lay an impost on goods imported into the States which had adopted it, they recommended the legislature of North Carolina to lay a similar impost on goods imported into the State, and to appropriate the money arising from it to the use of Congress.1 The elements which formed the opposition to the Constitution in other States received in Rhode Island an intense development and aggravation, from the peculiar spirit of the people, and from certain local causes, the history of which has never been fully written, and is now only to be gathered from scattered sources. Constitutional government was exposed to great perils, in that day, throughout the country, in consequence of the false notions of State sovereignty and of public liberty which prevailed everywhere. But it seemed as if all these causes of opposition and distrust had centred in Rhode Island, and had there found a theatre on which to exhibit themselves in their worst form. Fortunately, this theatre was so small and peculiar, as to make the display of these ideas extremely conspicuous. The Colony of Rhode Island was established upon the broadest principles of religious and civil freedom. Its early founders and rulers, flying from religious persecution in the other New England Colonies, had transmitted to their descendants a natural jealousy of other communities, and a high spirit of individual and public independence. In the progress of time, as not infrequently happens in such communities, the principles on which the State was founded were 1 North Carolina Debates, Elliot, IV. 250, 251. falsely interpreted and applied, until, in the minds of a large part of the people, they had come to mean a simple aversion to all but the most democratic form of government. No successful appeal to this hereditary feeling could be made during the early part of the Revolution, against the interests and influence of the confederacy, because the early and local effect of the Revolution in fact coincided with it. But when the Revolution was fairly accomplished, and the State had assumed its position of absolute sovereignty, what may be called the extreme individualism of the people, and their old unfortunate relations with the rest of New England, made them singularly reluctant to part with any power to the confederated States. The manifestations of this feeling we have seen all along, from the first establishment of the Confederation down to the period at which we are now arrived. The local causes which gave to this tendency its utmost activity, at the time of the formation of the Constitution of the United States, were the following. First, there had existed in the State, for a considerable period, a despotic and well-organized party, known as the paper-money party. This faction had long controlled the legislation of the State, by furnishing the agricultural classes, in the shape of paper money, with the only circulating medium they had ever had in any large quantity; and they were determined to extinguish the debt of the State by this species of currency, which the legislature could, and did, depreciate at pleasure. Secondly, there existed, to a great and ludicrous extent, a constant antagonism between town and country,-between the agricultural and the mercantile or trading classes; and this hostility was especially violent and active between the people of the towns of Providence and Newport and the people of the surrounding and the more remote rural districts.' The paper-money question divided the inhabitants of the State in the same way. The loss of this circulation would deprive the agricultural classes of their sole currency. They kept their paper-money party, therefore, in a state of constant activity; and when the Constitution of the United States appeared, this was an organized and triumphant party, ready for any new contest. Finally, there prevailed among the country party a notion that the maritime advantages of the State ought in some way to be made use of, for obtaining better terms with the general government than could be had under the Constitution, and that by some such means funds could be obtained for paying their most urgent debts. If we may judge of the spirit and the acts of the majority of the people of Rhode Island, at this time, by the manner in which they were looked upon throughout the rest of the Union, no language of 1 The march of the country people upon Providence, on the 4th of July, 1788, and the manner in which they compelled the inhabitants of the town to abandon their purpose of celebrating the adoption of the Constitution by nine States, -dictating even their toasts and salutes, reads more like a page in Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York than like anything else. But it is a veracious as well as a most amusing story. (See Staples's Annals of Providence, pp. 329-335.) censure can be too strong to be applied to them. They were regarded and spoken of everywhere, among the Federalists, with contempt and abhorrence. Even the opposition in other States, in all their arguments against the Constitution, never ventured to defend the people of Rhode Island. Ridicule and scorn were heaped upon them from all quarters of the country, and ardent zealots of the Federal press urged the adoption of the advice which they said the Grand Seignior had given to the king of Spain, with respect to the refractory States of Holland, namely, to send his men with shovels and pickaxes, and throw them all into the sea. Such an undertaking, we may suppose, might have proved as difficult on this, as it would have been on the other side of the Atlantic. But however this might have been, it is probable that the natural effect of their conduct on the minds of men in other States, and the treatment they received, reacted upon the people of Rhode Island, and made them still more tenacious and persistent in their wrongful course. But we need not go out of the State itself, to find proof that a majority of its people were at this time violent, arbitrary, and unenlightened, both as to their true interests and as to the principles of public honesty. Determined to adhere to their paper-money system, they did not pause to consider and to discuss the great questions respecting the Constitution,-its bearing upon the welfare of the States, its effect upon public liberty and social order, - the necessity for its amendment in certain particulars, which led, - in the conventions of the other States, to some of the most important debates that the subjects of government and free institutions have ever produced. Indeed, they resolved to stifle all such discussions at once; or, at any rate, to prevent them from being had in an assembly whose proceedings would be known to the world. When the General Assembly received the Constitution, at their session in October, 1787, they directed it to be published and circulated among the inhabitants of the State. In February, 1788, instead of calling a convention, they referred the adoption of the Constituion to the freemen in their several town meetings, for the purpose of having it rejected. There were at this time a little more than four thousand legal voters in the State. The Federalists, a small minority, indignant at the course of the legislature, generally withdrew from the meetings and refused to vote. The result was, that the people of the State appeared to be nearly unanimous in rejecting the Constitution.' The freemen of the towns of Providence and Newport, thereupon presented petitions to the General Assembly, complaining of the inconvenience of acting upon the proposed Constitution in meetings in which the people of the seaport towns and the people of the country could not hear and answer each other's arguments, or agree upon the amendments that it might be desirable to propose, and praying for a State convention. Their application was re 1 There were 2,708 votes thrown against it, and 232 in its favor. This occurred in March, 1788. |