title: An eulogy on the life and character of James Madison ... delivered at the request of the mayor, aldermen, and Common council of the city of Boston, September 27, 1836
text: hiESSTESDDD SS3H9NOD JO AHVUSn T«* ^ ~4 & ^ Ks /; op 35 Qe 4 • >> ^ % /• ^ "^ rf I r+& ^ % G* o s> ** o^ << ■ - % ^ V 4> * V j5 Qft > '\*+ % %■ £ ?5 <& -v rO' * ^ ^ ^ ^ o5 % « 0° ' o ft s _r* <* 0° rP ^tf- "W ^tf \ <^ % '^ v> ^ ^.o^ <0 O. V d °« c b % ^, ^ ■ £^ ^ ^ft * oV -^ -V- i V %0^ '■:■ V & s ^ V >r~. V ^ V EULOGY o I* JAMES MADISON. BY JOHN QUINCY ADAMS ■■<■ AN EULOGY ON THE LIFE AND CHARACTER OF JAMES MADI SON, FOURTH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES; DELIVERED AT THE REQUEST OF THE MAYOR, ALDERMEN, AND COMMON COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF BOSTON, SEPTEMBER 27, 1836. BY JOHN QU1NCY ADAMS. i BOSTON: JOHN II. EASTBURN, CITY PRINTER, No. 18 State Street. 1836. E?34 I CITY OF BOSTON In the Board of Aldermen, September 28, 1836. Resolved, That the thanks of the City Council be presented to the Hon. John Quincy Adams, for the eloquent Eulogy delivered by him, on the 27th instant, in the Odeon, at their request, in memory of the late venerable James Madison, and that a copy be requested for the press. Sent down for concurrence. SAMUEL T. ARMSTRONG, Mayor. I? Read and concurred. In Common Council, September 29, 1836. JOSIAH QUINCY, Jr., President. A true copy. — Attest, S. F. McCLEARY, City Clerk. EULOGY. When the imperial despot of Persia, surveyed the myriads of his vassals, whom he had assembled for the invasion and conquest of Greece, we are told by the father of profane history,* that the monarch's heart, at first, distended with pride, but immediately afterwards sunk within him, and turned to tears of anguish at the thought, that within one hundred years from that day, not one of all the countless numbers of his host would remain in the land of the living. The brevity of human life, had afforded a melan- choly contemplation to wiser and better men than Xer\t v s. in ages long before that of his own existence. It is still the subject of philosophical reflection or of Christian resignation, to the living man of the pres- ent age. It will continue such, so long as the race of man shall exist upon earth. But it is the condition of our nature to look before and after : The Persian tyrant looked forward, and lamented the shortness of life ; but in that century which bounded his mental vision, he knew not what was to come to pass, for weal or woe, to the race whose transitory nature he deplored, and his own purposes, happily baffled by the elements which he with absurd presumption would have chastised, were of the most odious and detestable character. * Herodotus. 4 Reflections upon the shortness of time allotted to individual man upon this planet, may be turned to more useful account, by connecting them with ages past than with those that are to come. The family of man is placed upon this congregated ball to earn an improved condition hereafter by improving his own condition here — and this duty of improvement is not less a social than a selfish principle. We are bound to exert all the faculties bestowed upon us by our Maker, to improve our own condition, by improving that of our fellow men, and the precepts that we should love our neighbor as ourselves, and that we should do to others as we would that they should do unto us, are but examples of that duty of co-opera- tion to the improvement of his kind, which is the first law of God to man, unfolded alike in the volumes of nature and of inspiration. Let us look back then for consolation from the thought of the shortness of human life, as urged upon us by the recent decease of James Madison, one of the pillars and ornaments of his country and of his age. His time on earth was short, yet he died full of years and of glory — less, far less than one hundred years have elapsed since the day of his birth — yet has he fulfilled, nobly fulfilled, his destinies as a man and a Christian. He has improved his own condi- tion by improving that of his country and his kind. He was born in Orange County in the British Col- ony of Virginia on the 5th of March, 1750; or ac- cording to the computation of time by the Gregorian Calender, adopted the year after that of his birth, on the 16th of March 1751, of a distinguished and opu- lent family ; and received the earl) elements of edu- cation parti) at a public school under the charge ol Donald Robertson, and afterwards in the paternal mansion under the private tuition of the Rev. Thomas Martin ; l>\ whose instructions he was prepared for admission at Princeton College. There arc three stages in the history of the North American Revolution — The first of which may be considered as commencing with the order of the British Council for enforcing the acts of trade in 1760, and as having reached its crisis at the meeting of the first Congress fourteen years after at Phila- delphia. It was a struggle for the preservation and recovery of the rights and liberties of the British Colonies. It terminated in a civil war, the character and object of which were changed by the Declaration of Independence. \ The second stage is that of the War of Indepen- dence, usually so called — but it began fifteen months before the Declaration, and was itself the immediate cause and not the effect of that event. It closed by the preliminary Treaty of Peace concluded at Paris on the 30th of November, 1782. The third is the formation of the Anglo-American People and Nation of North America. This event was completed by the meeting of the first Congress of the United States under their present Constitution of the 4th of March, 1789. Thirty years is the usual computation for the duration of one generation of the human race. The space of time from 1760 to 1790 includes the generation with which the North American Revolution began, passed through all its stages and ended. The attention of the civilized European world and perhaps an undue proportion of our own has been drawn to the second of these three stages — to the 6 contest with Great Britain for Independence. It was an arduous and apparently a very unequal con- flict. But it was not without example in the annals of mankind. It has often been remarked that the distinction between rebellion and revolution consists only in the event, and is marked only by difference of success. But to a just estimate of human affairs there are other elementary materials of estimation. A revolution of government to the leading minds by which it is undertaken is an object to be accomplish- ed. William Tell, Gustavus Vasa, William of Orange, had been the leaders of revolutions, the ob- ject of which had been the establishment or the re- covery of popular liberties. But in neither of those cases had the part performed by those individuals been the result of deliberation or design. The sphere of action in all those cases was incomparably more limited and confined, the geographical aimen- sions of the scene narrow and contracted — the polit- ical principles brought into collisions of small compass — no foundations'of the social compact to be laid — no people to be formed — the popular movement of the American revolution had been preceded by a foresee- ing and directing mind. I mean not to say by one mind ; but by a pervading mind, which in a preced- ing age had inspired the prophetic verses of Berkley, and which may be traced back to the first Puritan settlers of Plymouth and of Massachusetts Bay. " From the first Institution of the Company of Mas- sachusetts Bay," says Dr. Robertson, " its members seem to have been animated with a spirit of innova- tion in civil policy as well as in religion : and by the habit of rejecting established usages in the one, the\ were prepared for deviating from them in the other. They had applied for a royal charter, in order to give legal effect to their operations in England, as acts of a body politic ; but the persons whom thej sent out to America as soon as they landed there, considered themselves as individuals, united together by volun- tary association, possessing the natural right of men who form a society to adopt what mode of govern- ment and to enact what laws the) deemed most con- ducive to general felicity." And such had continued to be the prevailing spirit of the people of New England from the period of their settlement to that of the revolution. The people of Virginia too, notwithstanding their primi- tive loyalty, had been trained to revolutionary doc- trines and to warlike habits ; by their frequent col- lisions with Indian wars ; by the convulsions of Bacon's rebellion, and by the wars with France, of which their own borders were the theatre, down to the close of the war which immediately preceded that of the revolution. The contemplation and the defiance of danger, a qualification for all great enter- prise and achievement upon earth, was from the very condition of their existence, a property almost univer- sal to the British Colonists in North America, and hardihood of body, unfettered energy of intellect and intrepidity of spirit, fitted them for trials, which the feeble and enervated races of other ages and climes could never have gone through. For the three several stages of this new r Epocha in the earthly condition of man, a superintending Providence had ordained that there should arise from the native population of the soil, individuals with minds organized and with spirits trained to the exi- gencies of the times, and to the successive aspects of 8 the social state. In the contest of principle which originated with the attempt of* the British Govern- ment to burden their Colonies with taxation by act of Parliament, the natural rights of mankind found efficient defenders in James Otis, Patrick Henry, John Dickinson, Josiah Quincy, Benjamin Franklin, Arthur Lee and numerous other writers of inferior note. As the contest changed its character, Samuel and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were among the first who raised the standard of Independence and prepared the people for the conflict through which they were to pass. For the contest of physi- cal force by arms, Washington, Charles Lee, Put- nam, Green, Gates, and a graduation of others of in- ferior ranks had been prepared by the preceding wars — by the conquest of Canada and by the previ- ous capture of Louisburg. From the beginning of the war, every action was disputed with the perse- verance and tenacity of veteran combatants, and the minute men of Lexington and Bunker's Hill were as little prepared for flight at the onset as the Macedo- nian phalanx of Alexander or the tenth legion of Julius Caesar. But the great work of the North American revolu- tion was not in the maintenance of the rights of the British Colonies by argument, nor in the conflict of physical force by war. The Declination of Indepen- dence annulled the national character of the Ameri- can people. That character had been common to them all as subjects of one and the same sovereign, and that sovereign was a king. Tin; dissolution of that tie was pronounced by one act common to them all, and it left them as members of distinct communi- ties in the relations towards each other, bound only by the obligations of the law of nature and of the Union. In which they had renounced their connexion with the mother coiintn. But what was to he the condition of their national existence? This was the problem of difficult solu- tion for them; and this was the opening of the new era in the science of government and in the history of mankind. Their municipal governments were founded upon the common law of England, modified by their re- spective charters; by the Parliamentary law of Eng- land so far as it had been adopted by their usages, and by the enactments of their own Legislative as- semblies. This was a complicated system of law, and has formed a subject of much internal perplexity to many of the States of the Union, and in several of them continues unadjusted to this day. By the common consent of all, however, this was reserved for the separate and exclusive regulation of each State within itself. As a member of the community of nations, it was also agreed that they should constitute one body — "Epluribus unuwiP was the devise which they as- sumed as the motto for their common standard. And there was one great change from their former condi- tion, which they adopted with an unanimity so abso- lute, that no proposition of a different character was ever made before them. It was that all their gov- ernments should be republican. They were deter- mined not only to be separately republics, but to tolerate no other form of government as constituting a part of their community. A natural consequence of this determination was that they should remain separate independences, and the first suggestion which 10 presented itself to them, was that their Union should be merely a confederation. In the first and in the early part of the second stage of the revolution, the name of James Madison had not appeared. At the commencement of the contest he was but ten years of age. When the first blood was shed, here in the streets of Boston, he was a student in the process of his education at Princeton College, where the next year, 1771, he received the degree of bachelor of Arts. He was even then so highly distinguished by the power of application and the rapidity of his progress, that he performed all the exercises of the two senior Collegiate years in one — while at the same time his deportment was so exem- plary, that Dr. Witherspoon, then at the head of that College, and afterwards himself one of the most emi- nent Patriots and Sages of our revolution, always de- lighted in bearing testimony to the excellency of his character at that early stage of his career ; and said to Thomas Jefferson long afterwards, when they were all colleagues in the revolutionary Congress, that in the whole career of Mr. Madison at Prince- ton, he had never known him to say or do an indis- creet thing. Discretion in its influence upon the conduct of men is the parent of moderate and conciliatory coun- sels, and these were peculiarly indispensable to the perpetuation of the American Union : and to the pros- perous advancement and termination of the revolution, precisely at the period when Mr. Madison was first introduced into public life. In 1775, among the earliest movements of tin 1 iw- olutionar} contest, he was a member of the Commit- tee of Public Safety of the County of Orange, and in 11 1776, of the Convention substituted for the ordinary Legislature of the Colony. By one of those transient caprices of popular favour, which sometimes influence elections, he was not returned to the House of Dele- gates in 1777, but was immediately after elected by that body to the Executive Council, of which he con- tinued a leading member till the close of the year 1779, and was then transferred by the Legislature to the representation of the Commonwealth in the Con- tinental Congress. His first entrance into public life was signalized by the resolution of the Convention of the State, instructing their Delegates to vote for the Independence of the Colonies ; by the adoption of a declaration of rights, and by their organization of a State government which continued for more than half a century the Constitution of the Commonwealth be- fore it underwent the revision of the people ; an event in which he was destined again to take a conspicuous part. On the 20th of March, 1780, he took his seat as a delegate in the Congress of the Confederation. It was then, in the midst of the revolution, and under the influence of its most trying scenes, that his polit- ical character was formed, and then it was that the virtue of discretion, the spirit of moderation, the con- ciliatory temper of compromise found room for exer- cise in its most comprehensive extent. One of the provisions in the articles of Confedera- tion most strongly marked with that same spirit of Liberty, the vital breath of the contest in which our fathers were engaged ; the true and undying conserv- ative spirit by which we their children enjoy that Freedom which they achieved ; but which like all oth- er pure and virtuous principles sometimes leads to er- ror by its excess was that no member of this impotent 2 12 Congress should hold that office more than three years in six. This provision however, was construed not to have commenced its operation until the final ratifica- tion of the articles by all the States on the first of March, 1781. Mr. Madison remained in Congress nearly four years from the 20th of March, 1780 till the first Monday in November, 1783. He was thus a member of that body during the last stages of the rev- olutionary war and for one year after the conclusion of the Peace. He had during that period, unceasing opportunities to observe the mortifying inefficiency of the merely federative principle upon which the Union of the States had been organized, and had taken an active part in all the remedial measures proposed by Congress for amending the Articles of Confedera- tion. A Confederation is not a country. There is no mag- net of attraction in any league of Sovereign and Inde- pendent States which causes the heart strings of the individual man to vibrate in unison with those of his neighbour. Confederates are not Countrymen, as the tie of affinity by convention can never be so close as the tie of kindred by blood. The Confederation of the North-American States was an experiment of inesti- mable value, even by its failure. It taught our fath- ers the lesson, that they had more, infinitely more to do than merely to achieve their Independence by War. That they must form their social compact upon prin- ciples never before attempted upon earth. That the Achean leagues of ancient days, the Hanseatic league of the middle ages, the leagues of Switzerland or of the Netherlands of later times, furnished no precedent upon which they could safely build their labouring plan of State. The Confederation was perhaps as 13 closely knit together as it was possible that such a form of polity could be grappled ; but it was matured by the State Legislatures without consultation with the People, and the jealousy of sectional collis- ions, and the distrust of all delegation of power, stamp- ed every feature of the work with inefficiency. The deficiency of powers in the Confederation was immediately manifested in their inability to regulate the commerce of the country, and to raise a revenue, indispensable for the discharge of the debt accumula- ted in the progress of the Revolution. Repeated ef- forts were made to supply this deficiency ; but always without success. On the 3d of February, 1781, it was recommended to the several States as indispensably necessary that they should vest a power in Congress to levy for the use of the United States a duty of five per cent, ad valorem upon foreign importations, and all prize goods condemned in a Court of Admiralty ; the money aris- ing from those duties to be appropriated to the dis- charge of the debts contracted for the support of the War. On the 18th of April, 1783, a new recommendation was adopted by Resolutions of nine States, as indis- pensably necessary to the restoration of public credit, and to the punctual and honorable discharge of the public debt to invest the Congress with a power to lay certain specific duties upon spirituous liquors, tea, su- gar, coffee and cocoa, and five per cent, ad valorem up- on all other imported articles of merchandise, to be exclusively appropriated to the payment of the princi- pal or interest of the public debt. And that as a further provision for the payment of the interest of the debt, the States themselves should 14 levy a revenue to furnish their respective quotas of an a oro T e o-ate annual sum of one million five hundred thous- and dollars. And that to provide a further guard for the payment of the same debts, to hasten their extinguishment, and to establish the harmony of the United States the sev- eral States should make liberal cessions to the Union of their territorial claims. With this act a Committee consisting of Mr. Mad- ison, Mr. Ellsworth and Mr. Hamilton was appointed to prepare an address to the States, which on the 26th of the same month was adopted, and transmitted to- gether with eight documentary papers, demonstrating the necessity that the measures recommended by the act should be adopted by the States. This address, one of those incomparable State pa- pers which more than all the deeds of arms, immortal- ized the rise, progress and termination of the North American revolution was the composition of James Madison. After compressing into a brief and lumin- ous summary all the unanswerable arguments to in- duce the restoration and maintenance of the public faith ; it concluded with the following solemn and pro- phetic admonition. "Let it be remembered finally, that it has ever been the pride and boast of America, that the rights for which she contended, were the rights of human na- ture. By the blessing of the author of these rights on the means exerted for their defence, they have pre- vailed over all opposition, and form the basis of thir- teen independent States. No instance has heretofore occurred nor can any instance be expected hereafter to occur, in which the unadulterated forms of republi- can Government can pretend to so fair an opportunity 15 of justifying themselves by their fruits. In this view the citizens of the United States are responsible for the greatest trust ever confided to a political society. If justice, good faith, honor, gratitude and all the oth- er qualities, which ennoble the character of a nation, and fulfil the ends of Government be the fruits of our establishments, the cause of Liberty will acquire a dignity and lustre which it has never yet enjoyed ; and an example will be set which cannot but have the most favorable influence on the rights of mankind. If on the other side, our Governments should be unfor- tunately blotted with the reverse of these cardinal and essential virtues, the great cause which we have en- gaged to vindicate will be dishonored and betrayed ; the last and fairest experiment in favor of the rights of human nature will be turned against them ; and their patrons and friends exposed to be insulted and silen- ced by the votaries of tyranny and usurpation." My countrymen ! do not your hearts burn within you at the recital of these words, when the retrospect brings to your minds the time when, and the persons by whom they were spoken ? Compare them with the closing paragraphs of the address from the first Con- gress of 1774, to your forefathers, the people of the Colonies. " Your own salvation and that of your posterity now depends upon yourselves. Against the temporary in- conveniences you may suffer from a stoppage of Trade, you will weigh in the opposite balance the endless mis- eries you and your descendants must endure from an established arbitrary power. You will not forget the Honor of your Country that must from your behavior take its title in the estimation of the world to Glory or to Shame ; and you will, with the deepest attention 16 reflect, that if the peaceable mode of opposition re- commended by us be broken and rendered ineffectual ; you must inevitably be reduced to choose either a more dangerous contest, or a final ruinous and infa- mous submission. We think ourselves bound in duty to observe to you that the schemes agitated against these Colonies have been so conducted as to render it prudent that you should extend your views to mourn- ful events and be in all respects prepared for every contingency." That was the trumpet of summons to the conflict of the revolution; as the address of April, 1783 was the note of triumph at its close. They were the first and the last words of the Spirit, which in the germ of the Colonial contest, brooded over its final fruit, the universal emancipation of civilized man. Compare them both with the opening and closing paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, too deeply riveted in your memories to need the repeti- tion of them by me ; and you have the unity of action essential to all heroic achievement for the benefit of mankind, and you have the character from its open- ing to its close ; the beginning the middle and the end of that unexampled, and yet unimitated moral and po- litical agent, the Revolutionary North American Con- gress. But the Address of 1783 marks the commencement of one aera in American History as well as the close of another. Madison, Ellsworth, Hamilton, were not of the Congress of 1774, nor yet of the Congress which declared Independence. They were of a succeeding generation, men formed in and by the revolution itself. They had imbibed the Spirit of the revolution, but the nature of their task was 17 changed. Theirs was no longer the duty to call up- on their countrymen to extend their views to mourn- ful events, and to prepare themselves for every con- tingency. But more emphatically than even the Congress o(* 1774 were they required to warn their fellow citizens that their salvation and that of their posterity depended upon themselves. The warfare of self-defence against foreign oppres- sion was accomplished. Independence, unqualified, commercial and political was achieved and recognised. But there was yet in substance no nation — no people — no country common to the Union. These had been self-formed in the heat of the common struggle for freedom ; and evaporated in the very success of the energies they had inspired. A Confederation of separate State Sovereignties, never sanctioned by the body of the people, could furnish no effective Govern- ment for the nation. A cold and lifeless indifference to the rights, the interests, and the duties of the Union had fallen like a palsy upon all their faculties instead of that almost supernatural vigor which at the origin of their contest had inscribed upon their banners, and upon their hearts "join or die." In November, 1783, Mr. Madison's constitutional term of service in Congress as limited bv the restric- tion in the articles of Confederation, expired. But his talents were not lost to his Country. He was elected the succeeding year a member of the Legisla- ture of his native State, and continued by annual elec- tion in that station till November, 1786, when having become re-eligible to Congress, he was again returned to that body, and on the 12th of February, 1787, re- sumed his seat among its members. In the Legislature of Virginia, his labors, during his 18 absence of three years from the general councils of the Confederacy, were not less arduous and unremit- ting, nor less devoted to the great purposes of revolu- tionary legislation, than while he had been in Con- gress. The Colony of Virginia had been settled under the auspices of the Episcopal Church of England. It was there the established Church ; and all other reli- gious denominations, there, as in England, were stig- matized with the name of dissenters. For the sup- port of this Church the Colonial laws prior to the rev- olution had subjected to taxation all the inhabitants of the Colony, and it had been endowed with grants of property by the Crown. The effect of this had nat- urally been to render the Church establishment un- popular, and the clergy of that Establishment general- ly unfriendly to the revolution. After the close of the War, in the year 1784, Mr. Jefferson introduced into the Legislature a Bill for the establishment of Reli- gious Freedom. The principle of the Bill was the abolition of all taxation for the support of Religion, or of its Ministers, and to place the freedom of all reli- gious opinions wholly beyond the control of the Legis- lature. These purposes were avowed, and supported by a long argumentative preamble. The Bill failed however to obtain the assent of the assembly, and in- stead of it they prepared and caused to be printed a Bill establishing a provision for teachers of the Chris- tian Religion. At the succeeding session of the Leg- islature, Mr. Jefferson was absent from the country, but Mr. Madison, as the champion of Religious Lib- erty supplied his place. A memorial and Remon- strance against the Bill making provision for the teach- ers of the Christian Religion was composed by Mr. Madison, and signed by multitudes of the citizens of 19 the Commonwealth, and the Bill drafted by Mr. Jef- ferson, together with its preamble, was by the influ- ence of his friend triumphantly carried against all op- position through the Legislature. The principle thai religious opinions are altogether beyond the sphere of legislative controul, is but one modification of a more extensive axiom, which in- cludes the unlimited freedom of the press ; of speech, and of the communication of thought in all its forms. An authoritative provision by law for the support of teachers of the Christian Religion was prescribed by the third Article of the Bill of Rights in the Consti- tution of this Commonwealth. An amendment re- cently adopted by the people has given their sanction to the opinions of Jefferson and Madison, and the substance of the Virginian Statute for the establish- ment of Religious Freedom, now forms a part of the Constitution of Massachusetts. That the freedom and communication of thoughl is paramount to all legislative authority, is a sentiment becoming from day to day more prevalent throughout the civilized world, and which it is fervently to be hoped will henceforth remain inviolate by the legislative author- ities not only of the Union, but of all its confeder- ated States. At the Session of 1 785, a general revisal was made of the Statute Laws of Virginia, and the great bur- den of the task devolved upon Mr. Madison as chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the House. The general principle which pervaded this operation was the adaptation of the civil code of the Common- wealth, to its republican and unfettered independence as a Sovereign State, and he carried it through with that same spirit of liberty and liberality which had 3 20 dictated the Act for the establishment of Religious Freedom. The untiring industry, the searching and penetrating application, the imperturbable patience, the moderation and gentleness of disposition, which smoothed his way over the ruggedest and most thorny paths of life, accompanied him through this transac- tion as through all the rest. While a member of the Legislature of Virginia, he had contributed more than any other person to the adjustment of that vital interest of the Union, the disposal of the Public Lands. It was the collision of opinions and of in- terests relating to them which had delayed the con- clusion of the Articles of Confederation, and the cession afterwards made of the North Western Ter- ritory was encumbered with conditions which further delayed its acceptance. By the influence of Mr. Madison, the terms of the cession were so modified, that in conformity with them the ordinance for the government of the North Western Territory was finally adopted and established by Congress on the 13th of July, 1787, in the midst of the labors of the Convention at Philadelphia, which two months later presented to the People of the United States for their acceptance, that Constitution of Government, thence- forth the polar star of their Union. The experience of four years in the Congress of the Confederation, had convinced Mr. Madison that the Union could not be preserved by means of that institution. That its inherent infirmity was a de- ficiency of power in the federal head, and that an in- surmountable objection to the grant of further powers to Congress, always arose from the adverse prejudices and jealousy with which the demand of them was urged by that body itself. The difficulty of obtain- 21 ing such grant of power, was aggravated by the con- sideration that it \\ as to be invested in those In w horn it was solicited, and was at the same time, and in the same degree, to abridge the power of those In whom it was to he granted. To avoid these obstacles it occurred to Mr. Mad- ison thai the agency of a distinct, delegated body, having no invidious interest of its own, or of its members, might be better adapted, deliberately to discuss the deficiencies of the federal compact, than the bod v itself by whom it was administered. 'The friends with whom he consulted in the Legislature of Virginia, concurred with him in these opinions, and the motion for the appointment of Commissioners to consider of the state of trade in the confederacy sug- gested by him, was made in the Legislature by his friend, Mr. Tyler, and carried by the weight of his opinions, and the exertion of his influence, without opposition. This proposition was made and Commissioners were appointed by the Legislature of Virginia, on the 21st of January, 1786. The Governor of the Com- monwealth, Edmund Randolph, was placed at the head of the delegation from the State. Mr. Madi- son and six others, men of the first character and influence in the State, were the other Commission- ers. The meeting was held at Annapolis in Septem- ber, and two Commissioners from New York, three from New Jersey, one from Pennsylvania, three from Delaware, and three from Virginia, constituted the whole number of this Convention. Five States only were represented, and among them, Pennsyl- vania by a single member. Four States, among 22 whom was Maryland, the very State within which the Assembly was held, had not even appointed Commissioners and the deputies from four others, amons: whom was our own beloved, native Common- wealth, suffering, even then, the awful calamity of a civil war, generated by the imbecility of the federal compact of union, did not even think it worth while to give their attendance. Yet even in that Convention of Annapolis, was the gem of a better order of things. The Commission- ers elected John Dickinson, of Delaware, their chair- man, and after a session of three days, agreed upon a report, doubtless drafted by Mr. Madison, — address- ed to the Legislatures by which they had been ap- pointed, and copies of which were transmitted to the other State Legislatures and to Congress. In this report they availed themselves of a sugges- tion derived from the powers which the Legislature of New Jersey had conferred upon their Commission- ers, and which contemplated a more enlarged revision of the Articles of Confederation, and they urgently recommended that a second convention of delegates to which all the States should be invited to appoint Commissioners, should be held at Philadelphia, on the second Monday of the next May, for a general revisal of the Constitution of the Federal Government, to render it adequate to the exigencies of the Union, and to report to Congress an act, which, when agreed to by them and confirmed by all the State Legislatures, should effectually provide for the same. In this re- port, first occurred the use of the terms Constitution of the Federal Government as applied to the United States — and the sentiment was avowed that it should 23 be made adequate to the exigencies of the Union. There was, however, yet no proposal for recurring to the great body of the people. The recommendation of the report was repeated by Congress without direct reference to it, upon a resolution offered by the delegation of Massachusetts, founded upon a proviso in the Articles of Confedera- tion and upon instructions from the State of New York to their delegates in Congress, and upon the susrjrestion of several States. The Convention as- Do sembled accordingly at Philadelphia, on the 9th of May, 1787. In most of the inspirations of genius, there is a simplicity, which, when they are familiarized to the general understanding of men by their effects, de- tracts from the opinion of their greatness. That the people of the British Colonies, who, by their united counsels and energies had achieved their indepen- dence, should continue to be one people, and consti- tute a nation under the form of one organized gov- ernment, was an idea, in itself so simple, and ad- dressed itself at once so forcibly to the reason, to the imagination, and to the benevolent feelings of all, that it can scarcely be supposed to have escaped the mind of any reflecting man from Maine to Georgia. It was the dictate of nature. But no sooner was it conceived than it was met by obstacles innumerable and insuperable to the general mass of mankind. They resulted from the existing social institutions, diversified among the parties to the projected national union, and seeming to render it impracticable. There were chartered rights for the maintenance of which the war of the revolution itself had first been waged. There were State Sovereignties, corporate feudal 24 baronies, tenacious of their own liberty, impatient of a superior and jealous, and disdainful of a paramount Sovereign, even in the whole democracy of the na- tion. There were collisions of boundary and of pro- prietary right westward in the soil — southward, in its cultivator. In fine the diversities of interests, of opinions, of manners, of habits, and even of extrac- tion were so great, that the plan of constituting them one People, appears not even to have occurred to any of the members of the Convention before they were assembled together. It was earnestly contested in the Convention itself. A large proportion of the members adhered to the principle of merely revising the articles of the Confed- eration and of vesting the powers of Government in the confederate Congress. A proposition to that ef- fect was made by Mr. Patterson of New Jersey, in a series of Resolutions, offered as a substitute for those of Mr. Randolph immediately after the first discus- sions upon them. Nearly four months of anxious deliberation were em- ployed by an assembly composed of the men who had been the most distinguished for their services civil and military, in conducting the country through the ardu- ous struggles of the revolution — of men who to the fire of genius added all the lights of experience and were stimulated by the impulses at once of ardent pat- riotism and of individual ambition aspiring to that last and most arduous labor of constituting a nation des- tined in after times to present a model of Government for all the civilized nations of the earth. On the 17th of September 1787, they reported. When the substance of their work was gone through a Committee of five members of whom Mr. Madison 25 was one, was appointed to revise the style, and to arrange the Articles which had been agreed to by the Convention, and this Committee was afterwards char- ged with the preparation of an address to the People of the United States. The address to the People was reported in the form of a Letter from Washington the President of the Convention to the President of Congress ; a Letter, admirable for the brevity and the force with which it presents the concentrated argument for the great change of their condition, which they called upon their fellow citizens to sanction. And this Letter, together with an addition of two or three lines in the pream- ble, reported by the same Committee, did indeed com- prise the most powerful appeal that could sway the heart of man, ever exhibited to the contemplation and to the hopes of the human race. It did not escape the notice or the animadversion of the adversaries to this new national organization. They were at the time when the Constitution was promulgated, perhaps more numerous, and scarcely less respectable, than the adherents to the Constitu- tion themselves. They had also in the management of the discussion, almost all the popular side of the argument. Government in the first and most obvious aspect which it assumes, is a restraint upon human action, and as such a restraint upon Liberty. The Constitu- tion of the United States Avas intended to be a gov- ernment of great energy, and of course of extensive restriction not only upon individual Liberty but upon the corporate action of States claiming to be Sovereign and Independent. The Convention had been aware that such restraints upon the People, could be imposed 26 by no earthly power other than the People themselves. They were aware that to induce the People to im- pose upon themselves such binding ligaments, motives not less cogent than those, which form the basis of human association were indispensably necessary. That the first principles of politics must be indisso- lubly linked with the first principles of morals. They assumed therefore the existence of a People of the United States, and made them declare the Consti- tution to be their own work — speaking in the first person and saying We the People of the United States, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Uni- ted States of America — and then the allegation of motives — to form a more perfect union, to establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and se- cure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our pos- terity. These are precisely the purposes for which it has pleased the author of nature to make man a so- cial being, and has blended into one his happiness with that of his kind. 