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 9
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67 See in Mr. Rush's memoranda of a residence at the Court of St. James, the opinions of modern English statesmen on the probable suc- cess of the Armada.
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and his queen.68 The metropolis of the Colony still perpetuates his name. Its great seminary, the charter of which was granted by William, and which received his fostering care, bore, as it bears still, his name and the name of his faithful consort. Inci- dents in his career were to be traced even in the nomenclature of the plantation. The light wherry bobbing on the waters of the York or the James, was called the Brill in honor of the gallant frigate in which the Deliverer sailed from Helvoetsluys to the harbor of Torbay. The love of the people long survived his natural life. A great county, created long after the death of William, and stretching far beyond the blue wall which now bounds it in the west to the shores of the Ohio, whether named from the colour of its soil, which is also the symbol of Protest- ant Christianity wherever the British race extends, or in honor of William, pleasingly recalls the name of the small principality on the banks of the Rhone, from which the Prince derived his familiar title.63 An adjoining State has honored the name of Bertie, the first peer of the realm who joined the standard of William on the soil of Britain, and our own town of Abingdon illustrates the same event.70 And the noble county of Halifax, though called apparently in honor of a man who filled a secre- tary's office in England at a later day, reminds us of that bril- liant and accomplished statesman, the unfaltering enemy of the House of Bourbon of that age when the sway of that House was supreme at Whitehall; the friend of Protestant Christianity, from whose hand William received the Declaration of Right.
68 Two years after the accession of William, a county was called after the Princess Anne, in honor of her claim as the successor of William and Mary, in the event of her surviving them, according to the parlia- mentary settlement of the crown.
69 In the Topographical Analysis of Virginia for the year 1790-'1, in the Appendix of the last edition (published by J. W. Randolph, Rich- mond, 1853, 8vo.) of the Notes on Virginia left for publication by Mr. Jefferson, the county of Orange, which was cut off from Spotsylvania in 1734, almost a third of a century after the death of William, is put down without the expression of a doubt as called in honor of William.
10 The North Carolinians may say, and justly, that Bertie county was called in commemoration of the two Berties, in whom the proprietary rights of the Earl of Clarendon vested; but as it was formed within twenty years of the death of William, I always associate it with his history.
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When the intelligence of Barclay's plot against the life of the king, which had well-nigh proved successful, reached the Colony, the excitement was great. The news flew from plantation to plantation. The Burgesses instantly prepared an address in which they denounced the plotters and congratulated the king on his escape from the daggers of the Jacobite faction. Planters spurred in haste from their homes to the capital, and, bespattered with mud, hastened to the secretary's office, there to record their horror of the assassins and their joy at the safety of the king. The address, engrossed on parchment and duly incased, was despatched to London by the first packet, and was immediately placed in the hands of William. The fate of the address was peculiar. When it had been read in common with kindred memorials from all parts of the British empire, it was laid aside and forgotten. Nor was it till William had been sleeping for more than one hundred and sixty years in his ancestral tomb at the Hague, far from the dust of her on whose pure brow the diadem of Elizabeth had pressed so queenly, and to whose de- voted love more than to his own consummate statesmanship he owed his emperial crown, the venerable parchment was enrolled once more, and brought to public notice by a historian whose genius has invested the dim and distant past with the freshness of current time, and who has taught how the sober events of real life may be made as fascinating as the phantoms of romance or 'the dreams of poetry. Even to this hour the curious eye detects in the number of William Henrys that are still seen in the advertisements of the daily press, or the sign boards of the shops, and in our political and ecclesiastical bodies, the image of that strong affection with which our ancestors regarded the name of William Henry, Prince of Orange. One of his Virginia name-sakes has already received the honors of the Presidency of the United States. Another Virginia name-sake, but for extreme illness," might have reached the same exalted station. Thus it was that any omen derived from the life of William was hailed by our fathers with delight. Nor did the friends of the Constitution fail to perceive another coincidence which might well happen. Should Virginia sustain the Constitution, that instrument would certainly take effect, and the new government
71 William Henry Crawford.
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would be inaugurated on the fourth of March of the following year, the centennial anniversary of the year, and almost the month when, in the banqueting room at Whitehall, Halifax at the head of the Lords, and Powle at the head of the Commons, presented to William and Mary the Declaration of Right, and when those sovereigns accepted that instrument which united for the first time in a common bond the title of the reigning dynasty and the liberties of the people of England.72
On the other hand, no cheering sign greeted the opponents of the Constitution. Hitherto they had ever constituted a majority in the councils of the Commonwealth. They now heard bruited abroad the supposed majority by which that instrument would be carried,7 and the names of the individuals who would fill the principal offices to be created by it. Still they were sustained by that steadfast courage which buoys up the patriot when he wrestles in defence of his country. They saw, indeed, in that stern gathering of military men, who composed more than one- fourth of the body, and of the not less formidable corps of judges, that their hopes of triumph were faint. They regarded the Constitution as the offspring of usurpation. They solemnly believed that of all the members of the Assembly who voted for the resolution convoking the Convention recently held in Phila- delphia, not a single individual, so far as they knew, looked be- yond a literal amendment of the Articles of Confederation ; and that, if any radical change had been avowed in debate, the reso- lution would have been indignantly rejected. They felt that a great wrong had been perpetrated upon the people. It had been ingeniously contrived that the work of the Convention should
72 I was told of these congratulations among the members by a gen- tleman who heard them. The public men of the Revolution were more intimately acquainted with the minutest details of English history than their successors in the public councils of the present day. One reason may be that they had fewer books to read, and that, as colonists, it was their interest to know critically the remarkable epochs of English his- tory. For an allusion to the address of the tobacco-planters of Virginia to William on his escape from the assassin, see Macaulay's History of England, IV, 478, Butler's octavo edition, 1856. '
73 "The sanguine friends of the Constitution counted on a majority of twenty at their first meeting, which number they imagine will be greatly increased." Washington to Jay, June 8, 1788. Washington's Writings, IX, 374.
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be referred to the action, not of the legislatures of the States, but to a convention to be called for the purpose ; while a nominal compliance with the act of Virginia was evinced by reporting the new scheme to the Congress for its recommendation to the States. This important innovation did not escape the sagacity of Richard Henry Lee, who was at the time a member of Con- gress, nor of the Congress as a body ; but, controlled by an ex- trinsic pressure, which it did not deem prudent to resist, it finally recommended the Constitution to the States, to be dis- cussed in the mode prescribed by the Convention that framed it. Still, when the Constitution was laid before the General Assem- bly at its October session of 1787, victory was not wholly be- yond its grasp. One of two methods of redress was yet within its reach. Either that body might refuse to receive the Consti- tution, and refer it back to the Congress as framed in palpable violation of the resolution of Congress, and of the resolution of Virginia instructing its delegates to the General Convention ; or, overlooking the recommendation of a special Convention for its ratification as surplusage, and regarding the Constitution as a mere amendment of the Articles of Confederation, might have rejected it forthwith ; but, unconscious of the crisis which im- pended over the country, or relying on its probable strength, the majority of the Assembly assented to the proposition con- tained in the new scheme, and called a Convention to pass upon it. The opponents of that scheme saw too late that this act was . fatal. It mended all defects of form, and gave the instrument a legitimacy which it did not before possess. It not only took from the majority a weapon which, wielded by efficient hands, would . have cloven down the defences of the minority, but it transferred the contest to a field in which the mighty influence of great names, heretofore the common property, would be exerted against it. That contest raged long and fiercely, and in whose favor it ultimately turned we shall presently see. But let us re- cord the proceedings of the body in the order in which they occurred.
When the House was called to order, a motion was made that John Beckley " be appointed secretary to the Convention, who
" John Beckley was at various times Clerk of the House of Dele- gates and of the Senate of Virginia. On the organization of the House
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was accordingly chosen, and took his place at the table in front of the chair. Paul Carrington now rose, and in a short ad- dress nominated Edmund Pendleton as President.73 A few moments of anxious suspense followed. The opinions of Pen-
of Representatives of the United States, he was elected clerk, and served from April 1, 1789, to May 15, 1797, and from December 7, 1801, to October 26, 1807. If not born in England, he was educated at Eton, and I have heard Governor Tazewell say that he was a classmate of Fox,
[Beckley, or Bickley, was born in Virginia, and his full name was John James, and he thus subscribed himself as a member of the Phi-Beta-Kappa Society of William and Mary College, in 1776. He was descended from the family of Bickley, or Bickleigh, anciently seated at Bickleigh, upon the river Ex., in Devonshire. The elder branch of this family removed into Sussex, and settled at Chidham. Other branches settled in the counties of Cambridge, Warwick and Middle- sex. Arms : Arg. a chev. embattled between three griffins' heads, erased gules. Henry Bickley of Chidham, county Essex, born 1503 ; died 1570. Joseph Bickley, seventh in descent from Henry, of Chid- ham, patented, 16th June, 1727, 400 acres of land in King William county, Virginia. John James Bickley was probably the son of Sir William Bickley, Baronet, who died in Louisa county, Virginia, March 9th, 1771. Bickley was not only the first Clerk of the House of Representatives, but also the first Librarian of Congress, serving from 1802 to 1807 .- ED.]
15 Neither the Journal of the Convention nor Robertson reports the name of the member who nominated Pendleton. I heard, from a gen- tleman who was present at the time, that Judge Carrington made the motion ; but I am wholly at a loss for the name of the seconder, who, I suppose, was Wythe, from the fact that he was the only member likely to be brought out against Pendleton, and that Pendleton almost invariably called him to the chair in Committee of the Whole. I do not find that any of our early deliberative bodies have ever elected the chairman of the Committee of the Whole, which was formerly the usual practice in the House of Commons. The nomination of Pendle- ton was fixed upon beforehand, beyond doubt, and there can be as little doubt that Wythe was party to it. In the Convention of 1829-30 it was arranged with the privity of Madison, and doubtless at his sug- gestion, that Mr. Monroe should be made president of the body, and he was so nominated by Mr. Madison himself; but the ablest members of the Convention were not aware of the design ; and when Mr. Madi- son made the nomination, those who sate near John Randolph and observed his countenance, say that he was on the eve of rising to op. pose it, not so much from hostility to Mr. Monroe as from a belief that the honor of the presidency should first be conferred on Madison.
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dleton were well known to be in favor of the Constitution ; and the election of president presented a fair opportunity of testing the relative strength of parties. In the selection of their candi- date, the Federalists had chosen a name which, in the pure and benevolent character of him who bore it, in his long and valua- ble service in the public councils, and in his venerable age, was known and honored throughout the Commonwealth, and which, with the exception of that of one who had long been his com- peer in the House of Burgesses, at the bar of the General Court, in the Conventions of 1775 and 1776, in the Congress, and on the bench, may be said then to have stood almost alone in the civil service of his country.16 But George Wythe was now known to approve the Constitution, and so far from opposing Pendleton would sustain him by his vote. Had Wythe been of the opposite party, the opponents of the Constitution would doubtless have ventured a contest. Nor is it certain that the contest would not have been successful. Wythe was, as a man, more popular than Pendleton ; many of the members had been his scholars, and loved him with an affection which neither time nor distrust could weaken ; and he would certainly have carried with him the votes of the smaller counties on tide, which had ever regarded him with warm attachment, and had long counted his fame among their most precious possessions. The contest, too, might have been waged without wounding the delicacy of Pendleton, who was unable to perform the duties of the presi- ding officer unless allowed to sit in the chair; and opposition may have taken the hue of respect for his physical infirmities. But no name was brought forward by the opponents of the Con- stitution, and Pendleton was elected without a division.
Twelve years which had elapsed since the adjournment of the Convention of 1776 had left their mark upon the President. He was in his sixty-seventh year, and his intellectual powers, quick- ened by the discussions in the court in which he had presided since its organization, were undiminished ; but there was a sad
76 President Pendleton, who was also president of the Court of Ap- peals, was now in his sixty-seventh year, but, from the breaking of a thigh-bone ten or eleven years before, which prevented him from taking exercise or moving without a crutch, looked much older than he was.
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change in his outward form. Some individuals present remem- bered him as he was in the House of Burgesses more than a quarter of a century past; one member had seen him in the public councils more than the third of a century ago ; and not a few of the members could recall him as with a buoyant and . graceful step he walked from the floor of the Convention of December, 1775, and of May, 1776, to the chair, escorted in the former body by Paul Carrington and James Mercer, and in the latter by the venerable Richard Bland and the inflexible Archi- bald Cary. It was a touching sight to behold him, his earlier and elder compeers long laid to rest, as, with his shrunken form upheld by crutches, he now passed between Carrington and Wythe to the chair. He made an acknowledgment of the honor conferred upon him in a few plain words not otherwise remark- able than as being the first ever addressed to a deliberate Assem- bly of Virginia from a sitting position.17
The Rev. Abner Waugh was, on motion of Paul Carrington, unanimously elected chaplain, and " was ordered to attend every morning to read prayers, immediately after the bell should be rung for calling the Convention. 78
When the Convention had elected the other officers of the body,79 had appointed a Committee of Privileges and Elections, 60
77 There was no formal resolution but rather a general understanding that Pendleton was to sit in addressing or putting a question to the house. It is probable that Carrington, who was his associate on the bench of the Court of Appeals, and who knew his physical infirmities, may have alluded to the subject in his nominating speech. Robertson, in his Debates, thus alludes to the election of Pendleton : "He was unanimously elected president, who being seated in the chair, thanked the Convention for the honor conferred upon him, and strongly recom- mended to the members to use the utmost moderation and temper in their deliberations on the great and important subject now before them." Pendleton, in the sketch of his own life, mentions gratefully that he was allowed to sit while performing the duties of the chair.
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78 The Rev. Abner Waugh, as early as 1774, had been the rector of Saint Mary in the county of Caroline, and survived to the year IS06, when he was chosen rector of St. George's parish, Fredericksburg, but finding his health insufficient for the performance of his duty, he soon resigned and died a short time after at "Hazlewood." His valedictory to his parishioners breathes the devotion of a Christian.
19 The other officers were William Drinkard, Sr., and William Drink-
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and had chosen a printer of its proceedings, it adjourned, on the motion of George Mason to the next day at eleven, then to meet in the New Academy on Shockoe Hill.
On the morning of the next day it met in the New Academy, a large wooden structure reared by the Chevalier Quesnay, a cap- tain in the army of the Revolution, for the promotion of the arts and literature of the rising Commonwealth. Its corner- stone had been laid two years before with great ceremony in , presence of the State and town authorities ; and the scheme of the institution had received the sanction of the French Academy of Sciences in a formal report endorsed by the famous Levoisier a short time before he was led to the guillotine, and which was designed to be the fountain from which the arts and sciences in the New World would soon begin to flow, but which, like most of the schemes of foreign proprietors in a new country, was des- tined to a speedy dissolution. The commodious hall of this building was well adapted to the purposes of the Convention, and was now filled to overflowing. 81
ard, Jr .. doorkeepers; Edmund Pendleton, Jr., clerk of the Committee of Elections ; Augustine Davis, printer ; and on the following day William Pierce was elected sergeant-at-arms, and Daniel Hicks, one of the doorkeepers. Augustine Davis was the editor and proprietor of the Virginia Gazette, and somewhat later postmaster of Richmond. His printing office was in the basement of a house at the corner of Main and Eleventh streets, which was subsequently the office of the Whig, founded by John Hampden Pleasants, (who first used a press purchased from Davis) and successively of the Enquirer, influential organs in the past respectively of the Whig and Democratic parties .- ED.
80 The Committee of Privileges and Elections were so distinguished a body that I annex their names, with the remark that such an array of genius, talents, and public and private worth had not been seen before, nor has it been seen since, on such a committee in Virginia : Benjamin Harrison, George Mason, His Excellency Governor Ran- dolph, Patrick Henry, George Nicholas, John Marshall, Paul Carring- ton, John Tyler, Alexander White, John Blair, Theodore Bland, Wil- liam Grayson, Daniel Fisher, Thomas Mathews, John Jones, George Wythe, William Cabell, James Taylor of Caroline, Gabriel Jones, Fran- cis Corbin, James Innes, James Monroe, Henry Lee, and Cuthbert Bul- litt. The committee is appointed with great liberality, the friends of the Constitution having a majority of two only.
81 The Academy grounds included the square bounded by Broad and Marshall and Eleventh and Twelfth streets, on the lower portion of
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After the transaction of some ordinary business, Benjamin Harrison moved that all the papers relative to the Constitution
which stood the Monumental Church and the Medical College. The Academy stood midway in the square fronting Broad street. "L' Acad- emie Des Etats-Unis De L'Amerique" was an attempt, growing out of the French alliance with the United States, to plant in Richmond a kind of French Academy of the arts and sciences, with branch acad- emies in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. The institution was to be at once national and international. It was to be affiliated with the royal societies of London, Paris, Bruxelles, and other learned bodies in Europe. It was to be composed of a president, vice-president, six counsellors, a treasurer-general, a secretary and a recorder, an agent for taking European subscriptions, French professors, masters, artists -* in-chief attached to the Academy, twenty-five resident and one hun- dred and seventy-five non-resident associates, selected from the best talent of the Old World and of the New. The Academy proposed to publish yearly from its own press in Paris, an aimanac. The Academy was to show its zeal for science by communicating to France and other European countries a knowledge of the natural products of North America. The museums and cabinets of the Old World were to be enriched by specimens of the flora and fauna of a country as yet undis- covered by men of science. The proprietor of the brilliant scheme was the Chevalier Alexander Maria Quesnay de Beaurepaire, grand- son of the famous French philosopher and economist, Dr. Quesnay, who was the court physician of Louis XV. Chevalier Quesnay had served as a captain in Virginia in 1777-78 in the war of the Revolution. The idea of founding the Academy was suggested to him in 1778 by John Page, of "Rosewell," then Lieutenant-Governor of Virginia, and himself devoted to scientific investigation. Quesnay succeeded in raising by subscription the sum of 60,000 francs, the subscribers in Vir- ginia embracing nearly one hundred prominent names. The corner- stone of the building, which was of wood, was laid with Masonic cere- monies July 8th, 1786. Having founded and organized his Academy under the most distinguished auspices, Quesnay returned to Paris and succeeded in enlisting in support of his plan many learned and dis- tinguished men of France and England. The French Revolution, however, put an end to the scheme. The Academy building was early converted into a theatre, which was destroyed by fire, but a new theatre was erected in the rear of the old. This new building was also de- stroyed by fire on the night of December 26th, 1811, when seventy-two persons perished in the flames. The Monumental church commemo- rates the disaster, and its portico covers the tomb and ashes of most of its victims. A valuable sketch of Quesnay's enlightened projection, chiefly drawn from his curious " Mémoire concernant l' Academie des . Sciences et Beaux Arts des États-unis d' Amerique, Établic a Rich-
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should be read. John Tyler observed that before any papers were read, certain rules and regulations should be established to govern the Convention in its deliberations. Edmund Randolph fully concurred in the propriety of establishing rules ; but, as this was a subject which would invoke the Convention in debate, he recommended that the rules of the House of Delegates, as far as they were applicable, should be observed. Tyler had no objection to the mode suggested by Randolph ; accordingly, the rules of the House of Delegates, as far as they were applicable, were adopted by the present, as they had been by all subsequent Conventions.
On motion, "the resolutions of Congress of the twenty-eighth of September previous,82 together with the report of the Federal Convention, lately held in Philadelphia, the resolutions of the General Assembly of the twenty-fifth of October last, and the Act of the General Assembly, entitled an Act concerning the Convention to be held in June next," were now read, when George Mason arose to address the House. In an instant the insensible hum of the body was hushed, and the eyes of all were fixed upon him. How he appeared that day as he rose in that large assemblage, his once raven hair white as snow, his stalwart figure, attired in deep mourning, still erect, his black eyes fairly flashing forth the flame that burned in his bosom, the tones of his voice deliberate and full as when, in the first House of Dele- gates, he sought to sweep from the statute book those obliquities which marred the beauty of the young republic, or uttered that withering sarcasm which tinges his portrait by the hand of Jef- ferson, we have heard from the lips, and seen reflected from the moistened eyes of trembling age. His reputation as the author of the Declaration of Rights and of the first Constitution of a free Commonwealth; as the responsible director of some of the
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