USA > Connecticut > Fairfield County > Bridgeport > Reports and papers. Fairfield County Historical Society, Bridgeport, Conn. 1882-1896-97 > Part 15
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It is evident, however, that the people felt that he did not share their enthusiasm. A paper found by Mr. Hoadly, the state librarian, and to be printed in the next and final volume of the Colonial Records, (should that appear, as is earnestly to be hoped,") is very significant here. It gives, what we sel- dom have, the votes of the freemen at the September nomina- tion for members of the council, and Johnson's name is the
42 Life and Times, 109-12, 210-12 (App.)
43 Travel4. 1. 150.
. Dr. Headly is now (October, 1889,) superintending its passage through the press.
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last of the twenty put in nomination. The higher numbers exceed four thousand, while Johnson received less than one thousand votes. At the election in April. 1776, when twelve of the twenty were chosen, he was naturally not one of them. For the time the whigs of Connecticut had disowned him, though he was as good a whig as before. But his defeat was probably fortunate for him, since he must have opposed the action which the assembly unanimously took in June, by in- structing the delegates of the commonwealth in the second continental congress to vote for independence.
Johnson's reasons for thinking the famous Declaration which followed. an unwise step, may be clearer to us, and even in some degree command our sympathy, as we read the words used by the assembly in the following October: " This Repub- lic," (to wit, Connecticut,) "is. and shall forever be and re- main, a free, sovereign and independent state." ++ Johnson believed in state rights, and contended for them throughout his publie life; he did not believe in state sovereignty, and he was now bearing witness to the necessity of a supreme een- tral government. He separated from Trumbull in 1776 in be- half of the principle which Buckingham summoned the com- monwealth to vindicate in 1861. It is true that Connecticut did not dream of acting apart from the other states, and that the phrase "state sovereignty" was often used to express very nearly the same idea which now attaches to the phrase "state rights." But thought. as well as language, was confused at that period with respect to the novel political system which emerged at the Declaration of Independence, and the sove- reignty which Connecticut meant to claim was something quite beyond anything that the system admitted of. We can see that a new sovereign, stronger than George the Third, was proclaimed in the Declaration : that it proceeded from an authority capable of binding all the states into one larger state, the authority of the sovereign people. But the very men who signed that instrument did not see this, or they would hardly have gone on to frame the Articles of Confede- ration in behalf of sovereign states. Those articles, fortu-
44 See Johnson's Connecticut, 304.
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nately not adopted until the war was nearly over, (1781) were like an abdication on the part of the new king between his accession and his eoronation. And we all know that the rule of the states, substituted for that of the people, very nearly ruined the country Dr. Jolmson, in spite of his elear politi- 'cal insight, perhaps did not recognize the incoming lord par- amount any more than his neighbors did. But he undoubt- edly perceived the immense difficulty of the situation created by cutting one bond of union before another, equally strong, was visible somewhere. Even Patrick Henry, eager to fight. and eager for independence. would have had the Declaration delayed until the colonies should have united as a confede- racy. 43 And Johnson's mistake seems to have been that of being a "Union man" eighty-five years too soon. Moreover, he was not mistaken in thinking, as most men had thought until then, that freedom was possible without independence. England could learn to respect colonial rights, and the subse- quent history of the British empire on the whole proves this. It is even probable that the lesson would have been learned in another year, and that the war for freedom would have elosed triumphantly with the battle of Saratoga. And that a man who foresaw such evils as the country actually suffered before state sovereignty was repudiated, should have shrunk from independence, implies no failure of patriotism. Jolin Dickinson, the famous " Pennsylvania Farmer, " though in com- mand of a regiment enlisted to fight the king, opposed the Declaration on the floor of congress, thereby furnishing. in the judgment of the historian Hildreth, one of the two or three highest examples of moral courage in American history.
But while Johnson's conscience would not have permitted him to take part, as a public man, in dissolving what we may eall the British union, he could and did, as a private eitizen. give his aid in repelling invaders. He subscribed money for the common defence, he promoted enlistments, he furnished a soldier for the war, and he was ready, before the war was over, to take the oath of fidelity to the United States. 46
45 Tyler's Patrick Henry, 171 6.
46 Life and Times, 116.
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During his retirement he was onee (1779) arrested by a military offieer for having promised, against his own judg- ment, to ask General Tryon not to burn Stratford. But the eivil authority refused to hold him, and his ohl friend, Gover- nor Trumbull, may have seen a partial resemblance between the proposed mission to Tryon and the one on which he him- self had sent him, four years earlier, to Gage, at the risk of offending Massachusetts. In the present ease it appears that the majority of the Stratford freemen were offended at being made to seem willing to hold "a traitorous correspondence with the enemy," aud they prepared a statement for publica- tion in the New Haven newspaper. But they must have thought better of it, since that paper, the Connecticut Journal, is apparently silent about the whole transaction. +
It is well known that many Americans became partisans of England during the war, after having zealously opposed par- liamentary taxation. But Dr. Johnson never was transformed into a partisan of England. And his belief that the dissolu- tion of the union with Great Britain. at that time, was unwise. a belief which he never renouneed. + did not permanently affect his standing among his contemporaries. Before the articles of peace were signed he was once more serving the commonwealth, and onee more in defence of a chartered right, the title of Connecticut to the land on which the Sus- quehanna Company had made settlements. The title had been approved by high legal authority in England, and the unani- mous decision now given in favor of Pennsylvania, may have suggested to our advocate the reflection that independence had not increased the seenrity of state constitutions.
This appointment was a mark of confidence on the part of the government. The people, in turn, soon showed how highly they rated character above opinions by electing John- son onee more to the council. In 1784 he was sent to the continental congress, and in 1787 he was first in the Connec- tieut delegation to the convention which framed the Consti- tution of the United States. It appears that he had been
47 Life and Times, 112-6; list. of Stratf. Pt. I., JSC-S.
49 Life and Times, &5.
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opposed to the convention, 49 and he certainly had some rea- son to fear that the miseries caused by state sovereignty would now react to the prejudice of state rights. What the convention really had to do was, with a difference, what the British parliament had failed to do, namely to find out to govern a nation and an empire, a single state and a collection of states, through the same legislature. The British experi- ment had failed because the supreme legislature, representing the people of a single state, had tried to take money from the people of states which were not represented. But the Amer- ican experiment had already proved that the supreme legisla- ture could not get money through the local legislatures. Its credit was ruined by their disregard of its requisitions, and it must assume the power of taxation. Parliament was having . its revenge on the continental congress. An American con- gress, however, might rightfully tax Americans because they would be represented in it. But how should they be repre- sented? In laying taxes congress must undertake to govern them not as members of several bodies politie but as members of one, as a single people. 'And when it should begin to act thus directly on the people the people ought to be represented equally. One man in Delaware ought not to have the taxing power, and the general governing power, of sixteen men in Virginia, which would be the case if Delaware and Virginia should have an equal vote in the new congress, as they ha.l in the old. It was in fact the sovereignty of the people which had now to be re-asserted, and it must find expression in a truly representative legislature. Most of the leading men in the convention, therefore, men like Madison and Hamilton, devoted themselves to the task of making the new represen- tative body purely national, by wholly depriving the states of the equal vote, leaving their weight in congress to depend on their population.
Dr. Johnson, who had insisted on "due subordination " within the old empire, and who had found it so hard to "go with his state" in seceding from the empire, believed as firmly as Madison and Hamilton in a strong central government.
40 Bancroft's History of the Constitution, ii. 30, 419 /App )
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But he was not willing that what was then called a partial " or "residuary sovereignty" should be lost to the states, and he feared that they would lose it if congress should repre- sent the people exclusively. It apparently was assumed in some quarters that they had fulfilled their function, as states, by protecting individual rights against invasion from the een- tral state, and that they must disappear, or become atrophied. since that had been exscinded. Madison avowed the wish to reduce the states. as far as possible, to the condition of coun- ties, 50 and this, to a New Englander. was nearly equivalent to abolishing them. And when a plea for state rights was offered, some of the advocates of a purely national system described the states. in reply, as "artificial," or even as "im- aginary" beings, to which it was monstrous to sacrifice the rights of men. 5 1
Those who defended the claim of the states to representa- tion in their corporate character generally treated the ques- tion as an issue between the small states and the large ones. They asserted that the former would be at the mercy of the latter if the equal vote allowed in the continental congress were taken away. It was easy for Madison to show, as John Adams had shown in 1776. that the larger states, (Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.) had no common interests apart from the others. 52 And he justly urged that a strong central government would best protect the small states. Had Madison been as familiar with the history of New England as he was with that of Greece he might have referred here to the confederacy of 1643, in which the one vote of Massachusetts commonly outweighed the other three, and which was power- less to prevent Connecticut from anexing New Haven piece- meal. The New England delegates, in faet, knew very well, thanks to their town meetings, that local rights may be secure under a vigorous general administration, and none of those from Connecticut maintained the cause of the small states violently. Johnson, however, stood alone in the so-called
50 Elliot's Debates, v. 253.
51 Elliot's Debater, v. 258, 263, 267.
52 Elliot's Debates, v. 250-3; Works of John Adams, ii. 500, note.
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"state rights party," in resting the argument against a one- sided nationalism on the simple fact that the states existed. It is possible that had he spoken as often as Sherman and Ellsworth he would have expressed, like them, a moderate in- terest in the small states as such, but what he actually said indicates no interest in them whatever. His object was now, as in the Stamp Act congress, to secure certain bodies politic, the large and the small alike, against the invasion of their rights by a central authority which he nevertheless recognized as supreme. For him the colonial charters had passed from the British into the American constitution, and the sovereign people must acknowledge and protect them.
The last of Dr. Johnson's three brief speeches on this sub- ject, made at the opening of the debate on the day after Frank- lin's famous proposal of daily prayers, is thus reported by Madison: "The controversy must be endless whilst gentle- men differ in the grounds of their arguments: those on one side considering the states as districts of people composing oue political society, those on the other side considering them as so many political societies. The fact is, that the states do exist as political societies, and a government is to be formed for them in their political capacity, as well as for the individ- nals composing them. Does it not seem to follow that if the states, as such, are to exist," (as nearly all felt to be inevita- ble) "they must be armed with some power of self-defence? .
. On the whole he thought that as, in some respects, the states are to be considered in their political capacity, and. in others, as districts of individual citizens, the two ideas embraced on different sides, instead of being opposed to each other ought to be combined-that in one branch the people ought to be represented, in the other, the states." 53
It should be borne in mind that the division of the general legislature into two branches, of which the second, (the sen- ate.) should after a fashion represent the states, had formed part of the "Virginia plan," offered to the convention three days before Johnson took his seat, and that about three weeks before this speech was made Sherman had declared equal rep-
53 Flliot's Ik bates. v. 255.
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resentation of the states in the second branch to be indispens- able. 34 So far, Johnson was simply supporting his colleagues. But while the friends of the Virginia plan strenuously opposed equal representation in either branch as unjust. Sherman per- sonally preferred the "New Jersey plan" of a legislature in one chamber, representing the states. The union which he really desired was a league of sovereignties. 53 Now Johnson's whole political career, above all his opposition to an indepen- denee which seemed to threaten, and which had nearly pro- dueed, disintegration, had been a protest against such a sys- tem as his colleague wished for. But although the difference between him and Sherman was probably more radical than that between him and Madison, he could act with Sherman against Madison because the double representation offered by the former and rejected by the latter, was precisely what ex- isting facts, as Johnson saw them, made not simply expedient but right. He virtually held up before his associates that unwritten constitution which is, as Judge Jameson says, to be "considered as the outcome of social and political forces in history, as an organic growth . . as a faet.,"56 We need not assume that Jolmson had learned the doctrine of his- torieal development ; it is enough that his clear insight showed him a certain result of development. He perceived that the new system, really evolved out of the old, retained the unity and the diversity of the latter, and must be accepted as it was. The single state and the group of states, the one political society, and the many, were alike there, only they now occu- pied the same territory, and the one people inhabiting them all had taken the place of the crown. It was nation and empire in one. The national character of this complex body politie should appear, therefore, in a popular branch of the supreme legislature, speaking for the sovereign people, while another, the monthpiece of co-equal states, should be the sym- bol and the safeguard of the okl colonial liberties, the impe- rial signet on the young republic.
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51 Elliot's Debates, v. 127, IS1; Hildreth's History of the United States, Revis, Ed ili. 485.
55 Elliot's Debates, v. 219-0, 160, etc.
56 The Constitutional Convention, 3d Ed., Co.
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Mr. George Tieknor Curtis says, with reference to Dr. John- son's speech, that "neither party was ready to adopt the sug- gestion" about a combination of views, 37 and what Johnson urged as right in itself, was finally done under the form of a compromise, and largely through the efforts of Sherman and Ellsworth. But what took place was, in reality, the submis- sion of both parties to the impersonal, infallible arbitration of an historical evolution, the results of which Johnson saw more elearly than either. And when, a year later, Hamilton and Madison were pleading so ably and magnanimously for the constitution with discontented state rights partisans, we find them more than onee defending positions which the older statesmen had defended against them, and doctrines on which he had been aeting when they were school-boys. They were bearing unconscious witness to the strength of the system which he knew to be already in operation, and which had been the real antagonist of their theories. 3 8 .
Dr. Johnson made an interesting contribution to the com- pleteness of the federal system after the great struggle was over, and when, as Mr. Bancroft says, "Connecticut had won the day." It was voted on his motion, by a large majority, that the jurisdiction of the supreme court should be "ex- tended to cases of law and equity," and then, with no dissent- ing votes, that it should embrace "all cases arising under the Constitution." This, according to Mr. Bancroft, finally dis- posed of the plan favored by Madison, of giving congress a veto on state legislation, and confined the power fo revers- ing state laws to the judiciary, in cases brought before it.5" This is the principle (differently applied) for which Johnson pleaded with Lord Hillsborough in 1768. He thus fitly closed the battle in behalf of the freedom of local legislation which he had begun in England nearly twenty years before, 6ยบ aud the supreme court is to-day the most conspicuous guardian of state rights.
57 Curtis's History of the Constitution, ji. 138.
58 See The Federalist, Ed, 1826, 152, (No. 281, 200 (No. 37), 263 (No. 461, 333 (No. 59). 346-7 (No. 62).
59 Baneroft'a Hist. of Const., ii. 193; Elliot's Debates, v. 170-1, 431-2 60 See above, pp. (13-13-13.)
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When the draft of the Constitution was to receive its final form, and was entrusted for that purpose to a committee ap- pointed by ballot, which included four leaders of debate, Alex- ander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, James Madison and Rufus King, Dr. Johnson was its chairman. And though the prep- aration of the new draft was the work of Morris. Johnson did not fail in his own duty of oversight and revision, for his handwriting is still to be seen in corrections made in the orig- inal document. and included in the Constitution as it stands. 51 And the Constitution as it stands probably expresses his life- long political convictions more adequately than those of any other member of the committee. The convention chose the right man to superintend the final touches upon its great work. But he was the right man especially because its great work had really been done by "progressive history," and because few Americans, if any, had been so closely identified with the development of the federal out of the imperial constitution. from the moment when the process becomes clearly visible at the Stamp Act congress. This is not less but more true as . respects his attitude at the middle point of the process. eleven years after the congress, eleven years before the convention, when his countrymen seemed to him to be removing one essen- tial part of their political system. the supreme central author- ity, without knowing whether it could be replaced. For then he accepted a situation which he would have no hand in ereat- ing, and adjusted himself to it without factious and useless opposition. And so he could take, and his countrymen could let him take, an honorable and useful part in the task of giv- ing just scope to the new central authority which was all the while present, and which had spoken in the Declaration of In- dependence. " the authority of the good people of these colo- nies." Dr. Johnson was undoubtedly one of the most culti- vated men in America, and his mental and moral action at this period admirably illustrate the value of culture. In that we have, according to Mr. Matthew Arnold, "the endeavour to see things as they are, to draw towards a knowledge of the univer- sal order which seems to be intended and aimed at in the
61 Life and Times, 128.
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world, and which it is a man's happiness to go along with or his misery to go counter to."6" Dr. Johnson instinctively yielded to that which makes history progressive, the move- ment of regulated forees, forces which control the most sensi- tive conscience because they are the expression of laws, of laws which instruct the best trained intelleet because they are thoughts. He is an admirable example of that unreserved self-surrender of the good and wise to the irresistible marel of progress which is their testimony to the truth that
" __ thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,"
and which gives them the power to serve their fellow-men by helping "to make reason and the will of God prevail." And his firm and effective maintenance from first to last of the polit- ical principles which are embodied in the Constitution warrant the assertion that he was one of the best qualified statesmen of the most critical period of American history.
When the Constitution went into operation in 1780, Dr. Johnson became one of the senators from Connecticut, Oliver Ellsworth being his colleague. The two acted together in or- ganizing that "court for commonwealths . . . the most august in Christendom." (as a descendant of Roger Sherman has styled the supreme court.) 63 over which Ellsworth was afterwards to preside, the principle of which Johnson had long before taught a British minister to respect. In 1791, soon after eongress removed to Philadelphia. whither he could not follow it without neglecting his duty to Columbia College, (of which he had been made president in 1787.) Johnson resigned his seat in the senate. He was sueceeded by Sherman, who meanwhile had been serving with distinction in the house of representatives. ITis academic career lasted nine years longer. until his resignation in 1800, when he was almost seventy- three. He lived in cheerful and dignified retirement for nearly twenty years in Stratford, where he died, soon after passing his ninety-second birthday, on the fourteenth of November, 1819. He barely outlived the colonial charter, which, by
62 Culture and Anarchy, Eng. Ed , 11.
63 Prof. S. E. Baldwin, in New Haven Col. Ilist. Soc. Papiere, in. 291
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serving as the state constitution until 1818. had vindicated his belief that the English sovereigns had established true and free states in America. It had also been proved that the great native sovereign whose accession, in disguise, had not been much more visible to Dr. Johnson than to other men, was a rather better guardian of local government than the king of England. For the charter had had nearly thirty years of . security, not absolute indeed. but greater, upon the whole, than it enjoyed even when it lay, (if it did lie,) in the heart of the Wyllys Oak.
NOTE .- The foregoing paper was read before the New Haven Colony Historical Society, February 27, 1898. Slight additions were made at that time, and a few verbal changes have been made since. But it appears in very nearly the form in which it was read at Bridgeport.
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FAIRFIELD COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
BY-LAWS.
RULE I.
The officers of the Fairfield County Historical Society shall consist of a President. three Vice-Presidents, a Treasurer, Re- cording Secretary, and Corresponding Secretary, who shall be chosen annually from its members, by a majority ballot, at the annual meeting of the Society.
The term of the officers of said Society shall be for one year from their eleetion, and until others shall be chosen in their places: and their powers and duties shall be those usually appertaining to those officers, except when otherwise ordered by the Society.
Said officers shall also be the Executive Committee of said Society, and as such shall have charge of and direct all mat- tters of executive, financial and clerical business appertaining to the management of the Society, except when otherwise ordered by the Society.
The President of this Society shall be er-officio, Chairman of the Executive Committee.
Any vacancy occurring in any of the said offices, before the expiration of its term, may be filled for the unexpired portion thereof, by those of the Executive Committee of said Society, who shall be in the exercise of their offices at the time.
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