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 6
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33 Colonel Henry declined the appointment, and R. H. Lee was ap- pointed by the Governor in his stead ; but he declined, doubtless for the same reason which induced the Assembly to pass him by, which was that he was President of Congress, which would hold its sessions simul- taneously with those of the Convention. On Lee's declension, Dr. James McClurg was appointed, and took his seat at the beginning of the session.
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their union, in spite of many obstacles, had carried them success- fully through the late contest. But now one portion of the peo- ple was to be arrayed against another ; and the result of the new contest, whatever it might be, would be fraught with peril. The first general impression should seem to have been adverse to the new system. It had taken the people by surprise. It should be remembered that the deliberations of the General Convention had been secret, and, that if they had been public, the facilities by which we are now enabled to watch from its inception any meas- ure of public policy, did not then exist. The Constitution pro- posed an entirely new system of government, when the belief of the people was universal that the powers of the General Con- vention were limited to an amendment of the existing system to which they had become attached, and which they believed amply sufficient, with certain modifications, to attain the end of its cre- ation. They felt at the moment that resentment which springs from a sense of having been cajoled or deceived by those to whom we have confided an important trust.34 Upon a nearer view, they were led to believe that the new Constitution was in opposition to the wishes of a majority of their representatives in Convention. It bore indeed the name most dear to the hearts of the people, but he may have signed it as an officer, and not as
34 If the reader wishes to see how far these suspicions were founded, let him consult and compare the resolution appointing delegates to Annapolis ; the resolution of the General Assembly of the third of November, 1786, declaring that an act ought to pass to appoint dele- gates to the General Convention "with powers to devise such further provision as shall to them appear necessary to render the Constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union ; and to report such an act for that purpose to the United States in Con- gress assembled, as, when agreed to by them, and afterwards con- firmed by the legislatures of every State, will effectually provide for the same "; and especially the resolution appointing the delegates to the Convention, which was drawn by Mr. Madison, under the instructions of the foregoing resolution, marking the substitution of the word "States " for legislatures; and it will be seen that a strict and literal amendment of the old, and not the introduction of a new one, was in the view of the Assembly. From the state of parties in the House of Delegates when these resolutions were passed, it may be safely affirmed that not thirty votes could have been obtained for any other amend- ment than a specific one to pass through the forms required for an amendment to the Articles of Confederation.
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an individual ; but with the exception of the names of Blair and Madison, it bore no other. Patrick Henry had declined his seat in the Convention; but neither the name of McClurg, who suc- ceeded him, nor that of Mason, or Randolph, or Wythe were attached to its roll. If the absence of these names meant any thing, it meant that if the vote of Virginia could have controlled the question of the adoption of the Constitution by the Conven- tion which framed it, it would not have seen the light. It was the work then of a minority of the delegates of Virginia in Con- vention, and it had the hand of bastardy on its face. And it is certain that upon an immediate direct vote upon it by the peo- ple, it would have been rejected by an overwhelming majority.
Fortunately, there was full time for the examination of the new system. From the adjournment of the General Convention to the time of the meeting of the Virginia Convention, which was called to discuss it, eight months would elapse ; and never were eight months spent in such animated disputation. Essays on the new scheme filled the papers of the day, but the papers of that day were small and had but a limited circulation ; and for the first time in our recent history, the pamphlet became a fre- quent engine of political warfare. Beside those essays which have come down to us in the garb of the Federalist, and which are still regarded with authority, there were others published throughout the States of equal popularity. The solemn protest of George Mason, the eloquent letter of Edmund Randolph, then Governor, to the Speaker of the House of Delegates, and the statesmanlike production of Richard Henry Lee addressed to the Governor, all demonstrating the defects of the proposed plan of government, were in every hand.35 The bibliographer still points to the tracts of the period, bound in small volumes, as among the sybil relics of our early political literature. But how- ever great was the influence of the press, its influence was ex- ceeded by oral discussions. Public addresses were made at every gathering of the people. The court green, the race-course, and
35 Though the people in the vicinity of towns and villages could get a glance at a paper, even prominent men in the interior were not reached by the press. Humphrey Marshall, from Kentucky, had trav- elled into the densely populated parts of Virginia on his way to the Convention, when he met with a number of the Federalist for the first time.
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the muster field, resounded with disputations. The pulpit as well as the rostrum uttered its voice, and the saint and the sin- ner mingled in the fierce melee.36 An incident which occurred in Halifax will serve to show the excitement of the times. A preacher on a Sunday morning had pronounced from the desk a fervent prayer for the adoption of the Federal Constitution ; but he had no sooner ended his prayer than a clever layman ascended the pulpit, invited the people to join a second time in the suppli- cation, and put forth an animated petition that the new scheme be rejected by the Convention about to assemble by an over- whelming majority. 37
Great tact was shown by the friends of the new scheme in the selection of candidates. The honest country gentlemen whose fathers had been for years in the Assembly, and who had been for years in the Assembly themselves, and who thought that they had a prescriptive title to public honors, were gently put aside, and the judge. was taken from the bench, and the soldier, who was reposing beneath the laurels won in many a stricken field, was summoned from his farm to fill a seat in the approaching Convention. Such, indeed, was the zeal with which the elec- tions were pushed, that, for the first time in our history, personal enmities were overlooked, and ancient political feuds, which promised to descend for generations, were allowed to slumber. One gentleman, who, in the beginning of the war, had been sus- pected of dealing with the enemy, who had been arrested and held under heavy bonds in strict confinement, and had been escorted by a military guard into the interior of the State, was returned to the Convention, his friendship for the Constitution
36 There was a passage at arms between the Rev. John Blair Smith, president of Hampden-Sydney College in Prince Edward county, and Patrick Henry, who represented that county in the Convention. Henry had inveighed with great severity against the Constitution, and was responded to by Dr. Smith, who pressed the question upon Henry, why he had not taken his seat in the Convention and lent his aid in making a good Constitution, instead of staying at home and abusing the work of his patriotic compeers? Henry, with that magical power of acting in which he excelled all his contemporaries, and which before a popu- lar assembly was irresistible, replied : " I SMELT A RAT."
37 I could "name names," if necessary, but to do so might possibly be unpleasant to the descendants of the actors.
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wiping out the sins of his earlier life. Another member, whose father had by a formal decree of one of the early Conventions been arrested, had also been placed under heavy bonds, and had been confined within certain limits, and who had himself spent the entire period of the Revolution abroad, expiated his guilt patrimonial and personal by his attachment to the new system, and took his seat by the side of men whose swords had hardly ceased to drip with the blood of the common foe. Whether we regard such results as flowing from high principles or from the impulse of eager passion, it is equally our duty to record them. Thus, when the time approached for the election of the members who were to decide the fate of the Constitution, there was not only an obvious line drawn between its friends and its enemies, but there were shrewd estimates of its ultimate fate.
The assembling of the Convention attracted attention through- out the State and throughout the Union. Few of the citizens of Virginia had ever seen a Convention of the people. The Con- vention of August, 1774, sate in Williamsburg, and adjourned after a session of five days. The Conventions of March, of July, and of December, 1775, sate in Richmond ; but the Convention of March was in session but seven days, the Convention of July only thirty-nine days, and that of December fifty days; and the Richmond of 1775 differed almost as much from the Richmond of 1778, small as it was at the latter period, as the Richmond of 1788 differed from the Richmond of 1858. The Convention of 1776 sate in Williamsburg, and, as the sessions embraced sixty days, was together longer than any deliberative body in our pre- vious annals. Still, from the emergencies of war, from the uncer- tainty of the times, and from the sparseness of the population, those only who lived in the vicinity of Williamsburg and Rich- mond had then seen any of the prominent men of that generation. Henry was the best known of our public men. He had not only been Governor twice during the last twelve years, and occasion- ally a member of the Assembly, which he was ever the last to reach and the first to quit, but he had frequently been called to distant counties to defend culprits which no native talents were likely to screen from the law; yet few of the men then on the stage had ever seen Henry. Pendleton, who, from his years, was more of a historical character than Henry, could for the last ten years be seen only in term time on the bench, or in his snug 3
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room at the Swan, or in vacation on his estate in Caroline. Mason, though laborious on committees- and in the House of Delegates, had a horror of long sessions, and would not be per- suaded to remain long beyond the smoke of "Gunston Hall." The person of Wythe was more familiar to persons from abroad ; for, since the removal of the seat of government from Williams- burg, he had taken up his abode in town, 38 and might be seen in his court or in his study, and not unfrequently of a bright frosty morning, in loose array, taking an air- bath in the porch of his humble residence on Shockoe Hill. Now all these eminent men, and others who had grown into reputation during the war and since, were to be seen together. In every point of view the Con- vention was an imposing body. It presented as proud a galaxy of genius, worth, and public service as had ever shone in the councils of a single State. The rule of its selection had been without limit. The members were chosen without regard to the offices which they held, or to their pursuits in life. The judge, as was just observed, was called from the bench, and the soldier from his home ; while the merchant, the planter, the lawyer, the physician and the divine, made up the complement of its mem- bers. There was one feature conspicuous in the returns, and shows not only the fluctuation of the public mind at that impor- tant crisis, but the force of individual worth. Sharply drawn as were the lines of party, a county would send up one of its two members friendly to the Constitution, and the other opposed to it. As a type of the times, it may be noted that the successor of Henry in the General Convention which framed the Federal Con- stitution, was one of the most distinguished physicians of that age. The body was very large, and consisted, as already stated, of one hundred and seventy members, and exceeded by fifty two the number of the members who composed the Convention of 1776. It was more than four times greater than the Convention which formed the Federal Constitution when that body was full, and it exceeded it, as it ordinarily was, more than six times. It had a trait discernible in all the great Conventions of Virginia. It con- sisted of the public men of three generations. Some of the
38 Judge Wythe's residence stood at the southeast corner of Grace and Fifth streets, on the spot where stands the residence erected by the late Abraham Warwick, and now owned and occupied by Major Legh R. Page.
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eminent men who more than thirty years before had dared to assail the usurpations of Dinwiddie, and to dispatch to England to protest against the unconstitutional pistole tax levied by the Governor;39 who, twenty-three years before, had voted on Henry's resolutions against the Stamp Act, and had voted thirteen years before on his resolutions for putting the Colony in a posture of defence, and had voted for the resolution proposing indepen- dence; who had distinguished themselves in the Indian wars, and who had borne a prominent part on the military and civil theatre of the Revolution.
Several of the members of that great committee, under whose wise guidance the country had passed from the Colony to the Commonwealth, with their illustrious chief at their head, were members of the body ; and sitting by their side was that re- markable man, more illustrious still, who, in a time of intense excitement, had been deemed their victim. 40
The martial aspect of the Convention would alone have at- tracted observation. There was hardly a battlefield, from the Monongahela and the Kanawha to the plains of Abraham, from the Great Bridge to Monmouth, and from the bloody plains of Eutaw to York, that was not illuminated by the valor of some member then present. The names of Bland, Carrington of Hali- fax, Samuel Jordan Cabell, Clendenin, Darke, Fleming, Grayson, Innes, Lawson, Henry Lee of the Legion, known in the Con- vention as Lee of Westmoreland, in distinction from his name- sake and relative, Henry Lee of Bourbon, Matthews, who, when
39 The conduct of the House of Burgesses on that occasion displayed great spirit. They sent Peyton Randolph, then Attorney-General, to England, who partly succeeded in his mission. His expenses were two thousand five hundred pounds, which were paid by a bill which the Governor refused to approve. The House of Burgesses then tacked the sum of two thousand five hundred pounds to the appropriation bill of twenty thousand pounds ; and the Governor sent back this bill also. The House then ordered the treasurer to pay the money ; which he did. Journals House of Burgesses, Nov., 1753, and Sparks' Washington, II, 59. Dinwiddie Papers, I, 44, et seq .; II, 3, 57.
" After the adjournment of the Convention of 1776, Pendleton and Henry never met in a public body. Henry was elected Governor by that Convention; and Pendleton, after a session or two in the House of Delegates, was placed on the bench, where he remained nearly a quar- ter of a century. Henry was often a member of the House of Dele- gates in the interval between 1776 and 1788.
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not engaged in the field, was a member of the House of Dele- gates, whose name is conspicuous in our early Journals as chair- man on Committee of the Whole and Speaker of the House, and is still borne by one of those beautiful counties that over- look our great inland sea, Mason, of Loudoun, Marshall, who had not attained the age of thirty-three, and little dreamed that in a few short years he was to represent the young empire at the most renowned court in Europe, and to preside, for an entire generation, in the judiciary of the new system which he was about to sustain, Monroe, the junior of Marshall by three years, his playmate at school, his colleague in camp and in college, and destined to fill the highest offices, at home and abroad, of the new system which he was about to oppose, McKee, Moore of Rockbridge, George and Wilson Cary Nicholas, Read, Riddick, Steele, Adam Stephen, Stuart of Augusta, Stuart of Greenbrier, Zane, and others, recall alike our hardest contest with the In- dians and the British. Well might Henry and George Mason view that brilliant phalanx with doubt and fear." Pendleton, the President of the Court of Appeals, and Wythe, a chancellor and a member of the same court, who had been pitted against each other in the Senate and in the forum throughout their political lives, and were now to act in unison, were not the only representatives of the judiciary.42 Bullitt had not taken his seat on the bench ; but
41 A large majority of the officers of the army of the Revolution were in favor of the new Constitution. The Cincinnati were mostly among its warmest advocates ; and as they were organized and were, many of them, of exalted private and public worth, and could act in concert through all the States, their influence was foreseen and feared by its opponents. Mason and Gerry often alluded to that influence in their speeches in the General Convention (Madison Papers, II, 1208; Elliot's Debates, V, 368) ; and although Judge Marshall affirms that "in Vir- ginia certainly a large number, perhaps a majority, of the Cincinnati were opposed to it" (meaning the administration of Washington), (II, Appendix 31, second edition); yet when he enumerated the various classes who favored a change in the Articles of Confederation, he says, " the officers of the army threw themselves almost universally in the same scale." Life of Washington, II, 77. In the present Convention there were several who were opposed to the Constitution.
42 These two venerable men, with George Mason and Patrick Henry, were those first sought by the spectator, as in a convention, forty years later, were Madison, Monroe, Marshall, and Fayette. If the reader wishes to know the constitution of the courts in 1787, let him turn to Mr. Minor's edition of Wythe's Reports, page 20 of the memoir.
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Blair, Cary of Warwick, Carrington of Charlotte, Jones, and Tyler, were members of the body. Some of the prominent mem- bers of Congress were present. Harrison, Henry and Pendleton stood up in the Carpenters' Hall, when the eloquent Duchè, then firm in his country's cause, had invoked the guidance of Heaven in the deliberations of the first Congress ; while Grayson, Henry Lee of the Legion, Madison, Monroe, Edmund Randolph, and Wythe, had been or were then in the councils of the Union. The Attorney-General of the Commonwealth, the eloquent and ac- complished Innes, and the Governor, were included in that dis- tinguished group.
Yet the eye of the aged spectator, as it ranged along those rows of heads, missed some familiar faces, which, until now, had been seen on nearly all the great civil occasions of a third of the century then past. The venerable Richard Bland, the unerring oracle, whose responses had, for more than thirty years, been eagerly sought and rarely made in vain, and whose tall form had been so long conspicuous in the House of Burgesses and in all the previous Conventions, had fallen dead in the street in Wil- liamsburg, twelve years before, while attending the session of the first House of Delegates, and when, as chairman of the commit- tee, he was about to report that memorable bill, drawn by Jeffer- son, abolishing entails. Benjamin Watkins, of Chesterfield, in whose character were united in noble proportions the firmness of the patriot, the charity of the philanthropist, and the wisdom of the sage, and his name, revived in the Convention that met near half a century after his death to revise the Constitution, which he assisted in framing, was invested with fresh and imperishable praise, had died three years before.43 The absence of the old Treasurer, Robert Carter Nicholas, that grave and venerated face, which had been seen for forty years in the House of Bur- gesses, and in all the Conventions, in one of which he presided, and whose presence gave to the general heart a sense of safety, was now observed for the first time in our great assemblies. He had died, when the storm of the Revolution raged fiercest, at his
43 He was the maternal grandfather of Benjamin Watkins Leigh and Judge William Leigh, who were members of the Convention of 1829-30. For further details of Mr. Watkins, consult the Watkins' genealogy, by Francis N. Watkins, Esq., page 46.
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villa in Hanover, and his corpse, borne by his weeping neigh- bors, had been laid in its humble grave. Archibald Cary, too, was gone. He had been intimately connected for the third of a century with very great measures of our colonial policy, had, as chairman of the Committee of the Whole, reported to the Con- vention of 1776 the resolution instructing our delegates in Con- gress to propose independence, and had been at the head of the committee which reported the Declaration of Rights and the Constitution. His unconquerable spirit was an element of force in every body of which he was a member. Two years had barely elapsed since his stalwart form had been committed to the · grave, at Ampthill." He had lived to behold the triumph of his country, and to preside, until his death, in the Senate under that Constitution at whose baptism he had been the fearless and cor- . dial sponsor." The person of another still more beloved was wanting. On him the honors of every deliberative assembly of which he was a member seemed, by common consent, to devolve. In the warm conflict between the House of Burgesses and a royal Governor, who sought to tax the people without the consent of their representatives, which had occurred in his early manhood, he had taken an honorable part, and had been sent abroad to seek redress at the foot of the throne. His fine person and dig- nified demeanor had made an impression even within the pre- cincts of St. James. He had filled the office of Attorney-Gen- eral with acknowledged skill, and had volunteered, at a time of danger, to march at the head of his company against the Indians. He had presided ten years in the House of Burgesses, and had won the affection of its members. He was hated by those only who hated his country. He had presided in the August Con- vention of 1774, and in the Conventions of March and July, 1775, and was the first president of Congress. He had died,
# Cary died at ' Ampthill," his seat in Chesterfield county, but was buried in the ancestral grounds at "Ceeleys," in Warwick county .- ED.
45 In the discourse on the Convention of 1776, page 90, I allude to Colonel Cary as rather small than large in stature, though compact and muscular. Subsequent investigations have led me to believe that he was' a large man of great physical strength. His corporeal powers have been celebrated in poetry as well as in prose. [He was known by the sobriquet "Old Iron."-ED. ]
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almost instantaneously, while attending to his duties in Congress ; but his remains had been brought to Virginia ; and persons then present remembered that melancholy morning on which the coffin of Peyton Randolph, wrapped in lead, had, twelve years before, been borne from his late residence, along the high street of Williamsburg, followed by the first General Assembly of the Commonwealth, with their speakers at their head, by the Ma- sonic body, and by a large concourse of citizens, to the threshold of William and Mary College, the nurse of his early youth and the object of his latest care, and had been consigned. with the offices of religion and the rites of Masonry, amid the shrieks of women and the audible sobs of wise and brave men, to the an- cestral vault beneath the pavement of the chapel. Other familiar faces were also missing ; and old men shook their heads, shrugged their shoulders, and muttered that it was ill for the country that such men, at such a crisis, were in their graves; and that public bodies were not now what they once had been. A sounded opinion would be that, in ability and capacity for effective public service, the Convention of 1776 was surpassed by the Conven- tion of 1788, which was in its turn surpassed by the Convention of 1829-30.46
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