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 5
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derive benefit from so intimate an alliance. The gain from an equal participation in the trade of the buyer, and a sense of se- curity from their united strength, may be deemed a fair equiva- lent for the risks which it runs. But it is plain that the benefits of such a coalition depend wholly on the good faith of the stronger party ; and the rights of the weaker are enjoyed by the courtesy of the stronger. To hold the most precious rights at the discretion of another was a dangerous experiment; and ex- perience has shown that no such union has ever been voluntarily made. No confederacy, in ancient or in modern times, was ever formed on so intimate a union of its several parts, and the un- usual experience of mankind should seem to forbid it.
But if it be dangerous for a small State to form so intimate an alliance with a greater, it follows that it is equally dangerous for a large State to coalesce, not with a smaller, or a series of smaller ones, whose combined strength is inferior to its own, but with a series of States whose strength exceeds its own, whose voices can control the common counsels, and whose interests can apply the common resources at discretion. In such a case, the large State sinks its independent position, and has no more conclusive control of its own affairs than the humblest member of the asso- ciation. Hence, the record of civilized States affords no instance of such an alliance. Guided by these principles, our fathers determined to form a Federal alliance more intimate, indeed, than any which has come down to us, but to reserve a conclusive con- trol over the trade and the commerce of Virginia. They were willing to surrender the sword, but they retained the purse in their own keeping.
Of all alliances between independent States in ancient or in modern times, the Articles of Confederation presented the fair- est model of a Federal system. It raised the admiration of Europe, strangely mingled with surprise. For a single province, or more provinces than one, to cast off allegiance to a distant power, was no uncommon incident in modern times. But to
form a Federal alliance, which bestowed with a liberal hand upon the central executive all the powers which the general interests demanded, and yet guarded with consummate skill the integrity and independence of the component parts, was a brilliant achieve- ment. Its reception by the people was joyous. At a later period, when its workings had been observed more closely, the
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Congress which it created but echoed the general voice in pro- nouncing it "a glorious compact." It was destined to a short life of eight years ; and its brightness has paled before the more dazzling scheme which succeeded it ; but it still remains the most perfect model of a confederation which the world has ever seen. The future historian will record its worth with becoming pride, and rescue the glory of its founders from the eclipse which the ambition and passions of men have combined to darken it.
What heightened the admiration of the Federal system was the circumstances under which it was formed. It was at the darkest period of the Revolution. It was formed at a time when the greatest military and naval power which the world had ever seen was marshalling all its forces against a feeble country, and was pushing them forward with certain hopes of conquest; when some of the statesmen most active in the public councils, shrink- ing from the odds arrayed against them, were ready, it is alleged, to create a dictator in the State and a dictator in the Federal Government; when the punishment of treason, denounced against our fathers by a king, whose predecessor and ancestor had, within the memory of men then on the stage, converted the fields of a kingdom, whose crown he inherited, into a blackened waste, and decimated a brave though rude population, was sus- pended over their heads; and when every motive that could sway the bosoms of men, impelled the people of the revolted Colonies to form the strongest bulwark against the invading hosts. And it is one of the wonders of history that a State which would not surrender its purse in the midst of a crisis that invoked its existence, should, in a time of profound peace and of general prosperity, have consented to such a sacrifice.
But the deed was done, and it is our duty to inquire whether the tendency of the Federal Constitution to produce such an effect on the commerce of the State as has since been apparent, could have been foreseen at the time of its adoption. A single glance will show that it contains no provision respecting one State more than another ; and that all the States stand on the same level. It is in its general scope that we must seek the cause of the com- mercial decline of this Commonwealth. Immemorial experience has shown that in every single and undivided political com- munity-and such would be the States of the Union, so far as commerce is concerned, under the proposed Constitution-there
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must be a controlling centre of trade, of business and of money. It might not have been safe to foretell the exact spot where that centre would be, but it was very easy to foretell where it would not be. It would not be in the ports of a people whose entire capital and labor were invested in agriculture, and who had not, during the period that elapsed from the settlement at James Town to the peace of 1783, built and manned a single merchant ship of three hundred tons. But let that centre be established anywhere, and the result would not be a matter of surprise but of mathematical certainty. Its influence would be universal. It would extend to the remotest limits of the widest empire. It would be equally stringent in regulating a commercial transac- tion in the waters of the Bay of Fundy and at St. Mary's, which was then the southern boundary of the Union. No Southern merchant could build, equip, and load a ship, despatch her to a foreign port, and order her to return with an assorted cargo to a Virginia port, without being governed by the rates prevailing at the controlling centre of the capital and labor of the country.
Bankruptcy, immediate and irretrievable, would certainly fol- low the neglect of such a precaution. It would be as wild to build, load, and sail a ship in opposition to the law of trade emanating from the central power, as it would be to attempt to place a planet in the skies irrespective of the law of gravitation. The consequence would ultimately be that the money centre would increase in population and resources with an accelerated rapidity, while those parts distant from the centre, probably in some proportion to their distance from that centre, and especially those which, engaged in agriculture, were less able to change the nature of their investments, must relatively decline. It is not contended that this central power is absolutely immovable; for, as it is not the creature of law, nor derives its power from ordinary legislation, it is possible to move it at any moment ; but it can only be removed by a kindred power greater than itself. We have no right to wonder that our fathers overlooked the obvious course of business and exchanges, when we see what has been done in our time by their descendants. Year after year we have denounced the Federal tariff as the cause of the commercial de- cline of the South, and one of the Southern States went so far in opposing it as to threaten a disruption of the Union. Yet it is plain, from what has been said, that the tariff, which, by the
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way, acted on the navigation of the North precisely as it acted on the navigation of the South, however odious, as laving upon the South what was deemed a high and unequal tax, had no more effect on our navigation than it had on the rise and fall of the tides, or on the course of our winds. If the Federal revenue had been derived from direct taxation, or from the sales of the public lands ; if not a dollar from the origin of the Federal Gov- ernment to the present hour had been levied upon imports ; nay, further, if not a solitary slave had existed for the last seventy years in that vast realm stretching from the Potomac to the Rio Grande; the result complained of in the South would have been essentially the same. The evil which the Southern States felt, and it is an existing evil, the effects of which on population, arts, and manufactures, are formidable, the acts of Congress did not cause, and the acts of Congress cannot cure. It follows, and must follow indefinitely, from the silent operation of that organic Federal bond which makes the people of the several States, so far as commerce is concerned, one people. It is in the various advantages resulting from the Federal compact, that we must . seek a compensation for the loss of our direct trade with foreign powers. The problem which should engage the attention of Southern statesmen is not to seek a restoration of the state of things that existed, when seventy years ago the Federal Consti- tution was adopted, by a dissolution of the Union, an event which would not only fail from obvious considerations to effect the desired end, but would open a hundred new questions of peace and war more perplexing and more difficult of solution than the one which now annoys us ; but acknowledging at once the bind- ing obligation of a law of trade, which the experience of seventy years has shown our inability to resist in the absence of the right to regulate our own commerce, and adapting ourselves to the new figure of the times, to ascertain the best means of making it available in the highest degree to the prosperity of the South- ern States. 27
The basis of the Convention, a topic of so much strife in re- spect of the Conventions of our own times, did not much engage the attention of our fathers. It was the basis of the House of Delegates, which was then composed of two members from each
27 It will be kept in mind that this was read before the Historical Society in February, 1858, and, I may add, written a year or two before.
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of the eighty-four counties, of one member from the city of Wil- liamsburg, and of one member from the borough of Norfolk. 28 Some time was to elapse before Richmond and Petersburg were to send delegates to the Assembly. Richmond, named by Byrd after that beautiful village which looks grandly down on the waters of the Thames, and which has been commemorated by the muse of Denham, was then known in public proceedings as Richmond Town, in order to distinguish it from the county of the same name. Since the organization of the State Govern- ment in 1776-a period of twelve years-no less than twenty- eight counties had been formed ; and the naming of the new counties offered a graceful opportunity of honoring individual worth.29 Posterity beholds in those names no uninstructive me-
28 The curious eye will miss, with tender regret, the name of William and Mary College, which had sent delegates to the House of Burgesses for eighty-four years, but was disfranchised by the Convention of 1776. The delegates from this institution were always of the highest order of talents and moral worth. The amiable and excellent Blair represented the College in the Convention of 1776, its last representative.
29 The names of the counties laid off in the interval between July, 1776, and June, 1788, were Fluvanna, Rockingham, Rockbridge, Green- brier, Henry, Kentucky, Washington, Montgomery, Ohio, Yohoganey, Monongalia, Powhatan, Illinois, Jefferson, Fayette, Lincoln, Harrison, Greensville, Campbell, Nelson, Franklin, Randolph, Hardy, Bourbon, Russell, Mercer, Madison, and Pendleton. The reader may wish to know on which of the patriots of the Revolution the honor of having a county called by his name was conferred. Patrick Henry received that honor. He was the first Governor of the State, and the old Colonial rule of naming a county after the existing Governor was applied with peculiar propriety in his case. But, at the same session, the county of Fincastle was divided into Kentucky, Washington, and Montgomery, and the name of Fincastle dropped, as was also, at the same session, the name of Dunmore, and Shenandoah substituted in its stead. At the session of the Assembly immediately after the adjournment of the present Convention, a county was called after George Mason, and another after the gallant Woodford. Mason and Woodford counties were in the district of Kentucky, and were lost to us when the district became a State. So that at this time we have no county named after the author of the Declaration of Rights, and the General who gained the first victory of the Revolution. The present Mason county was laid off in 1804-the year after the death of Stevens Thomson Mason, a dis- tinguished patriot, long a member of both Houses of Assembly and of the Senate of the United States; and, I have understood, was called in honor of his name.
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morial of the estimation in which the originals were held by their contemporaries. Indeed, from such materials, one skilled in the anatomy of history, might, in the absence of other sources of intelligence, reconstruct no inaccurate record of that age. Not one of those names had hitherto received any such expression of the public regard; for, up to this period, the name of no Vir- ginian had been given to a county ; and in the number and character of the new names, it is plainly seen that some remark- able public epoch had occurred. The history of Henry, Wash- ington, Jefferson, Harrison, Campbell, Nelson, Randolph, Hardy, Russell, Woodford, Mercer, Madison, and Pendleton, is the his- tory of their times. The names of Montgomery, Franklin, Lin- coln, and Greene, show that in the great event which had trans- pired, and which had called forth so many of our own citizens, we had received the succor of our sister States; while the name of Fayette evokes the name of that chivalrous youth who, turn- ing his back on the endearments of domestic life and the fasci- nations of the gayest metropolis in Europe, hastened to share with our fathers the toils and dangers of war, who attained to the rank of Major-General in the armies of the United States, and held high command in our midst, and who won on the field of York his greenest laurel; and the name of Bourbon renews the recollection of that beneficent but unfortunate prince, without whose assistance the war of the Revolution might have lasted thirty years, and whose fleets and armies aided in gaining, in our behalf, and within the limits of this Commonwealth, one of the most glorious of those innumerable battles in which the banner of St. Louis had, during many centuries, been borne in triumph.
Near the close of Sunday, the first day of June, 1788, Rich- mond Town was in an unusual bustle. The day had been bright and warm, and was among the last days of a drought, which had killed nearly all the young tobacco plants in the hill uncovered by clods, and had filled the roads fetlock-deep with dust, but which fortunately made the rivers and creeks fordable on horseback. Indeed, a rainy spell at that time would have been a grave an- noyance. It would have detained half of the members of the Convention on the road. It might have decided the fate of the Federal Constitution. A heavy rain at nightfall would have kept the member for Henrico, who lived on Church Hill, from taking his seat next morning in the old Capitol or in the new Academy.
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Bridges were then rare ; and a fresh rendered the clumsy ferry- boat of little avail. None of the appliances against the inclem- ency of the weather were then introduced. Oil skin and India rubber had not yet been heard of ; even the umbrella, which now makes a part of the Sunday rigging of the negroes on the to- bacco estates of the Staunton and the Dan, was then unknown. Rumors had reached the State that sallow men, from the remote East, might be occasionally seen on the steps of the India House, or sauntering in Piccadilly, having in their hands a curious in- strument, which was used ordinarily as a cane, but which, when hoisted and held overhead, protected the body from the rays of the fiercest sun, and also from the rain, though it should descend in torrents.
People in greater numbers than had ever been known before were coming into town from every quarter. Our modes of travel are widely different from what they then were. Not only were the can Al, the railway, and the steamer then unknown, but coaches were rarely seen. There were thousands of respectable men in the Commonwealth who had never seen any other four-wheeled vehicle than a wagon, and there were thousands who had never seen a wagon. Nothing shows more plainly the difference be- tween the past and the present than the modes of conveyance used then and now. To pass from Richmond to the Valley of Virginia in a carriage and pair was seldom attempted; and, if attempted, was seldom successful. The roads, which, now wind- ing their way gradually around the hills and mountains, make a jaunt across the Alleghany safe and pleasant, then, when there were no roads at all, sought the top the nearest way. Thirty years later, it was rare that the lowlander, who drove in his coach to the mountains, brought back the same pair of horses with which he set out on his journey. One of the pair had made his final pause in Rockfish Gap, and had been exchanged for another at the next settlement. The bones of the other had been picked by the buzzards, which, circling low and drowsily above the road of the Warm Springs mountain, had watched with listless eyes their yet breathing prey. Now the traveller may pass into the interior from the mouth of the James more than three hundred miles in canal packets, or in capacious steamers, the tonnage of one of which exceeds the combined ton- nage of the fleets in which Columbus and John Smith made their
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first voyage to the New World, and hardly miss the comforts and quiet of home. Then, and until forty years later, when the skill of Crozet had taught the waters of the James to flow peace- fully in trenches excavated by the pickaxe or blasted from the rock, the daring traveller who passed in a boat from the North river into the Jaines, and thence through the Balcony Falls, was never tired of recounting the dangers which beset his course. The swiftness of the river was frightful ; the loudest screams of the boatman, who wielded the long oar at the helm, was lost amid the roar of the waters dashing against the rocks ; the roar of the waters smote the rugged sides of the cliffs that guarded the pass, and the sullen cliffs gave back the roar. It was Scylla and Charybdis, the whirlpool and the rock, in fearful juxtaposi- tion. Should the long and frail boat, flying with a rapidity un- known to steam or sail, and twisted by the torrent, deviate a few feet from a tortuous channel known only to the initiated, it was shipwrecked beyond the reach of human aid. At the time of which we are treating, there was not only no mail coach running west of Richmond, but no mail coach running to Richmond itself. The planter, his legs sheathed in wrappers, his spare clothes stowed in saddle-bags, and his cloak strapped behind his saddle, left his home on his own horse.
Cavalcades of horsemen, to be traced from an elevated posi- tion by the clouds of dust that rose above them, were now seen along the highways leading into town. Just before sunset might have been observed from this hill30 the approach of two men, whose names will be held in honor by generations to come. Though not personal enemies, they rarely thought alike on the greatest questions of that age, and they came aptly enough by different roads. One was seen advancing from the south side of the James, driving a plain and topless stick gig. He was tall, and seemed capable of enduring fatigue, but was bending for- ward as if worn with travel. His dress was the product of his own loom, and was covered with dust. He was to be the master- spirit of the Convention. The other approached from the north side of the river in an elegant vehicle then known as a phaeton,"
30 This was read in the hall of the House of Delegates in the Capitol.
31 This phæton Pendleton afterwards gave to his relative, the mother of Jaquelin P. Taylor, Esq., the treasurer of the Virginia Historical So- ciety, who distinctly remembers it.
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which was driven so slowly that its occupant was seen at a glance to be pressed by age or infirmity. He had been thrown some years before from his horse and had dislocated his hip, and was never afterwards able to stand or walk without assistance. His imposing stature, the elegance of his dress, the dignity of his mien, his venerable age, bespoke no ordinary man. He was called by a unanimous vote to preside in the body. Both of these eminent men had been long distinguished in the Colony and in the Commonwealth. Both had borne a prominent part on every great occasion since the session of the House of Burgesses of 1765. Both had been intimately connected with that memo- rable resolution which instructed the delegates of Virginia to propose independence. One had sustained that resolution with unrivaled eloquence on the floor ; the other had drawn it with his own hand. They met on the steps of the Swan and ex- changed salutations. Public expectation was at its height when it was known that Patrick Henry and Edmund Pendleton, who, for a quarter of a century, had been at the head of the two great parties of that day, were about to engage in another fierce con- flict in the councils of their country.
The occasion might well inspire the deepest interest. For more than five years the amendment of the Articles of Confed- eration had engaged the public attention, but within two years then past it had become an engrossing topic. On the 21st of January, 1786, Virginia, by a formal resolution of her Assembly, had invited a meeting of the States, which was ultimately held at Annapolis.32 That body proposed the assembling of a Con- vention in Philadelphia on the second day of May, 1787. This resolution received the sanction of the Congress of the Confed- eration, and was pressed by that body on the attention of the
32 For the resolution of Virginia inviting the meeting that was held at Annapolis, see the Appendix ; for the Journal of the meeting at that place, see Bioren's and Duane's edition U. S. Laws, I, 55; for the letter to the States sent forth by those who met, and originally prepared by Colonel Hamilton, see Elliot's Debates, V, 115; and for the resolution appointing delegates to the General Convention in Philadelphia, see Appendix. The resolution convoking the meeting at Annapolis, and the preamble and resolution appointing delegates to the Convention, was drawn by Mr. Madison. The preamble of the last deserves a care- ful perusal.
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States ; but even before Congress had acted upon it, the General Assembly of this Commonwealth had complied with its object, and had appointed a delegation to the proposed Convention. The number and character of the delegates selected for the ser- vice demonstrated the importance of the movement ; and Vir- ginia, when she had confided her trust to George Washington, Patrick Henry, Edmund Randolph, John Blair, James Madison, George Mason, and George Wythe, calmly awaited the result of their labors. 83
The General Convention of the United States did not form a quorum until the twenty-fourth day of May ; and, after a con- tinuous session of four months, adjourned on the seventeenth of September following. The Constitution, the work of its hands, was duly transmitted to Congress, and was recommended by that body to the consideration of the States. Its first publication in this State gave rise to various emotions. A dark cloud evidenily rested above its cradle. Most of the officers and many of the soldiers of the Revolution, swayed by the opinions of Wash- ington, which were openly expressed in conversation, and in his letters, and charmed by the beautiful outline of a great polity presented by the instrument itself, received it with admiration and delight. But a formidable opposition was soon apparent from another quarter. The leading statesmen of Virginia, men who had sustained the resolutions of Henry against the Stamp Act, and his resolutions for embodying the militia, who had been eager for independence, and who had guided the public councils during the war and in the interval between the close of the war and the meeting of the General Convention, read the new plan with far different feelings. They saw, or thought that they saw. in its character and in its provisions, that the public liberties were seriously menaced, and that a war for independence was to be waged once more under most painful circumstances. Here- tofore the people had been united in the common cause; and
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