History of the Origin, Formation, and Adoption of the Constitution of the United States

but the example of their determination to enjoy it, founding institutions to which mankind may look for hope, for encouragement and light. He will see the arts of peace-commerce, agriculture, manufactures, jurisprudence, letters now languishing beneath a civil polity inadequate and incompetent, and now expanding through a continent with an energy and force unexampled in the history of our subduing the farthest recesses of nature, and filling the wilderness with the beneficent fruits of civilization and Christianity.

race,

Surveying all this,-looking back to the period which is removed from him only by the span of one mortal life, and looking around and before him, he will see, that among the causes of this unequalled growth stands prominent and decisive, far over all other human agencies, the great code of civil government which the fathers of our republic wrought out from the very perils by which they were surrounded.

It is for the purpose of tracing the history of the period in which those perils were encountered and overcome, that I have written this work. But in doing it, I have sought to write as an American. For it is, I trust, impossible to study the history of the Constitution which has made us what we are,

by making us one nation, without feeling how unworthy of the subject - how unworthy of the dignity of History - would be any attempt to claim more than their just share of merit and renown for names or places endeared to us by local feeling or traditionary attachment. Historical writing that is not just, that is not impartial, that is not fearless, looking beyond the interests of neighborhood, the claims of party, or the solicitations of pride, - -is worse than useless to mankind.