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 22
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a doubtful ground. We wish to give the Government sufficient energy on real republican principles ; but we wish to withhold such powers as are not absolutely necessary in themselves, but are extremely dangerous. We wish to shut the door against corruption in that place where it is most dangerous-to secure
against the corruption of our own representatives. 163
163 We ask
such amendments as will point out what powers are reserved to the State governments, and clearly discriminate between them and those that are given to the General Government, so as to prevent future disputes and clashing of interests. Grant us amendments like these, and we will cheerfully with our hands and hearts unite with those who advocate it, and we will do every- thing we can to support and carry it into execution. But in its present form we can never accede to it. Our duty to God and to our posterity forbids it. We acknowledge the defects of the Confederation, and the necessity of a reform. We ardently wish for an union with our sister States on terms of security. This, I am bold to declare, is the desire of most of the people. On these terms we will most cheerfully join with the warmest friends of this Constitution. On another occasion I shall point out the great dangers of this Constitution, and the amendments which are necessary. I will likewise endeavor to show that amend- ments, after ratification, are delusive and fallacious-perhaps utterly impracticable."
There is one passage in this speech which, in a historical view, should not be omitted. We have more than once observed that the ratification of the Federal Constitution by Virginia was effected mainly by the military officers of the Revolution and by the judiciary of the State, in opposition to the wishes of a large majority of the ablest and wisest statesmen who had engaged in the theatre of that contest, and we readily conceive the reasons which impelled them to desire a more energetic government than could well exist under the Articles of Confederation. Soldiers and judges are rarely safe statesmen in great civil conjunctures ; but in the present instance their purity of purpose and their
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163 The disclosures made at a late session of Congress show that the evil apprehended by Mason is not imaginary. In fact, most of the leading opponents of the Constitution in Convention went down to their graves in the full belief that they had witnessed for themselves a remarkable case of corruption in Congress.
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patriotism were unquestionable. There was, however, another class of men friendly to the Federal Constitution, who had mani- fested from the dawn of the contest with Great Britain a decided reluctance to a change of dynasty, but who, with the object of securing their estates from confiscation, determined to take sides with the people. These disaffected, on all trying occasions, hung on the rear of the friends of freedom, and sought to obstruct their progress when they could effect their object safely and without suspicion. They opposed the resolution of independence in the Convention of 1776, and the Constitution of the Common- wealth, and, disinclined to widen the rupture with Great Britain, zealously opposed the ratification of the Articles of Confederation by the Virginia Assembly.164 When the independence of the United States was recognized by Britain, and a return to the rule of the mother country became impracticable, guided by that distrust of the people which led them to obstruct the several capital stages of the Revolution, they were eager to establish a government as nearly allied in form to that which had been over- thrown as they could succeed in accomplishing. As these per- sons were possessed of high position, wide family connections, and abilities, their influence was sensibly felt by those able and patriotic men who believed that the Constitution, however wisely intended by its framers, would ultimately result in impairing the liberties of the people. Yet it was a most delicate and difficult task to assail them. It was this aspect of the case which Mason had the courage to denounce, when he said : "I have some acquaintance with a great many characters who favor this Gov- ernment, their connections, their conduct, their political principles, and a number of other circumstances. There are a great many wise and good men among them. But when I look around the number of my acquaintance in Virginia, the country wherein I was born, and have lived so many years, and observe who are the warmest and most zealous friends to this new government, it makes me think of the story of the cat transformed into a fine lady-forgetting her transformation, and happening to see a rat, she could not restrain herself, but sprung upon it out of the chair."
164 Letter of George Mason to R. H. Lee, May 18, 1776, in the archives of the Virginia Historical Society; and Patrick Henry to R. H. Lee, December 18, 1777, in the "Red Hill " papers. 13
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Henry Lee, ever mindful of the tactics of his profession, and thinking he saw an opening for a charge upon the enemy, sprang to the floor, and demurred to Mason's illustration of the cat and the fine lady. "The gentleman," he said, " has endeavored to draw our attention from the merits of the question by jocose observations and by satirical allusions. Does he imagine that he who can raise the loudest laugh is the soundest reasoner? Sir, the judgments and not the risibility of men are to be consulted. Had the gentleman followed that rule which he himself proposed, he would not have shown the letter of a private gentleman, who, in times of difficulty, had offered his opinion respecting the mode in which it would be most expedient to raise the public funds. Does it follow that since a private individual proposed such a scheme of taxation, the new Government will adopt it? But the same principle also governs the gentleman, when he mentions the expressions of another private gentleman-the well-born- that our representatives are to be chosen from the higher orders of the people-from the well-born. Is there a single expression like this in the Constitution? This insinuation is totally unwar- rantable. Is it proper that the Constitution should be thus attacked with the opinions of every private gentleman ? I hope we shall hear no more of such groundless aspersions. Raising a laugh, sir, will not prove the merits nor expose the defects of this system.'' 165
When Lee had exhausted his fire, there appeared on the floor for the first time one of those eminent men, the immediate growth of the Commonwealth, who blended in his character the qualities of the soldier and the statesman, and whose fame, won in various fields and in contact with his most distinguished con- temporaries, though obscured by the mists which have so long gathered over the memory of our early statesmen, may fitly fill
165 It is evident from Lee's speech that the cat and the fine lady was not the only piece of fun with which Mason relieved one of his ablest arguments ; but there is not a shadow of humor in any other part of the reported speech. I may say here that it is almost impossible in a short synopsis to present fairly the arguments of a speech ranging over the entire Constitution. and recurring time and again to the same topics. Under such a process all the speeches lose what little savour is · left by the original reporter, but especially those of Henry, Mason, and Grayson, the three great champions of the opposition.
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one of the brightest pages in our annals. His military career, beginning with the dawn of the Revolution, and pursued for the most part under the eye of Washington-with whom in early life he had hunted foxes over the moors of Westmoreland, and whose respect and esteem he enjoyed to the end of his life-con- tinued nearly to its close, and was marked by enterprise, by intrepidity, and by success. But the military services of Wil- liam Grayson, prominent as they were, were lost sight of in the blaze which his civic accomplishments kindled about his name. It is hard to say whether he was more fortunate in his natural genius, or in those advantages which enabled him to discipline and develop it. Educated at Oxford, 166 to which he early re- paired, he not only acquired a correct knowledge of the Latin and Greek tongues and of the sciences, but cultivated so assiduously the purer literature of England, especially in the department of British history, that in his splendid conversa- tional debates, and in his speeches at the bar and in public bodies, his excellence in this respect was universally confessed. The time of his abode in England was opportune. There was indeed a momentary pause in the productions of English genius. The wits of Queen Anne's time had disappeared, but the glory of the Georgian era was yet in its dawn. The Johnsonian galaxy yet shone with a moderate lustre. Burke, who was known as the author of " a very pretty treatise on the sublime," was yet to make his magnificent speeches in the House of Com- mons, and Gibbon, who was spoken of in a small circle as the author of a clever tract in refutation of one of the ingenious theories which Warburton had ventured upon in his Divine Legation, had not yet put forth the first volume of the Decline and Fall. Even Johnson had not published the most elegant of his prose compositions, the Lives of the British Poets. But in the sister kingdom of the north there appeared in rapid succes- sion a series of literary works which reminded the world that Scotland was the home of Buchanan, of Boethius, and of Napier, and was now the abode of Hume, of Ferguson, of Kames, of Robertson, and of Adam Smith. Grayson, smitten with a love of learning, eagerly perused the works of these authors as they
166 Grayson's name does not appear in the Alumni Oxienses of the eminent antiquary and genealogist, Joseph Foster .- ED.
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appeared ; but it was to the Wealth of Nations that he devoted all the energies of his intellect, and so thoroughly did he master the problems of the new philosophy, that in conversation and in debate he was proud to declare his allegiance to Adam Smith as the founder, or if not the founder, the great modern expositor of the science of political economy. 167
After serving his terms in the Temple, with a mind richly im- bued alike with the learning of the law and with the living litera- ture of the age, and panting for honorable distinction, he returned to Virginia at a time when the opposition to British rule, begun in the House of Burgesses, had passed to the people, and when Associations were regarded by the colonists as the surest means of defending their rights. A rapid and striking panorama then passed before his eyes. The Conventions soon began to assem- ble ; the royal governor soon fled from his palace ; the House of Burgesses soon went down to rise no more; and the Virginia regiments, fully equipped, were to be seen drawn up in the square at Williamsburg, or lounging in the shade of Waller's grove. Grayson instantly enrolled his name in one of the Asso- ciations, and became a candidate for the majority in the new corps, but was defeated by Alexander Spotswood.168 In the
167 A gentleman who knew Grayson intimately, told me that the Wealth of Nations had long been his favorite book, and that a favorite expression with him in the House of Delegates, when Virginia regu- lated her own commerce, and in Congress, was, "Let commerce alone ; it will take care of itself"-a version of the answer of the French mer- chants to Colbert.
168 Journal Convention of July, 1775, page 19. The first public act of Grayson was his participation in the Westmoreland meeting, which adopted the rules of association on the 27th day of February, 1766. Va. Hist. Reg., II, 17. I regret that I cannot ascertain his age, which is unknown to most of his descendants. As he was buried in a vault, we have no tombstone to refer to. and his coffin had no inscription upon it, as I learn from one who examined it. I have reason to believe that he was in England as late as 1765. One of his descendants states that he was educated at Edinburg ; another, equally intelligent and devoted to his memory, insists that he was educated at Oxford. Professor Tucker says he certainly studied law in the Temple. I have decided, from all the facts within my reach, that Oxford was the true place of his education. His combined classical and scientific acquirements, and especially his skill in Latin prosody, betoken an English training. My belief is that he was in his forty eighth year when he took his seat in
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following year he was appointed colonel of the first battalion of infantry raised for the internal security and defence of the State. His spirit and intelligence early attracted the attention of Wash- ington, who invited him to become a member of his military family. With the affairs at Valley Forge his name is intimately connected, and was associated with that of Hamilton in the dis- charge of several important trusts. 169 He was at the battles of Long Island and White Plains, of Brandywine and Germantown, and at Monmouth he is believed to have commanded the first brigade in the order of attack. 170 He had been appointed colonel of a regiment to be raised in Virginia in January, 1777, and it was probably in the command of this regiment that he was engaged at Monmouth.111 In 1779 his regiment was blended with Nathaniel Gist's, and, having become a supernumerary, he accepted the office of a Commissioner of the Board of War, which he had previously declined when a prospect of active service was before him, and in December of that year he took his seat at that Board, which he ultimately resigned on the 10th of September, 1781.172 In closing this allusion to the military
the present Convention, as in the year 1775 he was a candidate for the office of major, along with such men as Thomas Marshall, the father of the Chief Justice, and in the following year was elected a full colonel (Journal House of Delegates, 1776, p. 104), while Henry Lee and Theodoric Bland were satisfied with captaincies. Colonel Clement Carrington told me that when he saw Grayson attending Congress in New York, in 1786, he thought he was about fifty, but it is well known that very young men are prone to overestimate the age of their seniors. The age of an individual may seem unimportant, but in a body of men made up of two or three generations, a knowledge of the relative ages of the members is indispensable to a correct representa- tion of their characters, and of their relative positions towards each other.
169 Writings of Washington. V, 272. He was officially announced as aid to Washington in a general order dated "Headquarters at New York, 24th August, 1776."
170 Morse, in a school history of the United States, is the authority of this statement.
171 Journals of the Old Congress, Vol. II, pp. 19, 60, 300. His lieu- tenant colonel was Levin Powell, also a member of the present Con- vention ; born in 1738, in Loudoun county ; representative in Congress, 1799-1801 ; died at Bedford, Pa., in August, 1810 .- Ed.
172 Journals of Congress, IV, 505, 524; V, 335; VII, 144.
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offices which Colonel Grayson held during the war, one marked instance of his intrepidity, taken from the lips of the late and ever venerable Bishop White, deserves a record : " I was sitting in this house during the war," he said to a friend in conversation with him at his residence on Fifth street, Philadelphia, a short time before his death, "when a most furious mob of several hundred persons assembled on the opposite side of the street, and a few doors above this house, and I saw Colonel Grayson with some fifteen men, with fixed bayonets, hastily pass. My apprehension was that they would be torn to pieces ; but Colonel Grayson instantly entered the house of the rioters at the head of his small force, and in a few minutes the ringleaders were secured and the mob was dispersed."173
On his return to Virginia, Grayson continued the practice of the law until 1784, when he was deputed to Congress, and in March of the following year he took his seat in that body. To such a man opportunity was alone wanting to become an expert debater; and, although the deliberations of Congress were secret, we know that he soon acquired distinction on the floor. During his term of service some of the most serious questions that sprung up under the Confederation were disposed of. Among the number was the Connecticut cession of western lands with the Reserve, which he warmly opposed, and the passage of the Northwestern Ordinance, which he as warmly sustained.174 But, to pass over his Congressional career, to which we shall revert hereafter, although firmly attached to the Government prescribed by the Articles of Confederation, he was candid enough to declare as early as 1785 that new and extensive powers ought to be engrafted upon it, and that the ninth article should be amended
173 On the authority of a letter from Peter G Washington, Esq., dated August 24, 1856. Mr. Washington heard the Bishop narrate the inci- dent in the text. Mr. Washington is the grandson of the Rev. Spence Grayson, the brother of the Colonel. I must confess my obligations to Mr. Washington for the information contained in his letters to me, which are the more valuable from their reference to the proper authorities.
174 I regret that I cannot put my finger on the short note of Grayson addressed to a friend in Virginia announcing the passage of the Ordi- nance. One ground of his satisfaction was. that the Northwestern States would not be able to make tobacco. The letter was published in the papers in 1845.
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and extended,175 and he was equally explicit in declaring what these new powers ought to be, and with what limitations they should be granted. Still there was a barrier in the way of his approval of the new Constitution which it was impossible to remove. It involved, in his opinion, a total change of polity ; and for this change he felt that he was able to prove that there was no real necessity.
But before we proceed to develop his views of the new plan, we must speak of him as he now was, in the meridian of his fame as the most elegant gentleman as well as the most accom- plished debater of his age. In this respect he had some quali- ties which were possessed in no ordinary degree by his great contemporaries ; but there were other qualities which he alone possessed, and which he possessed in an eminent degree. In massive logical power he had his equals ; but his distinctive superiority in this respect was marked by the mode of argu- mentation which he pursued, and which was peculiar to himself. Thoroughly comprehending his theme in all its parts, as if it were a problem in pure mathematics, and conscious of his strength, he would play with his subject most wantonly, calling to his aid arguments and illustrations the full bearing of which he saw, and which he knew he could manage, but which to ordi- nary hearers were as fraught with danger as they were easy of misrepresentation. He was equally wanton in his manner of . treating the arguments of his adversaries, pushing them to the greatest extremes, and, as he worked his way without the slight- est intermixture of passion, often producing an effect upon his audience most worrying to his opponents, and near akin to the exhibition of humor itself. One practical effect was, that men laughed as heartily during his most profound arguments at the display of the wit of reason, as they are wont to do at the display of the wit which in other speakers ordinarily flows from the imagination. But there was one result which sometimes fol- lowed this sport of dialectics which was embarrassing in itself, and which was likely to lead to a loss of the game. He was liable to be misunderstood by those who were either unable or unwilling to follow him in the course of his flight, and he was
175 Writings of Washington. Washington to Grayson, August 22, 1785, IX, 125.
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further liable to the wilful misrepresentations of those whose arguments he had handled with so little reserve. It exposed him also to the suspicion and distrust of a class of men, who, though they never engaged in debate, exercised no little influ- ence in and out of the House, and who had learned to confound gravity with logic, and thought that a man could no more rea- son than he could tell the truth with a smile, and who, if they had lived at the time of the invention of gunpowder, would have denied to the last that a man could be as effectually killed by a bullet or a round shot as by a bow and arrow ; or in the time of the Holy Wars, that a head could be as completely severed from the neck by the scimiter of Saladin as by the sword of Richard.
But his uncommon versatility of logical power, which made every speech a specimen in dialectics, was only one of his accom- plishments as a debater. In the more refined departments of learning we have already said he was a proficient ; but in a min- ute acquaintance with the affairs of Congress since the war, when the defects of the Confederation had been fully developed, in a knowledge of all questions of commerce and political economy, and of the politics of England and of the continental States, which had been his favorite study abroad, and in a sound com- mon sense, which he did not suffer to be dazzled by his own spec- ulations any more than by the speculations of others, or deterred by the cumulative terrors of a present crisis, if he may be said to have had an equal in the House, he certainly had no superior in or out of it. Even these abundant stores of information, applied by an unimpassioned intellect to the case in hand, sometimes failed to produce their effects upon common minds ; for, as was observed of a celebrated English statesman, he was inclined to view questions requiring an immediate solution, not as they appeared, clogged with the interests and the passions of the moment, but as they would appear in the eyes of the next gen- eration-a trait, which, though favorable to a reputation with posterity, is in ordinary cases fatal to a reputation for practical affairs, but which was peculiarly adapted to the investigation of a new plan of government.176
176 One of the most perfect exhibitions in recent times of powers kin- dred with those of Grayson was the speech delivered by Governor Tazewell in the House of Delegates on the Convention bill of 1816. I heard in conversation with Mr. Tazewell the general outline of his
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His powers of humor, wit, sarcasm, ridicule, prolonged and sustained by argument and declamation, were unrivalled. The speech which he now rose to deliver abounds in passages of humor and sarcasm, not put forth to excite mirth, but to ad- vance his argument, and to annoy his adversaries. Nor did he confine himself to those illustrations which, reflected from the classics, have a lustre not to be questioned, though sometimes hard to perceive, but drew his images from the common life around him. When, in proving that the dangers from the neigh- boring States, which had been marshalled by the friends of the Constitution in dread array as likely to overwhelm Virginia in the event of the rejection of that instrument, were imaginary, he ridiculed such apprehensions of alarm, and, turning to South Carolina, described the citizens of that gallant State as rushing to invade us, mounted, not on the noble Arabian which poetry as well as history had clothed with beauty and with terror- not with the cavalry of civilized nations-but upon alligators, suddenly summoned from the swamp and bridled and saddled for the nonce-a cavalry worthy of such a cause-that of crush- ing a sister Commonwealth-his sally was received with roars
argument twelve years after it was delivered, with a pleasure which I have rarely received since from any public effort. The late Philip Doddridge, who took a part in the debate, told me that it was not only the most extraordinary exhibition of logical power which he had ever witnessed in debate, but which he believed was ever delivered in any public body in America. There, too, the speech was subjected to the misrepresentation of opponents, who fell upon the words "many- headed monster," which Mr Tazewell used in animadverting on the word " people," which was contained in the bill, and which he con- tended included men, women and children, white, black, and mulatto, and every other description and complexion known among men. Twenty years afterwards I heard these words, which had been carried to the counties and brought back again to Richmond, where they had been forgotten, quoted to show that Mr. Tazewell had spoken disre- spectfully of the people, of whom he and his large family were a part, and whose rights, at a severe pecuniary loss to himself, he had been elected without his knowledge to maintain on this very question. To have made such an objection in debate would have been to raise loud laughter.
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