fused, and Rhode Island remained in this position, at the time when the question of organizing the new government came before the Congress of the Confederation, in July, 1788. Better counsels prevailed with her people, at a later period, and the same redeeming virtue and good sense were at length triumphant, which, in still more recent trials, have enabled her to overcome error, and party passion, and the false notions of liberty that have sometimes prevailed within her borders. As the stranger now traverses her little territory, in the journey of a day, and beholds her ample enjoyment of all civil and religious blessings, -her busy towns, her fruitful fields, her fair seat of learning, crowning her thriving capital, her free, happy, and prosperous people, her noble waters where she sits enthroned upon her lovely isles,—and remembers her ancient and her recent history, he cannot fail, in his prayer for her welfare, to breathe the hope that an escape from great social perils may be found for her and for all of us, in the future, as it has been in the past. But the attitudes taken by North Carolina and Rhode Island - although in truth quite different and taken from very different motives-placed the Union in a new crisis, involving the Constitution in great danger of being defeated, notwithstanding its adoption by more than nine States. Both of them were members of the existing confederacy; both had a right to vote on all questions coming before the Congress of that confederacy; and it was to this body that the national Convention itself had looked for the initiatory measures necessary to organize the new government under the Constitution. The question whether that government should be organized at all, was necessarily involved with the question as to the place where it should be directed to assemble and to exercise its functions. This latter topic had often been a source of dissension between the States; and there was much danger lest the votes of North Carolina and Rhode Island, in the Congress of the Confederation, by being united with the votes of States opposed to the selection of the place that might be named as the seat of the new government, might prevent the Constitution from being established at all. But now, the pen that has thus traced these great events, and has sought to describe them in their true relations to the social welfare of the American people, must seek repose. How the Constitution was inaugurated, by whom and upon what principles it was put into operation, how and why it was amended or altered, when and under what circumstances the two remaining States accepted its benefits, what development and what direction it received from the generation of statesmen who made and established it, belongs to the next epoch in our political history, the Administration of Washington. APPENDIX. NOTE ON THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE ORDINANCE OF 1787. (See page 344, ante.) WHEN writing this volume, I prepared an elaborate note, for the purpose of proving that the Ordinance of 1787 was drawn up by Nathan Dane. The subsequent publication by Mr. Charles King, of New York, of an autograph letter of Mr. Dane's to his father, the Hon. Rufus King, written a few days after the passage of the Ordinance, put an end to all possibility of controversy on this subject, and made it unnecessary for me to burden my readers with a discussion of Mr. Dane's claim to be regarded as the author of that instrument. The following sentence in Mr. Dane's letter to Mr. King is decisive of the point which has sometimes been controverted : "When I drew the Ordinance, (which passed, a few words excepted, as I originally formed it,) I had no idea the States would agree to the sixth article, prohibiting slavery, as only Massachusetts, of the Eastern States, was present, and therefore omitted it in the draft; but finding the House favorably disposed on the subject, after we had completed the other parts, I moved the article, which was agreed to without opposition." |