by the general spirit and energy with which the rebellious colonists confronted the metropolitan power of England, then advanced, by the triumphant administration of Chatham, to heights of imperial splendor unattained before in all her history.* Under the stress of the Revolutionary War, the tendency to Union was naturally strengthened in the hearts of the peo * "Nothing has surprised people more than the Virginians and Marylanders joining with so much warmth with the New England Republicans, in their opposition to their ancient Constitution. . . . As there. are certainly no nations under heaven more opposite than these Colonies, it would be very difficult to account for it on the principle of religion and sound policy, had not the Virginians discovered their indifference to both."-Rivington's Gazette-(Quoted by Fowler, Sect. Cont., p. 8.) See, also, Irving's Life of Washington, vol. ii., p. 287. (1b.) Franklin (Works, vol. iv., p. 27) uses the existence of independent communities united under the British flag, as an argument against the claims of Parliament. "In fact," he writes, "the British empire is not a single State, it comprehends many. We have the same king, but not the same legislature." As to the great differences of feeling that existed between the Colonies even in the high noon of the Revolutionary temper, a cloud of witnesses might be summoned up. John Adams, in describing his journey to Congress, in 1774, records the fact that many of the New York patriots were "intimidated lest the leveling spirit of the New England Colonies should propagate itself in New York." "Phil Livingston," he says, "is a great rough mortal, who threw out hints about Goths and Vandals, hanging Quakers," and the like, for the benefit of the Eastern patriots. In Philadelphia, too, he found Massachusetts distrusted and scolded. Patrick Henry's famous speech, in which he declared that he was "not a Virginian but an American," John Adams shows us, met with a tart and unsympathetic reply. "A little colony has its all at stake as well as a great one," exclaimed Major Sullivan. Nor can there be any doubt that feelings of jealousy and distrust between the Colonies had much to do with the reluctance displayed by the Congress of the Colonies to take the decisive step of abolishing the royal supremacy. The only point distinctly settled by the inconsistent accounts which Adams and Jefferson have left of the genesis of the Declaration of Independence, is the fact that Massachusetts was compelled to surrender the leadership in the matter to Virginia, in order to conciliate the support of the Southern and Middle Colonies. ple of the various Colonies, although abundant evidence exists to justify the emphatic assertion of the elder Adams, that "it required more serenity of temper, a deeper understanding, and more courage than fell to the lot of Marlborough, to ride in the whirlwind" of sectional passions and interests which convulsed not Congress and the country alone, but the army itself. With peace and independence these passions naturally became more clamorous, and these interests more antagonistic than ever. The inhabitants of thirteen British Colonies had acquired a fresh importance in their own eyes by becoming citizens of as many American States. It was the earnest hope of the wise and great men who presided over the foundation of the new Confederacy, that the general government might be so administered as gradually to wear away the centrifugal forces of local pride and prejudice and interest; and the earliest history of the Union is the history of their persistent and patriotic efforts to achieve this paramount object of statesmanship in America.* The disruption in 1787 of that which in its articles of organization had been described as the "perpetual" Confederation, though in form a revolutionary act, was in substance an attempt to construct "a more perfect Union by dissolving that which could no longer bind, and leaving the separate parts to be united by the law of political gravitation to the centre."+ The Constitutional Convention of 1787, after discussing the * In the Congress of the Confederation, it was announced as a matter of course by Mr. Graham, of Massachusetts, that the Eastern States, at the invitation of the Legislature of Massachusetts, were about to form a convention with New York, for “regulating matters of common concern." A debate arose hereupon, (April 1, 1783,) in which Hamilton and Madison earnestly insisted upon the peril to the Union of such conventions, which Mr. Bland, of Virginia, described as gresses." young Con John Quincy Adams. (Jubilee Oration, delivered in New York, on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution.) bases of this "more perfect Union," from May to November, finally adopted, as the sole alternative of a disorderly dissolution, a plan of Constitution which was very far from commanding the cordial and deliberate support of the delegates, and was with no little difficulty recommended to the favor of their constituents.* Four of the States, indeed, New York, Virginia, Rhode Island, and North Carolina, declined to join in this action; and though the first two of these States soon entered the new Confederacy, Rhode Island and North Carolina insisted upon trying the experiment of independence, and refused to accept the new terms of Union with their former confederates, the one for a little less and the other for a little more than three years. No men were more concerned as to the feasibility of maintaining and consolidating the Union thus framed and formed of such materials, than those who had taken an active and patriotic part in constructing it. The fears that John Adams had expressed in 1775,† as to the consequences which might and probably would flow from the rooted "dissimilitude of character" between the people of the different Colonies, were felt as keenly in 1789 by men of the most widely different views on all other subjects. It was with a heavy heart that Washington left his home in Virginia to assume the presidential chair, and the scenes of popular joy and exultation through which he passed, on his way to the temporary capital of the newly founded nation, moved him to forebodings scarcely less melancholy than those with which the most gifted member of the cabinet of Wash * Secret Debates of the Constitutional Convention. By Luther Martin of Maryland, and Lansing of New York. "I dread the consequences of this dissimilitude of character, and without the utmost caution on both sides, and the most considerate forbearance with one another, and prudent condescensions on both sides, they will certainly be fatal."-Adams' Works, ix., 367. John Adams hoped to see the danger conquered by an "alteration of the Southern Constitutions," but it was decreed that the cotton-gin, California, and Richard Cobden, should disappoint this hope. ington has left it upon record, that he himself undertook "to prop the frail and worthless fabric."* Under the administrtion of Washington, the conflict of sectional interests, as well as of sectional character, between the Northern and Southern States of the Union developed itself in discussions, which, although they were conducted for the most part, with candor and decorum, and in a temper of reciprocal respect, very clearly foreshadowed the dangers of the future. The institution of slavery at that time existed in most of the States of the Union, as well as throughout the British Colonial Empire. It was denounced by conspicuous statesmen at the South as well as at the North. The ordinance of '87, excluding slavery from the North-western Territory, was originated and passed by the South in the Congress of the Confederation; and the further introduction of slaves into Virginia had been prohibited by law in that commonwealth two years before the adoption in Massachusetts of that justly famous “Bill of Rights," by which slavery was afterwards judicially held to have been abolished in that State. In the important agricultural States of the South, however, the number of slaves was greater, and their labor more productive than in the Middle and Northern States; and although the slavery question cannot properly be said to have been dangerously debated between the representatives of the South and of the North before the epoch of the "Missouri Compromise" in 1820, it undoubtedly contributed to the vivacity with which the differing commercial interests of the two sections were discussed in the Congress of the Union from the outset of its history. But it was upon a great question of finance, the proposition *"Perhaps no man in the United States has sacrificed or done more for the present Constitution than myself, and contrary to all my anticipations of its fate, as you well know, from the very beginning, I am still laboring to prop the frail and worthless fabric."-Hamilton's Works, vi., 530. + Dunbar. Rise and Decline of Commercial Slavery in America. New York, 1863, pp. 212-16. made by Mr. Hamilton, then secretary of the treasury, that the Federal government should assume the debts of the States, that the two great sections of the Union were, in 1790, for the first time arrayed against each other in an attitude sufficiently ominous of coming mischief to justify the earnestness with which Washington, in his farewell address, a few years afterwards, warned his countrymen against the organization of sectional parties. The Northern States supported, the Southern States opposed this measure with so much acrimony on either side, that when the proposition was finally rejected, Congress met and adjourned from day to day without doing anything; and the members from the Eastern States openly threatened the secession of those States from the Union, and the formation of an Eastern Confederacy.* A compromise was finally effected by the concession to the South of a site for the National Capital on the banks of the Potomac, in return for the reconsideration by the Southern members of the vote which had defeated the "Assumption Bill;" and American statesmanship received its first important lesson in the only policy which could be reasonably relied upon to confirm and consummate the union of the States. This lesson Mr. Jefferson, writing in 1792 to General Washington, declared had been lost upon the people of the Northern States, whose representatives in Congress had "availed themselves of no occasion of allaying the Southern opposition to the original coalescence" of the States; and the objections of Washington to accepting a second presidential term were finally-removed by the solemn consideration that the "continuance of the Union" depended upon the confidence which the people of both sections reposed in him, and in him alone. The importance of this consideration became painfully obvious during the administration of the successor of Washing * Jefferson's Abridgment of Debates, vol. i., p. 250. |