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When the recommendation of the Congress came before the legislature of the State, there appears to have been a strong party in favor of making an appointment of delegates to the Convention. The mercantile part of the population had come to entertain more liberal and far-seeing notions of their true interests; and the views of some of the more intelligent of the farmers and mechanics had been much modified. But by far the larger portion of the people-wedded to a system of paper money, which furnished almost their sole currency, and vaguely apprehending that a new government for the Union would destroy it, seeking the abolition of debts, public and private, and jealous of all influence from without Iwere in a condition to be ruled by their demagogues, rather than to be enlightened and aided by their statesmen. In May, the legislature rejected a proposition to appoint delegates to the Federal Convention; and in June, although the upper house, or Governor and Council, embraced the measure, it was again negatived in the House of Assembly by a large majority. The minority then formed an organization, which never lost sight of the national relations of the State, and which finally succeeded in bringing her into the Union under the new Constitution, in 1790.

Immediately after the first rejection of the proposal to unite with the other States in reforming the Confederation, a body of commercial persons in Providence addressed a letter to the Convention, expressing the opinion that full power for the regu

VOL. II.

lation of the commerce of the United States, both foreign and domestic, ought to be vested in the national council, and that effectual arrangements should also be made for giving operation to the existing powers of Congress in their requisitions for national purposes. Their object in this communication was to prevent an impression among the other States, unfavorable to the commercial interests of Rhode Island, from growing out of the circumstance of their being unrepresented in the Convention. Expressing the hope that the result of its deliberations would be to "strengthen the Union, promote the commerce, increase the power, and establish the credit of the United States;" they pledged their influence and best exertions to secure the adoption of that result by the State of Rhode Island. The signers of this letter formed the nucleus of that party which afterwards fulfilled the pledge thus given to the Convention.

The absence of Rhode Island did not occasion a serious embarrassment. The resolve of Congress recommending the Convention did not expressly require the presence of all the States; and the commissions given by each of the States which adopted the recommendation clearly implied that their delegates were to meet and act with the delegations of such other States as might see fit to be represented. The communication of the minority party in Rhode Island was received and read, and the interests of that State were attended to throughout the proceedings.

We are now carefully to observe the position of the States when thus assembled in Convention. Their meeting was purely voluntary; they met as equals; and they were sovereign political communities, whom no power could rightfully coerce.into a change of their condition, and with whom such a change must be the result of their own free and intelligent choice, governed by no other than the force of circumstances. That they were independent of foreign control was ascertained by the Declaration of Independence, by the war, and by the Treaty of Peace. That they were independent of each other, except so far as they had made certain mutual stipulations in the Articles of Confederation, was the necessary result of the events which had made the people of each State its rightful and exclusive sovereigns. We must recur, therefore, to the Articles of Confederation for the purpose of determining the nature of the position in which the States now stood.

When the States, in 1781, entered into the confederacy then established, they reserved their freedom, sovereignty, and independence, and every jurisdiction, power, and right not expressly delegated to the United States. By the provisions of the federal compact, these separate and sovereign communities committed to a general council the management of certain interests common to them all; in that council they were represented equally, each State having one vote; but as neither the powers conferred upon that body, nor the restraints

imposed by the States upon themselves, were to be enforced by any agreed sanctions, the parties to the compact were left to a voluntary performance of their stipulations. Still, there were certain powers which the States agreed should be exercised by the United States in Congress assembled, and certain duties towards the confederacy which they agreed to discharge; and therefore, so far as authority and jurisdiction had been conferred upon the United States, so far they had been surrendered by the States. The peculiarity of the case was, that the powers surrendered were ineffectual for the want of appropriate means of coercion.

These powers the States did not propose to recall. The Union was unbroken, though feeble, and trembling on the verge of dissolution. The purpose of all was to strengthen and secure its powers, to add somewhat to their number, and to render the whole efficient and operative by providing some form of direct and compulsory authority. For this end, as members of an existing confederacy, in possession of all the powers not previously delegated to the Union, the States had assembled upon the same equality, and under the same form of representation, with which they had always acted in the Congress.

As the States had conferred certain powers upon the Confederation, so it was equally competent to them to enlarge and add to those powers. They had formed State governments, and established written constitutions. But the people of the States, and not their governments, held the supreme, absolute,

and uncontrollable power. They had created, and they could modify or destroy; they could withdraw the powers conferred upon one class of agents, and bestow them upon another class. What was wanted was the discovery of some mode of proceeding, which, by involving the consent of the State governments, would avoid the appearance and the reality of revolution, and make the contemplated changes consist with the American idea of constitutional action.

Here also it seems proper to state the reasons why the process of framing the Constitution is so important as to demand a careful exhibition of the proceedings of those to whom this great undertaking was intrusted.

The Convention had confessedly no power to enact or establish anything. It was a representative body, clothed with authority to agree upon a system of government to be recommended to the adoption of their constituents. The constituents

were twelve of the thirteen States of the confederacy, each having an equal voice and vote in the proceedings; but neither the assent nor the dissent of a State, in the Convention, to the whole system, or to any part of it, bound the people of that State to receive or to reject it when it should come before them. Still, the results of the various determinations of a majority of the States in this body; the purposes of particular provisions which those results clearly disclose; the relations which they evince between the different parts of the system, are all of

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