history will find everywhere the clearest evidence that, so far as the purpose of forming a national government of a new character was entertained at the period when the Convention was assembled, a republican form for that government was a foregone conclusion. Not only did no State entertain any purpose but this, but no member of the Convention entered that body with any expectation of a different result. There is but one of the statesmen composing that assembly to whom a purpose of creating what has been called a monarchical government has ever been distinctly imputed; and with regard to him, as much as to every other person in the Convention, I shall show that the imputation is unjust. Hamilton, for it is to him of course that I now allude, - together with many others, believed that a failure, at that crisis, to establish a government of sufficient energy to pervade the whole Union with the necessary control, would bring on at once a state of things that must end in military despotism. Hence his efforts to give to the republican form, which he acknowledged to be the only one suited to the circumstances and condition of the country, the highest degree of vigor, stability, and power that could be attained.

Another very important fact, which the reader is to carry along with him into the examination of the proceedings of the Convention, is, that by the judgment of the old Congress, and of every State in the Union save one, the Confederation had been de

1 Rhode Island.

clared defective and inadequate to the exigencies of government, and the preservation of the Union. That this declaration was expressly intended to embrace the principle of the Union, or looked to the substitution of a system of representative government, to which the people of the States should be the immediate parties, in the place of their State governments, does not appear from the proceedings which authorized and constituted the Convention. In substance, those proceedings ascertained that there were great defects in the existing Confederation; that there were important purposes of the federal Union which it had failed to secure; and that a Convention of all the States, for the purpose of revising and amending the Articles of Confederation, was the most probable means of establishing a firm general government, and was therefore to be held. But what were the original purposes of the Union, or what purposes had come to be regarded as essential to the public welfare, was not indicated in most of the acts constituting the Convention. Virginia, whose declaration preceded that of Congress and of the other States, and on whose recommendation they all acted, had made the commercial interests of the United States the leading object of the proposed assembly; but she had also declared the necessity of extending the revision of the federal system to all its defects, and had advised further concessions and provisions, in order to secure the great objects for which that system was originally instituted. These general and somewhat indefinite purposes were de

clared by the other States, without any material variation from the terms employed by Virginia.'

Hence it is that the previous history of the Union becomes important to be examined before we can appreciate the great general purposes of its original formation, as they were understood at the time of these proceedings, or can appreciate the further purposes that were intended to be engrafted upon it. The declarations made by the Congress and the States seem obviously to embrace two classes of objects; the one is what, in the language of Virginia, they conceived to have been "the great objects for which the federal government was instituted"; the other is the "exigencies of the Union," for peace as well as for war, as they had been displayed and developed by the defects of the Confederation, and by its failures to secure the general welfare. The first of these classes of objects could be ascertained by reference to the terms and provisions of the Articles of Confederation; the second could only be ascertained by resorting to the history of the confederacy, and by regarding its recorded failures to promote the general prosperity as proofs of what the exigencies of the Union demanded in a general govern ment.2

1 New Jersey specifically contemplated a regulation of commerce. See the proceedings of Congress, and those of the States, ante, Vol. I. pp. 361, 367, notes.

2 Thus, for example, the regulation of commerce was not one of

the original purposes for which the Union was formed in 1775 or in 1781. But it became one of the exigencies of the Union, by becoming a national want, and by the revealed incompetency of most of the States to deal with the subject so as to

In the first volume of this work we have examined the nature and operation of the previous Union, in both of its aspects, and we must carry the results of that examination along with us in studying the formation of the new system. We have seen the character of the Union which was formed by the assembling of the Revolutionary Congress, to enable the States to secure their independence of the crown of Great Britain. We have seen that, from the jealousies of the States, even this Congress never assumed the whole revolutionary authority which its situation and office would have entitled it to exercise. We have seen also, that, from the want of a properly defined system, and from the absence of all proper machinery of government, it was unable to keep an adequate army in the field, until, in a moment of extreme emergency, it conferred upon the Commander-in-chief the powers of a dictator. We have witnessed the establishment of the Confedera tion, a government which bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction; for it relied entirely, for all the sinews of war, upon requisitions on the States, with which the States perpetually refused or neglected to comply. We have thus seen the war lingering and languishing until foreign aid could be procured, and until loans of foreign money supplied the means of keeping it alive long enough for the admirable courage, perseverance, and energy of

promote their own welfare, or to avoid injury to their confederates. So of a great many other things,

for which we must resort, as the framers of the Constitution resorted, to the history of the times.

Washington to bring it to a close, against all obstacles and all defects of the civil power. When the war was at length ended, and the duty of paying the debts thus incurred to the meritorious and generous foreign creditor, and the more than meritorious and generous domestic creditor, pressed upon the conscience of the country, we have seen that there was no power in the Union to command the means of paying even the interest on its obligations. We have seen that the treaty of peace could not be executed; that the Confederation could do nothing to secure the republican governments of the States; that the commerce of the country could not be protected against the policy of foreign governments, constantly watching for advantages which the clashing interests of the different States at all times held out to them; and that, with the rule which required the assent of nine States to every important measure, it was possible for the Congress to refuse or neglect to do what it was of the last importance to the people of the United States they should do. Finally, we have seen that what now kept the existing Union from dissolution, as it had been one immediate inducement to its formation, was the cession of the vast Northwestern territory to the United States; and that over this territory new States were forming, to take their places in the band of American republics, while the Confederation possessed no sufficient power to legislate for their condition, or to secure their progress toward the great ends of civil liberty and prosperity.