setts, a very decided majority in the beginning received the new plan of government with disfavor and opposition.

It was upon this great question of the ratification of the Constitution that the first division of the people of the United States into parties may be said to have occurred, although the grounds of opposition were by no means the same in all the States.

Those who favored the new scheme of government assumed the name of Federalists; those who opposed its adoption were called Anti-Federalists. It has been said with much force that the latter name is not a descriptive one, as the opponents of the Constitution were made up, as a rule, of those who were not so much opposed to a federal as to a National government, and the arguments on which they relied, in all the states, were largely drawn from the dangers to individual liberty and local government from the centralizing and national character, as they contended, of the new constitution.

five

When we read

The first State to ratify the Constitution was Delaware, and that by a unanimous vote, on the seventh day of December 1789. Pennsylvania followed days after by a vote of two to one. the names of the delegates from these two States to the Convention that framed the Constitution, we readily see the explanation of their prompt and decisive action. Among the delegates from Delaware were John Dickinson and George Reed, while Pennsylvania appeared

in the person of the venerable Benjamin Franklin, associated with whom were Thomas Mifflin, Robert Morris, George Clymer, Jared Ingersoll, James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris.

Two of the remaining States-New Jersey and Georgia ratified the Constitution unanimously, and in the Conventions of Connecticut and Maryland the opposition could muster but a small vote.

The Convention in Massachusetts met January 9, 1788. The success of the new Government was staked upon the action of that commonwealth, and the friends of the Constitution soon learned that upon a direct vote her voice would be against ratification. Votes must be won over or the cause was lost, and the cry was even raised in the Boston Gazette that money was subscribed to corrupt members of the Convention who opposed the Constitution. But this seems to have been a false clamor, for the plan actually devised to secure a majority in favor of ratification was so well adapted to the emergency that it was equally effectual in turning the scales in other States. That plan recognized the fact that many most ardent patriots, as anxious as any of their fellow citizens to escape from the imbecility and hopeless decline of the Confederation still hesitated about accepting the Constitution, without incorporating additional restraints upon the powers of the Federal Government. It accordingly proposed to combine with ratification the recommedation of such Amendments as seemed effective of this purpose.

Govenor John Hancock, President of the Convention, whose position had been in doubt, agreed to bring foward the proposition in the Convention. He was earnestly supported by Samuel Adams, the "helmsman of the Revolution, at its origin," who was also slow in favoring a National Government.

The Amendments matured, as Bancroft tells us, in secret council, by Hancock, Adams, Theophilus Parsons and other resolute and trusty men were offered as Hancock said, "for the removing the fears and quieting the apprehensions of the good people of the Commonwealth, and the more effectual guarding against an undue administration of the Federal Government.” Nevertheless the final vote was a close one, and when taken on the sixth day of February showed one hundred and sixty-eight in the negative, to one-hundred and eighty-seven, in the affimative.

The tide was now turned, but the fight in the Virginia Convention, which assembled in Richmond on the second day of June 1788, surpassed that in any of the States in the greatness of the combatants, both for and against the Constitution. The opponents of ratification were marshalled under that incomparable leader Patrick Henry, whose speeches in the Convention, even in the imperfect reports preserved to us, have always been a puzzle to those who accepted the common idea that he was merely an unlettered child of nature, endowed with a miraculous gift of oratory; an idea but recently dissipated in his admirable bi

ography by Professor Moses Colt Tyler, in which he is shown by proof that can not be assailed to have been a well trained lawyer and an unusually well educated man.

Henry was ably seconded by George Mason and Grayson, and had less active lieutenants in James Monroe, John Tyler Sr. and Benjamin Harrison.

The friends of ratification were led by Madison, who was supported by Edmund Pendleton, Govenor Randolph, John Marshall, (afterward Chief Justice) Henry Lee, ("Light-horse Harry") Bushrod Washington, nephew of the General, and afterwards the wellknown Justice Washington of the U. S. Supreme Court. George Wythe, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the famous Chancellor, who numbered among his law pupils Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall and Henry Clay, associated with these on both sides were men of scarcely less ability and weight in their Commonwealth, but were names little known to outside history. It was truly a war of giants, and in the opposing ranks were thus found nearly all that was distinguished for ability, patriotic service or legal learning in the State.

Three of her great names alone are missing. Washing had been President of the Federal Convention, had heartily approved the Constitution. From his retirement at Mount Vernon he watched with intense interest its progress through the several State Conventions, freely corresponding with its supporters in all

sections and never wavering in his faith in its ultimate success. His well-known favor was a powerful influence not only in Virginia, but in all the States in securing its ratification. ratification. Richard Henry Lee, the polished orator, and mover of the Declaration of Independence, was a zealous Anti-federalist.

Thomas Jefferson had been Minister to France for the past four years, and from that distant land had followed the course of events at home as faithfully reputed to him by James Madison and other confidential correspondents, with the ardent interest of the patriot and the friend of liberty.

At first he had received the draft of the new Constitution rather coldly, strongly objecting to the omission of a Bill of Rights, such as was found in the first Constitution adopted by the Commonwealth of Virginia, and also to the eligibility of the President. At a later date he wrote to Madison, "I wish, with all my soul, that the the nine first Conventions may accept the new Constitution, to secure us the good it contains; but I equally wish that the four latest whichever they may be, may refuse to accede to it, till a declaration of rights be annexed; but no objection to the new form must produce a schism in our Union." When, however, he heard of the plan adopted by Massachusetts, he declared that it was far preferable and expressed the hope that it would be followed, by the States which were yet to decide. His own statement of his position was, "I am not of the