THE

FORMATION OF THE CONSTITUTION

OF THE

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

IN FIVE BOOKS.

BOOK FIFTH.

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.

JUNE, 1787.

CHAPTER I.

THE CONSTITUTION.

1787.

"THE American constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man;" but it had its forerunners.

England had suffered the thirteen colonies, as free states, to make laws each for itself and never for one of the others; and had established their union in a tempered subordination to the British crown. Among the many guides of America, there had been Winthrop and Cotton, Hooker and Haynes, George Fox and William Penn, Roger Williams and John Clarke; scholars of Oxford and many more of Cambridge; Gustavus Adolphus and Oxenstiern; the merchants of the United Netherlands; Southampton and Baltimore, with the kindliest influences of the British aristocracy; Shaftesbury with Locke, for evil as well as for good; all the great slavetraders that sat on thrones or were fostered by parliament; and the philanthropist Oglethorpe, who founded a colony exclusively of the free on a territory twice as large as France, and though he had to mourn at the overthrow of his plans for liberty, lived to see his plantation independent.

There were other precursors of the federal government; but the men who framed it followed the lead of no theoretical writer of their own or preceding times. They harbored no desire of revolution, no craving after untried experiments. They wrought from the elements which were at hand, and shaped them to meet the new exigencies which had arisen. The least possible reference was made by them to abstract doctrines;

they moulded their design by a creative power of their own, but nothing was introduced that did not already exist, or was not a natural development of a well-known principle. The materials for building the American constitution were the gifts of the ages.

Of old, the family was the rudiment of the state. Of the Jews, the organization was by tribes. The citizens of the commonwealths of the Hellenes were of one blood. Among the barbarous tribes of the fourth continent, the governments and the confederacies all rested on consanguinity. Nations, as the word implied, were but large communities of men of one kin; and nationalities survive to this day, a source of strength in their unity, and yet of strife where two or more of them exist in their original separateness and are nevertheless held in subjection under one ruler. Rome first learned to cherish the human race by a common name and transform the vanquished into citizens.

The process of assimilation which Rome initiated by war received its perfect development in the land where the Dutch and the Swedes, and in the country north-west of the Ohio the French, competed in planting colonies; where the English, the Irish, the Scotch for the most part came over each for himself, never reproducing their original nationality; and where from the first fugitives from persecution of all nations found a safe asylum. Though subjects of the English king, all were present in America as individuals.

The English language maintained itself without a rival, not merely because those speaking it as their mother tongue very greatly outnumbered all others, and because all acknowledged English supremacy; but for the simplicity of its structure; its logical order in the presentment of thought; its suitableness for the purposes of every-day life; for the discussion of abstract truths and the apprehension of Anglo-Saxon political ideas; for the instrument of the common law; for science and observation; for the debates of public life; for every kind of poetry, from humor to pathos, from descriptions of nature to the action of the heart and mind.

But the distinctive character of the new people as a whole, their nationality, so to say, was the principle of individuality

which prevailed among them as it had nowhere done before. This individuality was strengthened by the struggles with Nature in her wildness, by the remoteness from the abodes of ancient institutions, by the war against the traditions of absolute power and old superstitions, till it developed itself into the most perfect liberty in thought and action; so that the American came to be marked by the readiest versatility, the spirit of enterprise, and the faculty of invention. In the declaration of independence the representatives of the United States called themselves "the good people of these colonies." The statesmen who drew the law of citizenship in 1776 made no distinction of nationalities, or tribes, or ranks, or occupations, or faith, or wealth, and knew only inhabitants bearing allegiance to the governments of the several states in union.

Again, this character of the people appeared most clearly in the joint action of the United States in the federal convention, where the variant prejudices that still clung to separate states eliminated each other.

The constitution establishes nothing that interferes with equality and individuality. It knows nothing of differences by descent, or opinions, of favored classes, or legalized religion, or the political power of property. It leaves the individual alongside of the individual. No nationality of character could take form, except on the principle of individuality, so that the mind might be free, and every faculty have the unlimited opportunity for its development and culture. As the sea is made up of drops, American society is composed of separate, free, and constantly moving atoms, ever in reciprocal action, advancing, receding, crossing, struggling against each other and with each other; so that the institutions and laws of the country rise out of the masses of individual thought, which, like the waters of the ocean, are rolling evermore.

The rule of individuality was extended as never before. The synod of the Presbyterians of New York and Philadelphia, a denomination inflexibly devoted to its own creed, in their pastoral letter of May 1783, published their joy that "the rights of conscience are inalienably secured and interwoven with the very constitutions of the several states." Religion was become avowedly the attribute of man and not of a cor