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 4
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unknown, the imports were almost wholly based upon exports, which must have reached five millions of dollars.16 Thus the import and export trade of Virginia during the year ending the thirty- first of August, 1788, was, at the present value of money, not far from twenty millions of dollars ; an amount which it had never reached before, and which, with the exception hereinafter to be mentioned and explained, it has never reached since.
But the average rate of the tariff of 1788, instead of being five per centum as above estimated, was in fact less than two and a half per centum ;17 and the duties collected under it would, on the grounds already stated, represent a commerce of forty mil- lions of dollars. Enormous as this sum appears, it may be nearly reached by another process. The year 1769 was regarded an ordinary year, yet the imports of Virginia during that year are ascertained to have been over four millions and a quarter.18 At that time our trade was almost wholly with Great Britain and possessions ; and our great and only staple which she would re- ceive was tobacco. In the interval of nineteen years, the popu- lation had from natural increase and immigration nearly doubled, and brisk trade in all the products of the soil and the forest was prosecuted with almost every foreign power. It is not unfair to presume that a laborer in 1788 was as successful as a laborer in
16 A shrewd traveller, Captain J. F. D Smyth, of the British army, who visited Virginia just before the Revolution and was present during the war, states that Virginia then exported "at least one hundred thou- sand hogsheads of tobacco of about one thousand pounds each, of which between ten and fifteen thousand might be the produce of North Carolina." He adds that Virginia exported, "besides Indian corn, provisions, skins, lumber, hemp, and some iron, large quantities of wheat and flour"; and he estimated the wheat at " five hundred thou- sand bushels," and the flour "at fifteen thousand barrels." Smyth's Tour in the United States, Vol. II, 140. In 1775. there were exported 101,828,617 pounds of tobacco, 27,623,451 pounds remaining on hand in Great Britain, and 74,205,166 pounds in other countries of Europe. Tobacco Culture in the United States, Tenth Census, Vol. IV ; " Suc- cinct Account of Tobacco in Virginia-1607-1790," by R A. Brock, p. 223.
17 I handed the Tariff Acts of Virginia, in force in 1788, to a mercantile friend, with a request that he would furnish me with a correct average . of all the duties, and he made it rather under than over two per cent.
. 18 $4,255,000. Forrest's History of Norfolk, 73.
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1769, and that the imports and exports of 1788 must have nearly doubled what they were nineteen years before ; and they would thus reach over thirty millions of dollars.
Indeed, the commercial prosperity of Virginia, from the date of the treaty of peace to the meeting of the Convention, was amazing. Her accessibility by sea at all seasons, her unequalled roadstead, the safe navigation of her bays and rivers, the extent, the convenience, and the security of her great seaport, the bulk, variety and value of her agricultural produce, invited the enter- prise of foreign capital. Many of the buildings of Norfolk had been burned at the beginning of the war by the British; and those that remained had been burned by the order of the Committee of Safety or of the Convention ; and in that once flourishing town, whose pleasant dwellings and capacious warehouses attracted the attention of the European visitor, and whose rental in the year preceding their destruction amounted to fifty thousand dollars, 19 not a building was allowed to remain. The whole population had been withdrawn and billeted upon families in the interior, whose claims for remuneration are strewed over our early Jour- nals. Even the wharves, which were made of pine logs, were destroyed by the burning of the houses that rested upon them.
Nought was left of a scene once so fair but the land on which the town was built, and the noble river that laved its smoulder- ing ruins. But in less than eight years from the date of the con- flagration, and less than five from the date of the treaty of peace, new and more commodious houses, destined to be destroyed by another some vears later and to rise with renovated splendor, had risen, and warehouses ample enough to hold large cargoes had been erected. We had not many merchants of our own, for the habits and prejudices of the people were in another direc- tion ; but merchants from England, Scotland and Holland, and from the Northern States, well skilled in trade, sought our ports, settled themselves permanently among us, founded families which are still proud of the worth of their progenitors, and, it may be
19 Forrest's History of Norfolk, 85. The burning of Norfolk by our own people was an act little short of madness. A population of six thousand men were thrown at once upon the interior to consume the provisions needful for the prosecution of the war; and Portsmouth, directly opposite, was as good a place for the military purposes of the enemy as Norfolk.
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remarked, became, without exception, the most strenuous advo- cates of the adoption of the Federal Constitution. There were no banks in those days in Virginia, nor was there any public depository of coin, which was emptied on the upper floor of warehouses and tossed about with shovels and spades.20 Ships of every nation filled our seaport. Their curious streamers, waving every Sabbath from the masthead and glittering in the sun, presented a scene that was long and keenly remembered by the inhabitants of Norfolk. An officer of the Revolution, who had served in the Southern army, and who visited Norfolk two years before the meeting of the present Convention, was struck at seeing ships not only crowded three or four deep at the wharves, but moored so thickly in the stream that a ferry boat passing from Norfolk to Portsmouth could advance only by cautiously working her zigzag course among them. Some of the ships at anchor awaited their chances to discharge and receive their car- goes at the wharves, while others preferred to discharge and re- ceive their freight in those vast and gloomy lighters, that may still be seen, freighted with fuel, entering or departing from the modern city. This observing traveller happened to be present on a gala day, when the ships were dressed, and when their salutes were heard through the town, and he was reminded of that brilliant spectacle exhibited at the departure of the British men-of-war and numerous transports with flags flying, with drums beating, and amid the roar of artillery, from the harbor of Charleston on the evacuation of that city by the enemy.21
This trade with foreign powers was strictly legitimate. We were at peace with all nations, and the leading States of Europe were at peace with themselves. It was not the result of political regulation or of distracted times. It was not the offspring of war between the carrying nations of the globe, and certain to terminate at the close of the war ; a species of trade which some years later fell to our lot, which involved us in fruitless negotia- tions, perplexed us with interminable controversies, led to the impressment of our sailors and to the sequestration of our ships, dishonored our flag in our own waters, and finally brought on a
20 I heard this fact from a venerable merchant of Norfolk, who is yet living (1866) ; and who saw it in his childhood.
21 Colonel Edward Carrington.
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war with one of the belligerents. The trade enjoyed by our fathers was strictly legitimate. It was stimulated by no passion, it was not the offspring of cunning or favor. It was the result of common interests. It was the exchange of commodities be- tween nations who believed themselves benefited by the opera- tion ; and as it was the result of common interests, so it was likely to be lasting. Indeed, nothing short of war or political regulation could affect it.
Nor was this trade wholly fed by the commodities of Virginia. The waters of the Chesapeake bore to our seaport not only the product of our own countries on its shores, but the products of Maryland and Pennsylvania. New England, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, and South Carolina contributed their aid. And although no modern facilities for the transportation of produce from the interior then existed, our own exports ex- ceeded the anticipations of the merchants. The embarrassments which many planters had to encounter at the close of the war were numerous and severe. When they looked around on their once thrifty plantations, a scene of devastation met their eyes. Their fences had been burned by the British or by our own soldiers during a seven years' war. Most of their live stock had long disappeared. Their cattle had either been seized by our own commissaries to sustain the army in the field, and was paid for in worthless paper, or had been taken by the British and not paid for at all. A favorite measure, both of the Americans and the British, was to lay waste the country on the track which either might be required to pass. Not only were fences burned, fruit trees destroyed, houses demolished or sacked, but beasts, whether fit for use or not, were seized upon. The throats of young colts were cut by the British, lest from this source the cavalry of the Americans should thereafter be recruited. One- fifth of the black population had been carried off by the British or died on their hands ; and, in the face of the treaty of Paris, few or none were returned. Money might have lessened the troubles of the planters to a certain extent, and in a desolate country to a certain extent only, but money was not to be had. The country was as bankrupt as the citizen. Debt, like a cloud, rested alike over the State Government, over the Federal Gov- ernment, and over a great number of people. But, what sensi-
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bly affected many persons, debts due the British merchants, some of which had been paid into the treasury under the sanction of an Act of Assembly, were now to be paid, and to be paid in coin. Hence some heads of families, which for more than a cen- tury had commanded respect, quitted their patrimonial hearths and sought, with sad hearts, new homes in the wilderness. Others sunk down broken-hearted, and left their members in hopeless penury.
But, touching as is frequently the fate of individuals in civil convulsions, nothing is more certain that an active, industrious, and free people cannot long remain in a forlorn condition. The population, as has already been observed, had, even amid the havoc of war, been steadily increasing ; and a population of eight hundred thousand, living upon fair lands and intent on retriev- ing bad fortune, cannot fail, in a space of time incredibly short in the eyes of superficial observers, to accomplish great and, to those who confound individual with general suffering, most un- expected results.22 Thus it was that, in spite of innumerable obstacles to success, the country rapidly prospered. With each succeeding year the crops increased in quantity ; and in five years of peace our tobacco, grain, and other productions of the soil and the forest, maintained the grandest commerce that had ever spread its wings from an Anglo-Saxon settlement in the New World towards the shores of the Old, and such as was never seen in the Colony, and such as, with the exception of a short period, has never been seen in Virginia since. It is an instruc- tive fact, not unworthy the attention of the statesman as well as the political economist, that the period from the death of Charles the First in 1641 to the restoration of Charles the Second-a space of nineteen years23-and that the period between the peace of 1783 and the adoption of the Federal Constitution of 1788- a space of five years-have been the most prosperous in our history ; and that of the two centuries and a half of Virginia, it was during those two periods only she enjoyed the benefits of
22 The doctrine of capital reproducing itself in a very short time was first distinctly shown by Dr. Chalmers. Lord Brougham availed him- self of the doctrine without stating the source from which he obtained it.
28 Campbell's History of Virginia, edition of 1860, p. 242.
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a trade regulated by her own authority, unrestricted and un- taxed.24
It is our duty to record the mistakes of our fathers as well as those deeds which justly entitle them to our respect and venera- tion. And in no instance did they commit a greater error than in the false estimate which the leading advocates of the Federal Constitution had formed of the general condition and of the commerce of Virginia, when the Federal Constitution was pre- sented for adoption. There were, indeed, grave and grievous embarrassments in our domestic and in our Federal relations that were calculated to excite apprehension in the breasts of our calmest and wisest men. But these embarrassments had been brought about in a period of revolution, when all trade was suspended, and were the result of causes which had ceased to operate, and which could never recur. They were the effect of time and cir- cumstances, and were likely to be relieved by the removal of the causes which produced them. An old and established nation, emerging from a long and disastrous war waged within its terri- tory, must be viewed in a very different light from the same nation in a long period of peace, when its resources were devel- oped and the arts cultivated under favorable auspices. But more especially does this observation apply to a purely agricul- tural people, occupying a wide territory, and harassed during eight years by a powerful enemy, when for the first time they take their position in the family of nations. And in the over- sight of this palpable truth may be traced an error of our fathers, the effects of which we feel to this day, and will continue to feel for generations to come. The wonderful increase of our popu- lation they had not the means of knowing, and did not know ; for up to that period of the eighteenth century no census had
24 I have sought in the Norfolk Custom House in vain for the full sta- tistics of the trade and commerce of Virginia with our own and foreign States during the interval between 1783 and 1790. The books were probably handed over to the new Government, and have been destroyed in the lapse of time as rubbish. Doubtless full reports were made to the treasury department in Richmond, and there may be found in some obscure place in the Capitol. If a committee were appointed by the Assembly to examine the public papers now on file, and publish in a cheap form the valuable ones amongst them, the full history of that period may yet be written.
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been taken ; nor had the custom then been introduced of calling upon the treasurer and the auditor for approximating statements of the population of the State. One of the most eloquent friends of the Constitution, who had served in Congress, and who at the time held a high office in the Commonwealth, made a mistake of 212,000 in his estimate of the people of Virginia ; or, supposing he had excluded the seven Kentucky counties, which were as much a part of Virginia as Accomac and Henrico, and are enu- merated as such in the census of 1790, and which he did not exclude, his mistake would still underrate the population more than 129,000, or more than one-fifth of the whole number. And when the trade and business of the country were represented in Convention as sunk to the lowest ebb, one of the opponents of the Constitution could only affirm that several American vessels had recently doubled the Cape of Good Hope.
But there were signs of prosperity obvious to the most care- less observer The increased production of agriculture, the immense quantities of lumber which employed a heavy tonnage, the vast commerce which filled our ports and rivers, and which was growing with every year, could hardly fail to attract obser- vation The imposing picture of a single seaport of Virginia, which had in the space of four years risen from ashes to a promi- nence which it had not attained during a century and a half of colonial rule, was a living witness of developed wealth, of suc- cessful enterprise, and of good government, and afforded a cheer- ful omen of the future. Such indications of prosperity, if not unheeded, were wrongly interpreted. Eminent statesmen, for- getting what a short time before was the condition of a country in which nearly all regular agricultural labor had for a series of years been suspended, which was girt by independent States, whose interests, if not positively hostile, were, as must always be the case with independent powers not identical with its own, and which was called for the first time to arrange and settle a gen- eral policy of trade and business with commodities beyond its borders, were annoyed and perplexed by a state of things that frequently exists in the oldest country, that time and experience would insensibly adjust, and which domestic legislation might at any moment remove. It is one of the pregnant lessons of his- tory, that public men on the stage often overlook or slight in great emergencies the salient facts of their generation, and in the
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haste of the hour take refuge from pressing difficulties in a sys- tem of measures which seem plausible at the time, which offer the chances of a favorable change, and which posterity is left to deplore. Overawed by those outward aspects of affairs which assail the common eye, they do not reflect that the common eye, even if it saw clearly, sees but a small part of a great empire ; that what it does see it sees often through a distorted medium, and that it can embrace, at the farthest, only a few, and those lying on the surface of those innumerable elements which com- pose the prosperity of a Commonwealth. No people rising sud- denly from a state of control which their fathers and themselves had endured for almost two centuries into a new complicated sphere, and capable of taking the full measure of their own stature, or the true dimensions of their own era. Of all the sciences which act on the business of life, the science of politi- cal economy was least studied by the statesmen of that age. Every question of law and politics relating to men and communi- ties, every question that pertained directly to the rights of per- son and property, had been critically studied by our fathers, and were discussed with an ability that made the dialectics of the Revolution as distinctive as the wisdom which declared inde- pendence, or the valor which achieved it. But the problems of political economy had never engaged their deliberate attention. That science had but recently taken its separate station in Eng- lish literature, for the Wealth of Nations was its text-book, and Adam Smith had not published the Wealth of Nations three years before the meeting of the first Congress. Nor were the doctrines of the new science readily received. Practical men, then as now, viewed them with disgust, and some of the British politicians of that day never read them at all. If, many years later, when its theories were expounded in Parliament and from the chairs of the schools, Charles James Fox was not ashamed to say that he had never read the Wealth of Nations, it is no reflection upon our fathers that they had not studied a science which they had no opportunity of knowing, and which had a slight bearing only on colonial legislation. But the science of political economy is only the philosophy drawn from the expe- rience of men in their commercial relations with one another ; and with some of those relations our fathers had an intimate ac- quaintance. It is creditable to Virginia that, though some of 2
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her famed sons did not comprehend or disregarded the teachings of the new science, others who had for a quarter of a century, in peace and war, mainly guided her destinies, had read them wisely.
The unfortunate delusion in respect of the commerce of Vir- ginia, which then prevailed, led to disastrous results. It kept alive in our early councils those dissensions which existed before the war began, which raged fiercely during its continuance, which, coming down to our own times, had nearly kindled the flames of civil war, but which otherwise might have ended with the eighteenth century. It led, in the vain hope of sudden im- provement, to the hasty adoption of the present Federal Consti- tution without previous amendments, and to the surrender of the right of regulating its commerce by the greatest State of the Confederation to an authority beyond its control. It led to a state of things of which our fathers did not dream, and which, if they could behold, would make them turn in their graves. It destroyed our direct trade with foreign powers. It banished the flag of Virginia from the seas. Instead of building and manning the ships which carried the product of our labor to foreign ports, and which brought back the product of the labor of others to our own ports, as some were persuaded to believe would be the result of the change, it compelled us thenceforth to commit our produce to the ships of other States, and to receive our foreign supplies through other ports than our own. It brought about the strange result that, instead of a large part of the cost of de- fraying the expenses of the Government of Virginia being de- rived from the duties levied upon foreign commerce, those duties, though levied upon a scale unknown in that age,25 will not suffice, in this sixty-ninth year of the new system, to pay the expenses of collection by other hands than our own.
It is due to the memory of our fathers to inquire, and it is the province of history to record, how far such a result could have been foreseen at the time; for the decision of the question has no unimportant bearing upon the reputation of the men who up- held or opposed the system from which such a revolution was
25 In a manuscript letter of Edmund Pendleton, dated December 4, 1792, in my possession, that illustrious jurist says: "Five per cent. seemed to have been fixed on, as a standard of moderation, by the general consent of America." This entire letter is devoted to the sub- ject of the tariff.
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destined to proceed ; and we fitly pause in our narrative to say a few words on the subject. It is singular that, when the Fede- ral Constitution was presented for their consideration, our fathers had already been more familiar with the theory of Federal sys- tems than any public men of that generation. Of the ablest men, who, more than ten years before, either aided in framing the Articles of Confederation in Congress, who discussed them in the General Assembly, who ratified them in behalf of Vir- ginia in Congress, and who watched their operation in Congress and in the Assembly, nearly all were then living. One of them, whose immortal name is appended to those Articles, had pub- lished his opinions on the new system.26 Several members of Congress were members of the present Convention. When those Articles were maturing in Congress, and were afterwards discussed in the General Assembly, the distinctive merits of the Federal schemes recorded in history were freely canvassed. It was soon seen that history, in its long roll of nations which have coalesced from motives of gain, ambition, or self-defense, afforded no model of a Federal alliance which was suited to the existing emergency, and that the problem was to be solved for the occa- sion. It was only from general reasoning, drawn from the nature of independent States, that our fathers could arrive at their con- clusions. And that reasoning was this: The right to regulate the trade and commerce of a State is, in fact, the right to con- trol its industry, to direct its labor, and to wield its capital at will. It was one of those exclusive rights of sovereignty that are inseparable from its being, and that no State can commit to the discretion of another; for no State whose industry is con- trolled by another, can be said to be free. To raise what pro- ducts we please, to send them, in our own way, to those who are willing to take them, and to receive in exchange such commodi- ties as we please, and those commodities to be free from all bur- dens, except such as we choose to put upon them, is a right which no people should voluntarily relinquish, and which no people ever relinquished but to a conquerer. A small State may, indeed, coalesce with a larger, and on certain conditions may
26 Letter of R. H. Lee to Governor Randolph, Elliott's Debates, Vol. I, 502, edition of 1859; objections of George Mason, Ibid., 494; Edmund Randolph's letter to the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, Ibid., 482.
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