USA > Virginia > The history of the Virginia federal convention of 1788, with some account of eminent Virginians of that era who were members of the body, Vol. I > Part 21
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157 The Hon. Josiah Quincey, who said in his speech on the occasion alluded to that he was the only living member of Congress of the last century. Governor Tazewell entered the House of Representatives in 1800 to fill Judge Marshall's unexpired term.
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essentially from what it was when, forty years later than our present period, in the Convention of 1829-30, at several im- portant conjunctures, under a sense of deep responsibility, and pressed by powerful opponents, he engaged in discussion. In the common parts of his discourse he spoke with a serious earnestness and with an occasional swing of his right arm, but when he became animated, as we once beheld him, by the de- livery of his theme, which was the true import of certain words of the Federal Constitution relating to the Judiciary, and by the presence of several of the most astute men of that age who were . opposed to him in debate, and who were watching him to his destruction, he rose to the highest pitch of pathetic declamation thoroughly blended with argument, the most powerful of all declamation ; and he might have been seen leaning forward with both arms outstretched towards the chair, as if in the act of calling down vengeance on his opponents, or of deprecating some enormous evil which was about to befall his country; while the tones of his voice, exalted above his usual habit, were in plaintive unison with his action. The report of this remarkable debate may be found elsewhere. 158 The triumph of Marshall's eloquence was heightened by the almost unequalled talents which were arrayed against him-by the subtle and terrible strength of Tazewell, by the severe and sustained logic of Barbour, by the versatile and brilliant but vigorous sallies of Randolph, whose fame as the chairman of the Judiciary committee of 1802, which reported the bill of repeal of the law passed by the Fed- eralists altering the judiciary system to the House of Repre- sentatives, was at stake, and by the extraordinary skill and blasting sarcasm of Giles, heightened and stimulated by the recollections of ancient feuds which still burned brightly in the breast of his antagonist and in his own, and from a sense of personal reputation which was involved in the passage of the act of repeal in the House of Representatives, which he mainly carried through that body. Of all the scenes which occurred in the Convention of 1829-30, varied, animated, and intellectual as they were, whether we respect the exciting nature of the topic in debate, the zeal, the abilities, the public services, the venerable
158'In the Debates of the Virginia Convention of 1829-30.
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age, and the historical reputation of those who engaged in the discussion-all enhanced in interest by the unequal division of the combatants in the field, this was, perhaps, the most striking which occurred in that body. And we feel the solemnity of this scene the more, when we recall the fact that in less than five years from the date of this eloquent exhibition of their faculties, every member who participated in the discussion, with the ex- ception of one who is yet living, was consigned to the grave.
Now on such an occasion, opposed as we were to his views, and familiar with the topic as we then were-a topic which had been so thoroughly discussed in Congress as to be incapable of novelty-we could but accord the palm of eloquence to Mar- shall ; and as that eloquence did not consist in the strength of his argument-for we thought his opponents had the better of the argument, or at least the right side of the question-it was the triumph of his action, at once unexpected to his audience, unpremeditated by himself, and affording an unequivocal proof of what he was capable of accomplishing on a proper occasion and in the prime of his powers.
As soon as Marshall had resumed his seat, and while the members were exchanging opinions respecting the relative merits of the two young men who had just appeared for the first time on the floor, there arose a large and venerable old man, elegantly arrayed in a rich suit of blue and buff, a long queue tied with a black ribbon dangling from his full locks of snow, and his long, black boots encroaching on his knees, who proceeded, evidently under high excitement, to address the House. He had been so long a member of the public councils that even Wythe and Pendleton could not easily recall the time when he had not been a member of the House of Burgesses. His ancestors had landed in the Colony before the first House of Burgesses had assembled in the church on the banks of the James, and had invoked in the presence of Governor Yeardley the blessing of heaven on the great enterprise of founding an Anglo-Saxon colony on the continent of America. One of his ancestors had been governor of Somer's Islands, when those islands were a part of Virginia. Others had been members and presidents of the Council of Vir- ginia from the beginning of the seventeenth century to that memorable day in August, 1774, when the first Virginia Conven-
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tion met in Williamsburg, and appointed the first delegation to the American Congress.159 Of that delegation, whose names are familiar to our school-boys, and will be more familiar to the youth of future generations, this venerable man had been a member, had hastened to Philadelphia, and had declared to John Adams that, if there had been no other means of reaching the city, he would have taken up his bed and walked. But this was not his first engagement in the public service. Educated at William and Mary, when that institution was under the guardianship of Commissary Blair. he entered at an early age the House of Burgesses, and in the session of 1764 was a member of the com- mittee which drafted the memorials to the king, the lords, and the commons of Great Britain against the passage of the Stamp Act. During the following session of the House of Burgesses, in 1765, he opposed the resolutions of Henry, not from any want of a cordial appreciation of the doctrines asserted by them, but on the ground that the House had not received an answer to the memorials which he had assisted in drawing the year before, which were daily expected to arrive. In the patriotic associa- tions of those times his name was always among the first on the roll. He was a member of all the Conventions until the inaugu- ration of the Commonwealth, and in the first House of Delegates gave a hearty co-operation in accommodating the ancient polity of the Colony to the requisitions of a republican system. But his most arduous services were rendered in the Congress, and as a.representative of Virginia in that body he signed the Decla- ration of American Independence. While in Congress he had presided on the most important committees, especially on those relating to military affairs, and on the Committee of the Whole during the animated discussions on the formation of the Articles of Confederation, and had been repeatedly deputed by Congress on various missions at critical periods to the army and to the States. On his return home he had been regularly a member of the House of Delegates, of which he was almost invariably the Speaker while he had a seat in the Assembly. He was in the
159 That delegation consisted of Peyton Randolph, George Wash- ington, Benjamin Harrison, Edmund Pendleton, Patrick Henry, and Richard Bland.
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chair of the House when, in 1777, the bill attainting Philips had been passed, and he knew that the bill had been drawn by Jeffer- son, his old colleague in the House of Burgesses, in the Conven- tions, and in Congress, in whose judgment and patriotism he had unlimited confidence. He remembered what a dark cloud was resting upon his country when the miscreant Philips with his band was plundering and murdering the wives and daughters of the patriotic citizens of Norfolk and Princess Anne, who were engaged elsewhere in defending the Commonwealth, attacking them in the dead of night, burning their habitations, perpetrating the vilest outrages, and then retreating at daybreak into the recesses of the swamp; and that all the Assembly had done under such provocation was to provide that, if the wretch did not appear within a certain time and be tried by the laws of the Commonwealth for the crimes with which he was charged, he should be deemed an outlaw ; and he felt indignant that such a . patriotic measure, designed to protect the lives and property of the people, should be wrested from its true meaning by the quib- bles of attorneys, and receive such severe condemnation. Before he took his seat he declared his opposition to the Constitution, little dreaming that the half-grown boy whom he had left at Berkeley blazing away at the cat-birds in the cherry-trees, or angling from a canoe for perch in the river that flowed by his farm, would one day wield the powers of that executive which he now pronounced so kingly.
When, Benjamin Harrison had pronounced the accusation of the General Assembly in respect to Josiah Philips, unjust, he declared that it had been uniformly lenient and moderate in its measures, and that, as the debates would probably be published, he thought it very unwarrantable in gentlemen to utter expres- sions here which might induce the world to believe that the Assembly of Virginia had perpetrated murder. He reviewed in a succinct manner the proposed plan of government, declared that it would infringe the rights and liberties of the people; that he was amazed that facts should be so distorted with a view of effecting the adoption of the Constitution, and that he trusted they would not ratify it as it then stood. This aged patriot did not engage in debate during the subsequent proceedings of the Convention. He felt that his time of departure was near, and in less than three years after the adjournment of the Convention, at
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Berkeley his patrimonial seat on the James, he was gathered to his fathers. 160
George Nicholas replied to Harrison that in the case of Philips, the turpitude of a man's character was not a sufficient reason to deprive him of his life without a trial-that such a doctrine was a subversion of every shadow of freedom. He then passed to an examination of the various arguments which had been urged by Henry in his last speech, taking them up one by one, and sought to demonstrate that they were either unsound in them-
160 I have represented Harrison as a large man, over six feet ; but the reader will not confound him with his namesake and relative, Benjamin . Harrison, who removed to Georgia, where he died in 1818, aged forty- five, and who measured seven feet two inches and a-half in his stock- ings I frequently allude to the stature of our early statesmen, not only because their physical qualities are proper subjects for remark, but because of the theory of the French philosopher about the dwindling of the human race on this side of the Atlantic was a playful subject with our fathers. Every member of the first deputation to Congress reached six feet or over. Randolph. Washington, Henry, Pendleton, R. H. Lee, Bland, and Harrison were six feet-their average height being over six feet, and their average weight would have been two hundred.
In another place I have spoken of Herman Harrison as one of the early governors of Virginia ; I should have said of the Somer's Islands. By the way, it was during the term of Herman Harrison that tobacco . worms and rats became popular on our plantations, as will be seen by the tract of Captain John Smith on the " Confusion of Rats," Vol. II, 141. From copies of records in the British State Paper Office, made by my friend Conway Robinson, Esq., I perceive that the Harrisons were among the earlier settlers. I ought to allude to the harsh comments on Colonel Harrison, which appear in the diary of John Adams, recently published in the edition of his works by his son. It was evidently a hasty entry, made under some casual provocation, and never revised. There could be, however, but little congeniality between the two men. from their tastes and prejudices, and their modes of life, but it is known that there was something like a feud in the Virginia delegation at the time the entry was made, and Adams sided warmly with Richard Henry Lee and against Harrison. Perhaps this notice is all the entry requires and deserves. Harrison corresponded with Washington during the war, and in one of his letters commended Edmund Ran- dolph to him as a promising young man, when that young man, in 1775, visited Cambridge with a view of entering the army. A copy of this · letter, which is too racy for publication, I have in my collection, and am indebted for it to George M. Conarroe, Esq., of Philadelphia.
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selves or inapplicable to the plan under consideration. On the conclusion of the speech of Nicholas, the House adjourned.
On Wednesday, the eleventh of June, the first and second sec- , tions still nominally the order of the day, and Wythe in the chair, Madison took the floor and discussed the subject of direct taxation in all its bearings, replying by the way to the argu- ments of Henry against the expediency of vesting that power in the Constitution, and delivered the most elaborate speech of his whole life. It will ever afford an admirable commentary on that part of the Constitution which it was designed to expound. But our limits will allow us only to refer to a topic he touched upon, which has a singular interest in connection with his subsequent career in the administration of the Federal Government. When he had showed the importance of a certain and adequate revenue to a State in order to guard against foreign aggression, he said : "I do not want to frighten the members of this Convention into a concession of this power, but to bring to their minds those considerations which demonstrate its necessity. If we were secured from the possibility or the probability of danger, it might be unnecessary. I shall not review that concourse of dangers which may probably arise at remote periods of maturity, nor all those which we have immediately to apprehend ; for this would lead me beyond the bounds which I have prescribed my- self. But I will mention one single consideration drawn from the fact itself. By the treaty between the United States and his most Christian majesty, among other things it is stipulated that the great principle on which the armed neutrality in Europe was founded, should prevail in case of future wars. The principle is this, that free ships shall make free goods, and that vessels and goods both shall be free from condemnation. Great Britain did not recognize it. While all Europe was against her, she held out without acceding to it. It has been considered for some time past that the flames of war already kindled would spread, and that France and England were likely to draw those swords which were so recently put up. This is judged probable. We should not be surprised in a short time to consider ourselves a neutral nation ; France on one side and Great Britain on the other. What is the situation of America ? She is remote from Europe and ought not to engage in her politics or wars. The American vessels, if they can do it with advantage, may carry on the com-
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merce of the contending nations. It is a source of wealth which we ought not to deny to our citizens. But, sir, is there not infinite danger, that in spite of all our caution we may be drawn into the war? If American vessels have French prop- . erty on board, Great Britain will seize them. By this means we shall be obliged to relinquish the advantage of a neutral nation, or be engaged in a war. A neutral nation ought to be respect- able, or else it will be insulted or attacked. America in her present impotent situation would run the risk of being drawn in as a party in the war, and lose the advantage of being neutral. Should it happen that the British fleet should be superior, have we not reason to conclude, from the spirit displayed by that nation to us and to all the world, that we should be insulted in our own ports, and our vessels seized ? But if we be in a respect- able situation, if it be known that our government can command · the whole resources of the nation, we shall be suffered to enjoy the great advantages of carrying on the commerce of the nations at war, for none of them would be anxious to add us to the num- ber of their enemies. I shall say no more on this point, there being others which merit your consideration."
The future historian, when he peruses the speech from which we have made an extract, will pause in silent wonder, and will hesitate whether most to admire the thorough knowledge of the operations of a government yet untried which it displays, the vigor of its reasoning, now close, now wide, as the particular topic in hand required, or the profound sagacity of its author.
Madison was succeeded by George Mason. It has been ` remarked by one of the most celebrated orators of the present age, that it is an advantage to a speaker of the first order of ability, and to such only, to succeed the delivery of a first-rate speech, that the attention of the audience is fixed firmly on the subject in debate, and that there is a craving for a reply.161 In this respect, Mason could not have been more fortunate, and in another not less so ; for the speech which had just been delivered " was addressed to the reason and not to the passions of the House, and the eminent perfection of Mason rested on his logi- cal power, in his knowledge of the British polity, and in his experience as a statesman. Hitherto Henry had stood alone-
161 Lord Brougham's Miscellanies, I, 184, note.
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alone, but unsubdued-exposed to the severest fire which up to this moment in our parliamentary history had ever been levelled against a single speaker. The maxims drawn by Henry from the British Constitution, and so long accepted as undeniable truths, the examples cited by him from ancient and modern his- tory, the practical doctrines and lessons drawn from our own institutions, which he had from time to time reiterated in the House, had been examined in detail by the able debaters who had successively appeared on the floor, and had almost been frittered away, and in the comparatively brief space of time allowed for a reply amid the innumerable arguments against the new plan with which his mind was teeming, as the discussion advanced, and as the fate of the Constitution was drawing nigh, it was impossible for him to reply in detail. Hence the service of such a coadjutor as Mason at that time was as appropriate as it was welcome.
After some observations on the propriety of arguing at large instead of confining the debate to a particular clause in the present condition of the House, he reverted to an argument of Nicholas', borrowed from Dr. Price, on the subject of the repre- sentation of the British people in the House of Commons, and showed that the remark could only apply to a single political system-a government totus teres alque rotundus-that as it was admitted by Nicholas that five hundred and fifty members could be bribed, then it was as much easier to bribe sixty-five, the number of the new House of Representatives, as sixty five was less five hundred and fifty ; that the bribery of the House of Commons was effected mainly by the distribution of places, offices and posts, and that Congress was authorized to create these at its discretion, and, as he sought to show, without any practical restraint. He proceeded to prove that the unlimited power of taxation vested in the Constitution would ultimately result in the oppression of the people ; that the concurrent power of taxation by two governments would necessarily clash ; that the mode of requisitions, while it would promote economy in the administration of the Federal Government, would prevent any unpleasant collision between the parties, and that he was willing to yield the power of taxation as a resource where requi- sitions failed. He showed what would be the subject of taxation under the new plan, establishing his point by a quotation from a
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letter of Robert Morris, the financier of the government, de- nounced the poll-tax, as well as the other taxes proposed in that letter, as peculiarly severe upon the slave-holding States, and invoking a certain conflict between the governments. He denied that Congress would possess the proper information for the assessment of direct taxes, especially as it was said that the body would be composed of the well-born-that aristocratic idol, that flattering idea, that exolic plant, which has been lately imported from Great Britain and planted in the luxuriant soil of this country .162 He established the position of Henry about the difficulty of getting back powers once given away, and showed that out of a thousand instances where the people precipitately and unguardedly relinquished power, there has not yet been one solitary instance of a voluntary surrender of it back by rulers, and defied the production of a single case to the contrary. Following the line of argument pursued by Randolph, he ex- pressed his love of the union and his opinion on another topic not devoid of interest at the present time. "The gentleman (Randolph) dwelt largely on the necessity of the union. A great many others have enlarged upon this subject. Foreigners would suppose, from the declamation about union, that there was a great dislike in America to any general American govern- ment. I have never in. my whole life heard one single man deny the necessity and propriety of the union. This necessity is deeply impressed upon every American mind. There can be no danger of any object being lost when the mind of every man in the country is strongly attached to it. But I hope it is not to the name, but to the blessings of union that we are attached. Those gentlemen who are the loudest in their praises of the name are not more. attached to the reality than I am. The security of our liberty and happiness is the object we ought to have in view in wishing to establish the union. If, instead of securing these we endanger them, the name of union will be but a trivial consolation. If the objections be removed-if those parts which are clearly subversive of our rights be altered-no man will go further than I will to advance the union. We are told in strong language of the dangers to which we will be ex-
102 The term " well-born " had dropped in conversation from a friend of the Constitution.
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posed unless we adopt this Constitution. Among the rest, domestic safety is said to be endangered. This government does not attend to our domestic safety. It authorizes the importation of slaves for twenty-odd years, and thus continues upon us that nefarious trade. Instead of securing and protecting us, the continuation of this trade adds daily to our weakness. Though this evil is increasing, there is no clause in the Constitution that will prevent the Northern and Eastern States from meddling with our whole property of that kind. There is a clause to prohibit the importation of slaves after twenty years; but there is no provision made for securing to the Southern States those they now possess. It is far from being a desirable property. But it will involve us in great difficulty and infelicity to be now deprived of them. There ought to be a clause in the Constitution to secure us that property, which we have acquired under our for- mer laws, and the loss of which would bring ruin on a great many people."
When Mason had replied to most of the arguments of Ran- dolph, maintaining his opinions from authorities, which he read on the floor, he discussed the objection of the difficulties that might result from delay, and referred to the inconsistency of the course of that gentleman : "My honorable colleague in the late Convention seems to raise phantoms, and to show a singular skill in exorcisms, to terrify and compel us to take the new gov- ernment with all its sins and dangers. I know he once saw as great danger in it as I do. What has happened since to alter his opinion? If anything, I know it not. But the Virginia Assembly has occasioned it by postponing the matter ! The Convention has met in June, instead of March or April! The liberty or misery of millions yet unborn are deeply concerned in our decision. When this is the case, I cannot imagine that the short period between the last of September and the first of June ought to make any difference. The union between England and Scotland has been strongly instanced by the honorable gentleman to prove the necessity of acceding to this new government. He must know that the act of union secured the rights of the Scotch nation. The rights and privileges of the people of Scotland are expressly secured. We wish only our rights to be secured. We must have such amendments as will secure the liberty and happiness of the people on a plain, simple construction, not on
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