He loved to indulge in speculations on the future condition of the country, and often foresaw results which gave him patience under the existing state of things. In 1784, writing to Mr. Jay, at a time when the clashing commercial regulations of the States seemed about to put an end to the Union, he said: "True it is, that the general government wants energy, and equally true it is, that this want will eventually be supplied. A national spirit is the natural result of national existence, and although some of the present generation may feel colonial oppositions of opinion, yet this generation will die away and give place to a race of Americans."[430]
He was himself, at all times, an American, and never more so than during the discussions of the Convention. Appealing to his colleagues to extend their views beyond the narrow limits of place whence they derived their political origin, he declared, with his characteristic energy and point, that State attachments and State importance had been the bane of this country. "We cannot annihilate," said he, "but we may perhaps take out the teeth of the serpents."[431]
In truth, the circumstances of his life had prevented him from feeling those strong local attachments which he considered the great impediments to the national prosperity. Born in one State, he had then resided for seven years in another, from whose inhabitants he had received at least equal marks of confidence with those that had been bestowed upon him by the people among whom he first entered public life.
In his political opinions, he probably went farther in opposition to democratic tendencies than any other person in the Convention. He was in favor of an executive during good behavior, of a Senate for life, and of a freehold qualification for electors of representatives. In several other respects, the Constitution, as actually framed, was distasteful to him; but, like many of the other eminent men who doubted its theoretical or practical wisdom, he determined at once to abide by the voice of the majority. He saw that, as soon as the plan should go forth, all other considerations ought to be laid aside, and the great question ought to be, Shall there be a national government or not? He acknowledged that the alternatives were, the adoption of the system proposed, or a general anarchy;—and before this single and fearful issue all questions of individual opinion or preference sank into insignificance.[432] It is a proof both of his sincerity and of the estimate in which his abilities were held, that, when this great issue was presented to the people, he was invited by Hamilton to become one of the writers of the Federalist.[433] It is not known why he did not embrace the opportunity of connecting himself with that celebrated publication; but his correspondence shows that it was from no want of interest in the result. He took pains to give to Washington his decided testimony, from personal observation, that the idea of his refusing the Presidency would, if it prevailed, be fatal to the Constitution in many parts of the country.[434]
Mr. Morris filled two important public stations, after the adoption of the Constitution. He was the first Minister to France appointed by General Washington, and filled that office from May, 1792, until August, 1794. In February, 1800, he was chosen by the legislature of New York to supply a vacancy in the Senate of the United States, which he filled until the 4th of March, 1803. He died at Morrisania on the 6th of November, 1818. "Let us forget party," said he, "and think of our country, which embraces all parties."[435]
CHAPTER XII.
King.
Rufus King, celebrated as a jurist, a statesman, an orator, and a diplomatist, was sent to the Convention by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Born in her District of Maine, in 1755, and graduated at Harvard College in 1777, he came very early into public life, and was rarely out of it until his death, which occurred in 1827, in the seventy-third year of his age.
His first public service was in the year 1778, as a volunteer in the expedition against the British in Rhode Island, in which he acted as aide-de-camp to General Sullivan. In 1780, he commenced the practice of the law in the town of Newburyport, and was soon after elected from that town to the legislature of the State. There he distinguished himself by a very powerful speech in favor of granting to the general government the five per cent. impost recommended by Congress as part of the revenue system of 1783.
He was soon after elected a member of Congress from Massachusetts, in which body he took his seat on the 6th of December, 1784, and served until the close of the year 1787. He was thus a member both of the Convention for forming the Constitution and of the Congress which sanctioned and referred it to the people. He was also a member of the Convention of Massachusetts, in which the Constitution was ratified by that State.
Mr. King did not favor the plan of a convention for the revision of the federal system, until after the meeting at Annapolis had been held; and, indeed, he did not concur in its expediency, until after the troubles in Massachusetts had made its necessity apparent. In 1785, as we have seen, he joined with the other members of the Massachusetts delegation in opposing it.[436] In the autumn of 1786, when the report of the Annapolis Convention was before Congress, he expressed the opinion, in person, to the legislature of Massachusetts, that the Articles of Confederation could not be altered, except by the consent of Congress and the confirmation of the several legislatures; that Congress ought, in the first instance, to make the examination of the federal system, since, if it was done by a convention, no legislature would have a right to confirm it; and further, that, if Congress should reject the report of a convention, the most fatal consequences might follow. For these reasons, he at that time held Congress to be the proper body to propose alterations.[437]
At the moment when he was making this address to the legislature, the disturbances in Massachusetts were fast gathering into that formidable insurrection, which two months afterwards burst forth in the interior of the State.[438] Mr. King spoke of these commotions in grave and pointed terms. He told the legislature that Congress viewed them with deep anxiety; that every member of the national councils felt his life, liberty, and property to be involved in the issue of their decisions; that the United States would not be inactive on such an occasion, for, if the lawful authority of the State were to be prostrated, every other government would eventually be swept away. He entreated them to remember, that, if the government were in a minority in the State, they had a majority of every State in the Union to join them.[439]
He returned to Congress immediately. But there he found that the reliance which he had placed upon the ability of the Confederation to interfere and suppress such a rebellion was not well founded. The power was even doubted, or denied, by some of the best statesmen in that body; and although the insurrection was happily put down by the government of the State itself, the fearful exposure of a want of external power adequate to such emergencies produced in Mr. King, as in many others, a great change of views, both as to the necessity for a radical change of the national government and as to the mode of effecting it. His vote, in February, was given to the proposition introduced by the delegation of New York for a national convention; and when that failed, he united with his colleague, Mr. Dane, in bringing forward the resolution by which the Convention was finally sanctioned in Congress.[440]
The Convention having been sanctioned by Congress, no man was more ready than Mr. King to maintain its power to deliberate on and propose any alterations that Congress could have suggested in the Federal Articles. He held that the proposing of an entire change in the mode of suffrage in the national legislature, from a representation of the States alone to a representation of the people, was within the scope of their powers, and consistent with the Union; for if that Union, on the one hand, involved the idea of a confederation, on the other hand it contained also the idea of consolidation, from which a national character resulted to the individuals of whom the States were composed. He doubted the practicability of annihilating the State governments, but thought that much of their power ought to be taken from them.[441] He declared, that, when every man in America might be secured in his rights, by a government founded on equality of representation, he could not sacrifice such a substantial good to the phantom of State sovereignty. If this illusion were to continue to prevail, he should be prepared for any event, rather than sit down under a government founded on a vicious principle of representation, and one that must be as short-lived as it would be unjust.[442]
There is one feature of the Constitution with which the name of Mr. King should always be connected, and of which he may be said, indeed, to have been the author. Towards the close of the session, he introduced the prohibition on the States to pass laws affecting the obligation of contracts. It appears that the Ordinance for the government of the Northwestern Territory, which had been passed by Congress about a month previous, contained a similar prohibition on the States to be formed out of that territory. That any of the jurists who were concerned in the framing of either instrument foresaw at the moment all the great future importance and extensive operation of this wise and effective provision, we are not authorized to affirm. But a clause which has enabled the supreme national judicature to exercise a vast, direct, and uniform influence on the security of property throughout all the States of this Confederacy, should be permanently connected with the names of its authors.[443]
Mr. King was but little past the age of thirty when the Constitution was adopted. After that event, he went to reside in the city of New York, and entered upon the career of distinction which filled up the residue of his life, as a Senator in Congress, and as Minister to England. No formal biography of him has yet appeared; but when that duty shall have been discharged by those to whom it appropriately belongs, there will be added to our literature an account of a man of the most eminent abilities and the purest patriotism, whose influence and agency in the great transactions which attended the origin and first operations of the government were of the utmost importance.
CHAPTER XIII.
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, the eldest son of a chief justice of that Colony, distinguished both as a soldier and a civilian, was educated in England, and read law at the Temple. He returned to his native province in 1769, and commenced the practice of his profession; which, like many of the young American barristers of that day, he was obliged to abandon for the duties of the camp, when the troubles of the Revolution began. He became colonel of the first regiment of the Carolina infantry, and served under General Moultrie in the defence of the fort on Sullivan's Island. This gallant resistance having freed the South, for a time, from invasion, Pinckney repaired to the Northern army, and was made aide-de-camp to General Washington; in which capacity he served at the battles of the Brandywine and Germantown. He afterwards acquired great distinction in the defence of South Carolina against the British under Sir Henry Clinton.
On the return of peace, he devoted himself to the law, in which he became eminent. He belonged to that school of public men, who had been trained in the service of the country under the eye of Washington, and who had experienced with him the fatal defects of the successive governments which followed the Declaration of Independence. Of his abilities, patriotism, and purity of character we have the strongest evidence, in the repeated efforts made by Washington, after the establishment of the Constitution, to induce him to accept some of the most important posts in the government.
He was, indeed, one of that order of men to whom Washington gave his entire confidence from the first. A ripe scholar, a profound lawyer, with Revolutionary laurels of the most honorable kind,—wise, energetic, and disinterested,—it is not singular that the people of South Carolina should have selected him as one of their delegates to an assembly, which was to frame a new constitution of government for the country to whose service his earlier years had been devoted.
General Pinckney entered the Convention with a desire to adhere, if possible, to the characteristic principles of the Confederation; but also with the wish to make that government more effective, by giving to it distinct departments and enlarged powers.[444] But in the progress of the discussions, he surrendered these views, and became a party to those arrangements by which mutual concessions between the opposing sections of the Union made a different form of government a practicable result.
He was a strenuous supporter of the interests of the slaveholding States, in all that related to their right to hold and increase their slave population. He contended earnestly against a grant of authority to the general government to prohibit the importation of slaves; for he supposed that his constituents would not surrender that right. But he finally entered into the arrangement, by which the postponement of the power to prohibit the slave-trade to the year 1808 was made a ground of consent on the part of the Southern States to give the regulation of commerce to the Union. He considered it, he said, the true interest of the Southern States to have no regulation of commerce; but he yielded it, in consideration of the losses brought upon the commerce of the Eastern States by the Revolution, and of their liberality towards the interests of the Southern portion of the Confederacy.
The framers of the Constitution of the United States have often been bitterly reproached for permitting the slave-trade to be carried on for twenty years after the period of its formation; and the Eastern States have been especially accused of a sordid spirit of trade in purchasing for themselves the advantage of a national regulation of commerce by this concession. It is the duty of History, however, to record the facts in their true relations.
At the time when the Convention for framing our Constitution was assembled, no nation had prohibited the African slave-trade. The English Quakers, following the example of their American brethren, had begun to move upon the subject, but it was not brought formally before Parliament until 1788; the trade was not abolished by act of Parliament until 1807, nor made a felony until 1810. Napoleon's decree of 1815 was the first French enactment against the traffic.
But in 1787, many of the members of the American Convention insisted that the power to put an end to this trade ought to be vested in the new government which they were endeavoring to form. But they found certain of the Southern States unwilling to deprive themselves of the supply of this species of labor for their new and yet unoccupied lands. Those States would not consent to a power of immediate prohibition, and they were extremely reluctant to yield even a power that might be used at a future period. They preferred to keep the whole subject in their own hands, and to determine for themselves when the importation should cease. The members of the Convention, therefore, who desired the abolition of this trade, found that, if they attempted to force these States to a concession that it ought to be immediately prohibited, either the regulation of commerce—the chief object for which the Convention had been called—could not be obtained for the new Constitution, or, if it were obtained, several of the Southern States would be excluded from the Union. The question, then, that presented itself to them was a great question of humanity and public policy, to be judged and decided upon all the circumstances that surrounded it.
Were they to form a Union that should include only those States willing to consent to an immediate prohibition of the slave-trade, and thus leave the rest of the States out of that Union, and independent of its power to restrain the importation of slaves? Were they to abandon the hope of forming a new Constitution for the thirteen States that had gone together through all the conflicts and trials and sacrifices of the Revolution, or were they to form such a government, and secure to it the power at some early period of putting an end to this traffic? If they were to do the latter,—if the cause of humanity demanded action upon this and all the other great objects dependent upon their decisions,—how could the commercial interests of the country be better used, than in the acquisition of a power to free its commerce from the stain and reproach of this inhuman traffic? By the arrangement which was to form one of the principal "compromises" of the Constitution, American commerce might achieve for itself the opportunity to do what no nation had yet done. By this arrangement, it might be implied in the fundamental law of the new government about to be created for the American people, that the abolition of the slave-trade was an object that ought to engage the attention of Christian states. Without it, the abolition of this trade could not be secured within any time or by any means capable of being foreseen or even conjectured.
That the framers of the Constitution judged wisely: that they acted upon motives which will enable History to shield them from all reasonable reproach; and that they brought about a result alike honorable to themselves and to their country,—will not be denied by those who remember and duly appreciate the fact, that the Congress of the United States, under the Constitution, was the first legislative body in the world to prohibit the carrying of slaves to the territories of foreign countries.[445]
It is no inconsiderable honor to the statesmen situated as General Pinckney and other representatives of the Southern States were, that they should have frankly yielded the prejudices, and what they supposed to be the interests, of their constituents, to the great object of forming a more perfect union. Certainly they could urge, with equal if not greater force and truth, the same arguments for the continuance of the slave-trade, which for nearly twenty years afterwards were continually heard in the British Parliament, and which postponed its abolition until long after the people of England had become satisfied both of its inhumanity and its impolicy. Whether General Pinckney was right or wrong in the opinion that his constituents needed no national regulation of commerce, there can be no doubt of his sincerity when he expressed it. Nor can there be any doubt that he was fully convinced of the fact, when he asserted that they would not adopt a constitution that should vest in the national government an immediate power to prohibit the importation of slaves. He made, therefore, a real concession, when he consented to the prohibition at the end of twenty years, and he made it in order that the union of the thirteen States might be preserved under a Constitution adequate to its wants.
For this, as well as for other services, he is entitled to a place of honor among the great men who framed the charter of our national liberties; and when we recollect that by his action he armed the national government with a power to free the American name from the disgrace of tolerating the slave-trade, before it was effectually put down by any other people in Christendom, we need not hesitate to rank him high among those who made great sacrifices for the general welfare of the country and the general good of mankind.[446]
CHAPTER XIV.
Wilson.
James Wilson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and one of the early Judges of the Supreme Court of the United States, was one of the first jurists in America during the latter part of the last century.
He was born in Scotland about the year 1742. After studying at Glasgow, St. Andrews, and Edinburgh, he emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1766. He became, soon after his arrival, a tutor in the Philadelphia College, in which place he acquired great distinction as a classical scholar. He subsequently studied the law, and was admitted to the bar; and, after practising at different places, took up his residence at Philadelphia, where he continued to reside during the rest of his life.[447]
For six years out of the twelve that elapsed from 1775 to the summoning of the Convention of 1787, he was a member of Congress. Concerned in all the great measures of independence, the establishment of the Confederation, the peace, and the revenue system of 1783, he had acquired a fund of political experience, which became of great value to the country and to himself. Although a foreigner by birth, he was thoroughly American in all his sentiments and feelings, and, at the time he entered the Convention, there were few public men in the country who perceived more clearly the causes of the inherent weakness of the existing government. During the war, he had always considered the States, with respect to that war, as forming one community;[448] and he did not admit the idea, that, when the Colonies became independent of Great Britain, they became independent of each other.[449] From the Declaration of Independence he deduced the doctrine that the States by which that measure was adopted were independent in their confederated character, and not as individual communities. This rather subtile distinction may seem now to have been of no great practical moment, since the Confederation had actually united the States as such, rather than the inhabitants of the States. But it was one of the positions assumed by those who desired to combat the idea that the States, when assembled in Convention, were restrained, by their position as equal and independent sovereignties, from adopting a plan of government founded on a representation of the people. To this objection Mr. Wilson repeatedly addressed himself, and his efforts had great influence in causing the adoption of the principle by which the people of the States became directly represented in the government in the ratio of their numbers. He showed that this principle had been improperly violated in the Confederation, in consequence of the urgent necessity of forming a union, and the impossibility at that time of forming any other than a union of the States. As a new partition of the States was now impracticable, it became necessary for them to surrender a portion of their sovereignties, and to permit their inhabitants to enter into direct relations with a new federal union. He pointed out the twofold relation in which the people must henceforth stand;—in the one, they would be citizens of the general government; in the other, they would be citizens of their particular State. As both governments were derived from the people, and both were designed for them, both ought to be regulated on the same principles. In no other way could the larger States consent to a new union; and if the smaller States could not admit the justice of a proportionate representation, it was in vain to expect to form a constitution that would embrace and satisfy the whole country.
This great idea of a representative government was in fact the aim of all Mr. Wilson's exertions; and when the Constitution was formed, he enforced this idea in the Convention of Pennsylvania with singular power. His speech in that body is one of the most comprehensive and luminous commentaries on the Constitution that have come down to us from that period. It drew from Washington a high encomium, and it gained the vote of Pennsylvania for the new government, against the ingenious and captivating objections of its opponents.
The life of this wise, able, and excellent man was comparatively short. In 1789, he was appointed by Washington a Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States. While on a circuit in North Carolina, in the year 1798, he died at Edenton, at about the age of fifty-six. The character of his mind and the sources of his influence will be best appreciated, by examining some of the more striking passages of his great speech on the Constitution.[450]
CHAPTER XV.
Randolph.
Edmund Randolph, a "child of the Revolution,"[451] was Governor of Virginia at the time of the Federal Convention. Probably it was on account of his position as the chief magistrate of the State that he was, by the general consent of his colleagues, selected to bring forward the Virginia plan of government, which was submitted at an early period of the deliberations, and which became, after great modifications, the nucleus of the Constitution.
At an early age, in August, 1775, this gentleman joined the army at Cambridge, and was immediately taken into Washington's military family as an aide-de-camp.[452] He served in this capacity, however, no longer than until the following November, when he was suddenly recalled to Virginia by the death of his relative, Peyton Randolph, the President of the First Continental Congress.
In 1779, he became a member of Congress from Virginia, and served until March, 1782.
In 1786, he was elected Governor of Virginia, succeeding in that office Patrick Henry. In this capacity, it became his duty to secure the attendance of Washington upon the Federal Convention. This matter he managed with great tact and delicacy; and, by the aid of other friends, he succeeded in overcoming the scruples of the illustrious patriot then reposing in the retirement of Mount Vernon.
Governor Randolph's conduct with regard to the Constitution might seem to be marked by inconsistency, if we were not able to explain it by the motive of disinterested patriotism from which he evidently acted. He brought to the Convention the most serious apprehensions for the fate of the Union. But he thought that the dangers with which it was surrounded might be averted, by correcting and enlarging the Articles of Confederation. When, at length, the government which was actually framed was found to be a system containing far greater restraints upon the powers of the States than he believed to be either expedient or safe, he endeavored to procure a vote authorizing amendments to be submitted by the State conventions and to be finally decided on by another general convention. This proposition having been rejected, he declined to sign the Constitution, desiring to be free to oppose or advocate its adoption, when it should come before his own State, as his judgment might dictate.
When the time for such action came, he saw that the rejection of the Constitution must be followed by disunion. He had wearied himself in endeavoring to find a possibility of preserving the Union without an unconditional ratification by Virginia. To the people of Virginia, therefore, he painted with great force and eloquence the consequences of their becoming severed from the rest of the country. Virginia was not, he said, invulnerable. She was accessible to a foreign enemy by sea, and through the waters of the Chesapeake. Her situation by land was not less exposed. Her frontiers adjoined the States of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina. With the first she had long had a disputed boundary, concerning which there had been imminent danger of a war, that had been averted with the greatest difficulty. With Maryland, there was an ancient controversy upon the navigation of the Potomac, and that controversy, if decided on grounds of strict right, would be determined by the charter of Maryland in favor of that State. With North Carolina, too, the boundary was still unsettled. Let them call to mind, then, the history of every part of the world, where independent nations bordered in the same way on one another. Such countries had ever been a perpetual scene of bloodshed; the inhabitants of one escaping from punishment into the other,—protection given to them,—consequent pursuit, violence, robbery, and murder. A numerous standing army, that dangerous expedient, could alone defend such borders.
On her Western frontier, Virginia was peculiarly exposed to the savages, the natural enemies of the white race, whom foreign gold could always incite to commit the most horrible ravages upon her people. Her slave population, bearing a very large proportion to the whites,[453] necessarily weakened her capacity to defend herself against such an enemy.
Virginia, then, must be defended. Could they rely on the militia? Their militia did not, at the utmost, exceed sixty thousand men. They had performed exploits of great gallantry during the late war, but no militia could be relied on as the sole protectors of any country. Besides, a part of them would be wanted for the purposes of agriculture, for manufactures, and for the mechanic arts necessary for the aid of the farmer and the planter. They must have an army; and they must also have a navy. But how were these to be maintained without money? The enormous debt of Virginia, including her proportion of the Continental debts, was already beyond her ability to pay from any revenue that could be derived from her present commerce.
In this state of things, looking forward to the consequences of a dissolution of the Union, he could not but remind the people of Virginia of what took place in 1781, when the power of a dictator was given to the commander-in-chief, to save the country from destruction. At some period, not very remote, might not their future distress impel them to do what the Dutch had done,—throw all power into the hands of a Stadtholder? How infinitely more wise and eligible than this desperate alternative would be a union with their American brethren. "I have labored," said he, "for the continuance of the Union,—the rock of our salvation. I believe, as surely as that there is a God, that our safety, our political happiness and existence, depend on the union of the States; and that, without this union, the people of this and the other States will undergo the unspeakable calamities which discord, faction, turbulence, war, and bloodshed have produced in other countries. The American spirit ought to be mixed with American pride, to see the Union magnificently triumphant. Let that glorious pride, which once defied the British thunder, reanimate you again. Let it not be recorded of Americans, that, after having performed the most gallant exploits, after having overcome the most astonishing difficulties, and after having gained the admiration of the world by their incomparable valor and policy, they lost their acquired reputation, their national consequence and happiness, by their own indiscretion. Let no future historian inform posterity that they wanted wisdom and virtue to concur in any regular, efficient government. Should any writer, doomed to so disagreeable a task, feel the indignation of an honest historian, he would reprehend our folly with equal severity and justice. Catch the present moment,—seize it with avidity,—for it may be lost, never to be regained! If the Union be now lost, I fear it will remain so for ever. I believe gentlemen are sincere in their opposition, and actuated by pure motives; but when I maturely weigh the advantages of the Union, and the dreadful consequences of its dissolution; when I see safety on my right, and destruction on my left; when I behold respectability and happiness acquired by one course, but annihilated by the other,—I cannot hesitate in my decision."[454]
Note.—The following account of the genealogy of Governor Randolph, for which I am indebted to one of his female descendants, was not received in season to be incorporated in the text.
Edmund Randolph was the son of John Randolph and grandson of Sir John Randolph, each of whom was Attorney-General of the Colony under the royal government. He was educated at William and Mary's College. Peyton Randolph, President of the First Continental Congress, was also a son of Sir John Randolph, and of course was uncle of Edmund Randolph, to whom he devised his estate. Sir John Randolph was one of five or six sons of William Randolph of Turkey Island in Virginia, from whom all the Randolphs in Virginia are descended. Of this William Randolph little is known, beyond the fact that he was a large landholder, and a nephew of Thomas Randolph, the poet, who flourished in the reigns of James I. and Charles I., 1605-1634.