lature, and which had great influence in the subsequent convention, that the attention of the people of South Carolina was not confined to the particular terms and arrangements of the compromises which took place in the formation of the Constitution. They looked to the propriety, expediency, and justice of a general power to regulate commerce, apart from the compromise in which it was involved. They admitted the commercial distresses of the Northern States; they saw the policy of increasing the maritime strength of those states, in order to encourage the growth of a navy; and they considered it neither prudent, nor fit, to give the vessels of all foreign nations a right to enter American ports at pleasure, in peace and in war, and whatever might be the commercial legislation of those nations towards the United States. For these reasons a large majority of the people of South Carolina were willing to make so much sacrifice, be it more or less, as was involved in the surrender to a majority in Congress of the power to regulate commerce.'

Still, the Constitution was not ratified without a good deal of opposition on the part of a considerable minority. As the convention drew towards the close of its proceedings, an effort was made to carry an adjournment to the following autumn, in order to gain time for the anticipated rejection of the Constitution by Virginia. This motion probably stimulated the convention to act more decisively than they might otherwise have done, for it touched the pride of the state in the wrong direction. After a spirited discussion it was rejected by a majority of forty-six votes, and the Constitution was thereupon ratified by a majority of seventy-six. Several amendments were then adopted, to be presented to Congress for consideration, three of which were substantially the same with three of those proposed by Massachusetts.2

On the 27th of May there was a great procession of the trades, in Charleston, in honor of the accession of the state, in which the ship Federalist, drawn by eight white horses, was a conspicuous object, as it had been in the processions of other cities.

1 See the course of argument of Edward Rutledge, General Pinckney, Robert Barnwell, Commodore Gillon, and others, as given in Elliot, IV. 253–316.

* See the Amendments, Journals of the Old Congress, Vol. XIII., Appendix.

CHAPTER XXXV.

RATIFICATIONS OF NEW HAMPSHIRE, VIRGINIA, AND NEW YORK, WITH PROPOSED AMENDMENTS.

SOUTH CAROLINA was the eighth state that had ratified the Constitution, and one other only was required for its inauguration. In this posture of affairs the month of May in the year 1788 was closed. An intense interest was to be concentrated into the next two months, which were to decide the question whether the Constitution was ever to be put into operation. The convention of Virginia was to meet on the 2d, and that of New York on the 17th, of June; the convention of New Hampshire stood adjourned to the 18th of the same month. The latter assembly was to meet at Concord, from which place intelligence would reach the Middle and Southern States through Boston and the city of New York. The town of Poughkeepsie, where the convention of New York was to sit, lay about midway between the cities of Albany and New York, on the east bank of the Hudson. The land route from the city of New York to Richmond, where the convention of Virginia was to meet, was of course through the city of Philadelphia. The distance from Concord to Poughkeepsie, through Boston, Springfield, and Hudson, was about two hundred and fifty miles. The distance from Poughkeepsie to Richmond, through the cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, was about four hundred and fifty miles. The public mails, over any part of these distances, were not carried at a rate of more than fifty miles for each day, and over a large part of them they could not have been carried so fast. The information needed at such a crisis could not wait the slow progress of the public conveyances.

No one could tell how long the conventions of New York and Virginia might be occupied with the momentous question that was to come before them. It was evident, however, that there was to be a great struggle in both of them, and it was extremely impor

tant that intelligence of the final action of New Hampshire should be received in both at the earliest practicable moment. For, whatever might be the weight due to the example of New Hampshire under other circumstances, if, before the conventions of New York and Virginia had decided, it should appear that nine states had ratified the Constitution, the course of those bodies might be materially influenced by a fact of so much consequence to the future position of the Union, and to the relations in which those two states were to stand to the new government. It was equally important, too, that whatever might occur in the conventions of New York and Virginia should be known respectively in each of them, as speedily as possible. About the middle of May, therefore, Hamilton arranged with Madison for the transmission of letters between Richmond and Poughkeepsie by horse expresses; and by the 12th of June he had made a similar arrangement with Rufus King, General Knox, and other Federalists at the East, for the conveyance from Concord to Poughkeepsie of intelligence concerning the result in New Hampshire.

A very full convention of delegates of the people of Virginia assembled at Richmond on the 2d of June, embracing nearly all the most eminent public men of the state, except Washington and Jefferson. All parties felt the weight of responsibility resting upon the state. Every state that had hitherto acted finally on the subject had ratified the Constitution; in three of them it had been adopted unanimously; in several of the others it had been sanctioned by large majorities; and in those in which amendments had been proposed they had not been made conditions precedent to the adoption. So far, therefore, as the voice of any state had pronounced the Constitution defective, or dangerous to any general or particular interest, the mode of amendment provided by it, to be employed after it had gone into operation, had been relied upon as sufficient and safe. The opposition in Virginia were consequently reduced to this dilemma: they must either take the responsibility of rejecting the Constitution entirely, or they must assume the equally hazardous responsibility of insisting that the ratification of the state should be given only upon the condition of previous amendments. They were prepared to do both, or either, according to the prospects of success; for their convictions were fixed against the system proposed; their abilities, patriot

ism, courage, and personal influence were of a high order; and their devotion to what they deemed the interests of Virginia was unquestionable.

They were led, as I have already said they were to be, by Patrick Henry, whose reputation had suffered no abatement since the period when he blazed into the darkened skies of the Revolution-when his untutored eloquence electrified the heart of Virginia, and became, as has been well said, even "a cause of the national independence." He had held the highest honors of the state, but had retired, poor, and worn down by twenty years of public service, to rescue his private affairs by the practice of a profession which, in some of its duties, he did not love, and for which he had, perhaps, a single qualification in his amazing oratorical powers. His popularity in Virginia was unbounded. It was the popularity that attends genius, when thrown with heart and soul, and with every impulse of its being, into the cause of popular freedom; and it was a popularity in which reverence for the stern independence and the self-sacrificing spirit of the patriot was mingled with admiration for the splendid gifts of oratory which Nature, and Nature alone, had bestowed upon him. But Mr. Henry was rightly appreciated by his contemporaries. They knew that, though a wise man, his wisdom lacked comprehensiveness, and that the mere intensity with which he regarded the ends of public liberty was likely to mislead his judgment as to the means by which it was to be secured and upheld. The chief apprehension of his opponents, on this important occasion, was lest the power of his eloquence over the feelings or prejudices of his auditory might lead the sober reflections of men astray.

He was at this time fifty-two years of age. Although feeling or affecting to feel himself an old and broken man, he was yet undoubtedly master of all his natural powers. Those powers he exerted to the utmost to defeat the Constitution in the convention of Virginia. He employed every art of his peculiar rhetoric, every resource of invective, of sarcasm, of appeal to the fears of his audi

1 Notice of Henry, in the National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans, Vol. II. Mr. Jefferson has said that Henry's power as a popular orator was greater than that of any man he had ever heard, and that Henry "appeared to speak as Homer wrote." Jefferson's Works, I. 4.

ence for liberty; every dictate of local prejudice and state pride. But he employed them all with the most sincere conviction that the adoption of the proposed Constitution would be a wrong and dangerous step. Nor is it surprising that he should have so regarded it. He had formed to himself an ideal image which he was fond of describing as the American spirit. This national spirit of liberty, erring perhaps at times, but in the main true to right and justice as well as to freedom, was with him a kind of guardian angel of the republic. He seems to have considered it able to correct its own errors without the aid of any powerful system of general government-capable of accomplishing in peace all that it had unquestionably effected for the country in war. As he passed out of the troubles and triumphs of the Revolution into the calmer atmosphere of the Confederation, his reliance on this American spirit, and his jealousy for the maxims of public liberty, led him to regard that system as perfect, because it had no direct legislative authority. He could not endure the thought of a government, external to that of Virginia, and yet possessed of the power of direct taxation over the people of the state. He regarded with utter abhorrence the idea of laws binding the people of Virginia by the authority of the people of the United States; and thinking that he saw in the Constitution a purely national and consolidated government, and refusing to see the federal principle which its advocates declared was incorporated in its system of representation, he shut his eyes resolutely upon all the evils and defects of the Confederation, and denounced the new plan as a monstrous departure from the only safe construction of a union. He belonged, too, to that school of public men, some of whose principles in this respect it is vain to question, who considered a bill of rights essential in every republican government that is clothed with powers of direct legislation.

On the first day of the session, at the instance of Mr. Mason, the convention determined not to take a vote upon any question until the whole Constitution had been debated by paragraphs; but the discussions, in fact, ranged over the whole instrument without any restriction. The opposition was opened by Henry, in a powerful speech of a general nature, in which he demanded the reasons for such a radical change in the character of the general government. That the new plan was a consolidated government,