CHAPTER III.

RATIFICATIONS OF NEW HAMPSHIRE, VIRGINIA, AND NEw York, WITH PROPOSED AMENDMENTS.

SOUTH CAROLINA was the eighth State that had ratified the Constitution, and one other only was required for its inauguration. In this posture of affairs the month of May in the year 1788 was closed. An intense interest was to be concentrated into the next two months, which were to decide the question whether the Constitution was ever to be put into operation. The convention of Virginia was to meet on the 2d, and that of New York on the 17th, of June; the convention of New Hampshire stood adjourned to the 18th of the same month. The latter assembly was to meet at Concord, from which place intelligence would reach the Middle and Southern States through Boston and the city of New York. The town of Poughkeepsie, where the convention of New York was to sit, lay about midway between the cities of Albany and New York, on the east bank of the Hudson. The land route from the city of New York to Richmond, where the convention of Virginia was to meet, was of course through the city of Philadelphia. The distance from Concord to Pough

keepsie, through Boston, Springfield, and Hudson, was about two hundred and fifty miles. The distance from Poughkeepsie to Richmond, through the cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, was about four hundred and fifty miles. The public mails, over any part of these distances, were not carried at a rate of more than fifty miles for each day, and over a large part of them they could not have been carried so fast. The information needed at such a crisis could not wait the slow progress of the public conveyances.

No one could tell how long the conventions of New York and Virginia might be occupied with the momentous question that was to come before them. It was evident, however, that there was to be a great struggle in both of them, and it was extremely important that intelligence of the final action of New Hampshire should be received in both at the earliest practicable moment. For, whatever might be the weight due to the example of New Hampshire under other circumstances, if, before the conventions of New York and Virginia had decided, it should appear that nine States had ratified the Constitution, the course of those bodies might be materially influenced by a fact of so much consequence to the future position of the Union, and to the relations in which those two States were to stand to the new government. It was equally important, too, that whatever might occur in the conventions of New York and Virginia should be known respectively in each of them, as speedily as possible.

About

the middle of May, therefore, Hamilton arranged with Madison for the transmission of letters between Richmond and Poughkeepsie, by horse expresses; and by the 12th of June he had made a similar arrangement with Rufus King, General Knox, and other Federalists at the East, for the conveyance from Concord to Poughkeepsie of intelligence concerning the result in New Hampshire.

A very full convention of delegates of the people of Virginia assembled at Richmond on the 2d of June, embracing nearly all the most eminent public men of the State, except Washington and Jefferson. All parties felt the weight of responsibility resting upon the State. Every State that had hitherto acted finally on the subject had ratified the Constitution; in three of them it had been adopted unanimously; in several of the others it had been sanctioned by large majorities; and in those in which amendments had been proposed, they had not been made conditions precedent to the adoption. So far, therefore, as the voice of any State had pronounced the Constitution defective, or dangerous to any general or particular interest, the mode of amendment provided by it, to be employed after it had gone into operation, had been relied upon as sufficient and safe. The opposition in Virginia were consequently reduced to this dilemma; they must either take the responsibility of rejecting the Constitution entirely, or they must assume the equally hazardous responsibility of insisting that the ratification of the State should be given only upon the condition of previous

amendments. They were prepared to do both, or either, according to the prospects of success; for their convictions were fixed against the system proposed; their abilities, patriotism, courage, and personal influence were of a high order; and their devotion to what they deemed the interests of Virginia was unquestionable.

They were led, as I have already said they were to be, by Patrick Henry, whose reputation had suf fered no abatement since the period when he blazed into the darkened skies of the Revolution, when his untutored eloquence electrified the heart of Virginia, and became, as has been well said, even "a cause of the national independence." He had held the highest honors of the State, but had retired, poor, and worn down by twenty years of public service, to rescue his private affairs by the practice of a profession which, in some of its duties, he did not love, and for which he had, perhaps, a single qualification in his amazing oratorical powers. His popularity in Virginia was unbounded. It was the popularity that attends genius, when thrown with heart and soul, and with every impulse of its being, into the cause of popular freedom; and it was a popularity in which reverence for the stern independence and the self-sacrificing spirit of the patriot was mingled with admiration for the splendid gifts of oratory

1 Notice of Henry, in the National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans, Vol. II. Mr. Jefferson has said that Henry's power as a popular orator was

greater than that of any man he had ever heard, and that Henry

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appeared to speak as Homer wrote." (Jefferson's Works, I.

4.)

which Nature, and Nature alone, had bestowed upon him. But Mr. Henry was rightly appreciated by' his contemporaries. They knew that, though a wise man, his wisdom lacked comprehensiveness, and that the mere intensity with which he regarded the ends of public liberty was likely to mislead his judgment as to the means by which it was to be secured and upheld The chief apprehension of his opponents, on this important occasion, was lest the power of his eloquence over the feelings or prejudices of his auditory might lead the sober reflections of men astray.

He was at this time fifty-two years of age. Although feeling or affecting to feel himself an old and broken man, he was yet undoubtedly master of all his natural powers. Those powers he exerted to the utmost, to defeat the Constitution in the convention of Virginia. He employed every art of his peculiar rhetoric, every resource of invective, of sarcasm, of appeal to the fears of his audience for liberty; every dictate of local prejudice and State pride. But he employed them all with the most sincere conviction that the adoption of the proposed Constitution would be a wrong and dangerous step. Nor is it surprising that he should have so regarded it. He had formed to himself an ideal image which he was fond of describing as the American spirit. This national spirit of liberty, erring perhaps at times, but in the main true to right and justice as well as to freedom, was with him a kind of guardian angel of the republic. He seems to have considered it able to correct its own errors without the aid of