The relations of the two branches to the Executive were not so close and, therefore, more easily adjusted. No little credit is due to the very cool and conservative man who became the executive head of the revived nation. Even the journey of the President-elect from his home to the seat of government had been a continued ovation. It can be compared only with his progress to Cambridge nearly a score of years before to take command of the Revolutionary army. In both instances he was regarded as the deliverer of the country from a great peril. Possessed of probably the largest fortune in America, he could not be accused, as were many of his compatriots, of mercenary motives in his public actions. His freedom from personal ambition and selfish motive having been tested in the tempting days of the war, he could be relied upon by the people not to betray them in their extremity by any assumption of powers. Reputed to be a man of great self-control, almost cold-blooded in his self-guardedness, having dwelt far removed from the partisan strife pertaining naturally to populous centres, he would be careful in forming opinions, conservative in actions, and unlikely to yield to the influence of faction or partisanship. A moral man for that day, but neither a propagandist nor a zealot, he was unlikely to favour any sect or establishment of religion—a danger against which every possible precaution had been taken.
Even while the electors were being chosen and were holding their meetings in the several States, it was understood that Washington would undoubtedly be the choice for the first President. Indeed, before the Constitution had been fully formed, Hamilton and others were naming him. In the State conventions which considered the new form, speakers did not hesitate to predict his election. The assurance that the dreaded power would be first entrusted to his hands to form precedents persuaded many to try the change. John Adams, recently returned from representing his Government in Great Britain, and finding himself chosen to the second place, was said to be unable to comprehend how Washington's military experience had fitted him for this civic duty. Yet it was simply the first of many instances in which the gratitude of the people, backed by innate hero-worship, has singled out a war hero for the highest civic honours. Hence it came about that the very unanimity of election, for which all had hoped, defeated the purpose of the framers of the Constitution to have an unbiassed selection made by the presidential electors. This, or a like cause, has thwarted the purpose in every succeeding election of a President.
[Illustration: FEDERAL HALL, NEW YORK CITY. Upon the balcony between the pillars of the second story Washington was inaugurated President, April 30, 1789. Congress sat in this building in 1789 and 1790.]
Considering the descent of the American people at that time, it is not surprising that the inauguration of the first President was copied largely from the inauguration of a British sovereign. Our fathers were not attempting to experiment with novelties of government, but to adapt tried methods to their needs. The trappings of royalty to be seen in an ancient kingdom were replaced in this Republic by a military display, significant of the means by which its birthright had been won. The royal procession from Buckingham Palace to the Abbey was reproduced in miniature in the escort of the President from the Osgood House, his temporary residence, to the Government chambers. The religious and civic rites observed at Westminster Abbey were here separated, the religious service being held at St. Paul's Chapel and the civic in the little recess or gallery between two pillars which had been made by the architect in transforming the New York City Hall into the National Federal Hall. The oath was taken upon a copy of the Bible by both monarch and President. The shouts from the crowd in front of the Federal Hall in Wall Street which followed Chancellor Livingston's cry of "Long live George Washington, President of the United States!" were no less sincere, although coming from fewer throats, than the cries of "Long live the King!" and "God save the King!" which proclaimed the homage of British subjects to their monarch. The cannon in old Fort George, down near the Battery, could greet a President as lustily as those in the Tower proclaimed a king.
But every departure from royal custom was in the direction of simplicity of detail. Instead of being surrounded by nobles and courtiers, the President was attended by the committees on inauguration from the Senate and House, by Vice-President Adams, Governor Clinton, and others. The coronation feast in the palace was republicanised into a dinner at the residence of Governor Clinton. The rich robes of the sovereign, to make which the resources of an empire were drawn upon, were transformed into a suit of ordinary clothing made entirely in America. Instead of being seated in an ancient chair endowed with kingly legend, the American President stood during the short ceremony. Instead of being administered by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the oath was given to him by the Chancellor of the State of New York. The fair and festivities which commonly ended the first day of a new monarch were changed into an illumination of the city of New York and a display of fireworks.
The ceremonies between the new President and the Congress bore an even closer resemblance to those accustomed to be seen at a coronation or upon the opening of a session of Parliament. The inauguration speech of the monarch took the shape of an inaugural address by the President, which confessed a lack of personal assurance and a reliance upon a Higher Power, called attention to the benefits of government, and begged the co-operation of all concerned in it. The speech from the throne at the opening of Parliament became a message to Congress at the opening of each session. Like the king's speech, it was divided into a general address to both Houses, and a special message to each. The attention of the House of Representatives was called to various financial matters, as the English monarch had been compelled to do since the stormy Stuart period.
Early in Washington's administration the Senate showed conclusively, by refusing to hear the Secretary of War explain an Indian treaty, that the Cabinet was not to have the British privilege of initiating legislation. Washington was compelled, consequently, to recommend to each branch of Congress in his opening address such matters as he thought demanded legislation. It is the only form of influencing Congress which has ever been given to the President, barring patronage. On these State occasions, when opening Congress, Washington was accustomed to ride down to the Federal Hall in the coach provided for him by Congress, with four instead of the two white horses usually driven, and outriders in advance as well as the two secretaries who rode habitually on horseback behind the coach. As was the custom in Parliament, a committee was appointed in each branch of Congress to draft a reply to the President's address. In due time this was carried by the Senators in solemn procession, headed by Vice-President Adams, to Washington's residence, where it was handed to him. The more democratic House of Representatives contented itself with presenting its reply to the President in a vacant room in the Federal building. To each of these replies Washington was accustomed to make a counter-reply, thanking the members for their courtesy and promising his continued efforts to secure the objects they suggested.
These forms and ceremonials, although copied originally from Britain, had been used in the inauguration of colonial governors and in the opening of colonial assemblies. They furnish a further proof that the American nation has been a thing of growth, an imitation of existing conditions until such time as originality could be developed or imitations transformed to meet the new conditions. Local forms furnished the models. They would be changed only as national ideals were developed. The fact that most of these European ceremonials were lopped off within twelve years shows how rapidly originality was developed.
During the first session Congress took up "the principal officer in each of the executive departments," as authorised by the Constitution. It was understood that these would be about the same as had been developed during the preceding years, viz., Foreign Affairs, Treasury, and War. It was not foreseen that they would become in time a "Cabinet." To these three departments Congress added a fourth, Justice, for which an attorney-general was appointed. He was considered a head of an executive department and ranked with the other three among the President's advisers.
The wisdom of the framers of the Constitution in simply arranging outlines instead of filling in details was nowhere better shown than in the provisions for the national judiciary. Congress was bound only to establish "one superior court" and could add such inferior courts as necessity might demand from time to time. So essential was a national judiciary felt to be, that during the pressing business of the first session the United States was divided for this purpose into thirteen judicial districts, conforming generally to the eleven States in the Union, each to have a district court held by a Federal judge. These districts were then grouped into an eastern, a middle, and a southern circuit, in accord with the geographical grouping of the States. In these two circuit courts were to be held each year by one or more district judges and one or more justices of the Supreme Court. The latter, the final tribunal of appeal from these inferior courts, was to consist of a chief justice and five associate justices. Necessary officers, such as marshals and clerks, were given to these courts, rules were formulated for their procedure, and an act was passed at the next session defining crimes against the United States. A resident of any State was by these acts made the subject of a new sovereign,—the United States of America,—liable to be punished for treason committed not against his State, but against the nation; to be prosecuted for piracy on the seas; for counterfeiting money, altering records, committing perjury in the Federal courts, resisting a national official, or offering violence to a foreign representative.
The United States could now command some respect from the individual. The Union would also assume a new dignity from being a judge instead of an arbiter between the States. No more would such long-continued warfare as the territorial dispute between Connecticut and Pennsylvania bring the Republic into ill-repute. This new judicial power extended to "controversies between citizens of different States." Never again would the cumbersome machinery of Federal commissioners to hear disputed claims to territory be called into service—a kind of Platonic lot-casting phantasy—because the new national judiciary system covered "controversies between two or more States." What powerful possibilities were given to the new Central Government in the provision that the Supreme Court should have "appellate jurisdiction from the courts of the several States in the cases hereinafter specially provided for." It would be found as futile to restrict the cases in which the national court should have an appeal from the State courts as to attempt to reserve all the powers to the States not expressly granted to the Union. In the haste necessarily attendant upon suddenly putting the provisions of the new government into effect, no one had the leisure if any possessed the foresight to consider the limits to which the Federal courts might extend its authority in the light of interpretation. Even Jefferson later confessed that this member of the Federal Government was at first considered as the most harmless and helpless of all its organs.
[Illustration: THE PRESIDENTIAL MANSION, FRANKLIN SQUARE, NEW YORKCITY 1789.]
The beginnings of the national judiciary were so modest that no one could have taken alarm. The day that he signed the judiciary bill, Washington nominated John Jay, of New York, to be chief justice of the court, Edmund Randolph, of Virginia, to be attorney-general, and John Rutledge, of South Carolina, James Wilson, of Pennsylvania, William Gushing, of Massachusetts, Robert H. Harrison, of Maryland, and John Blair, of Virginia, to be associate justices.
State distribution of patronage was not such a criterion as in later appointments; yet the department of Justice represented all parts of the country. Considered from a sectional point, there seemed at the time little likelihood that the court would prove hostile to Southern individualism, since it contained, counting the attorney-general, four Southern men and three Northern men. District judges, attorneys, and marshals for the eleven judicial districts were appointed at the same time. A joint resolution of Congress asked the States to give their jailers power to receive and hold United States prisoners.
"Many of your old acquaintances and friends," wrote Washington to Lafayette, "are concerned with me in the administration of this government. By having Mr. Jefferson at the head of the department of state, Mr. Jay of the judiciary, Hamilton of the treasury, and Knox that of war, I feel myself supported by able coadjutors, who harmonise extremely well together."
Randolph, the Attorney-General, had never come in contact with Lafayette and consequently was not mentioned by Washington. This list of the chief administrators of the new Government must have reassured Lafayette, as well as other friends of the experiment, who wished to see it given a fair trial. They feared that the first administration might be given over to its enemies, who would be inclined to decrease rather than to strengthen its powers. Before the elections, General Lincoln had confessed to his former companion in arms, General Washington, his apprehension lest "the Anti-Federalists would try to get into office men unfriendly to the Constitution and so break it down, or men who would change many of its provisions at an early date." The attitude of the President and of most of his Cabinet, it was well known, was in favour of an efficient central power. John Adams, the Vice-President, had long been an advocate of a stronger frame, and now made good his words by casting the deciding vote in twenty ties in the Senate, every time in favour of centralised authority where there was any doubt involved. By one of these close votes authority was given the President to remove an official without the necessary consent of the Senate. The Constitution was silent on this point, and its decision favourable to the Executive greatly increased the prerogatives of that office.
This summer of 1789 was a time of anxiety for the friends of the new Government. They could scarcely hope that the new machinery had no flaw. At any moment an unforeseen defect might bring the whole to a standstill. Friction fatal to continued happiness might arise between the different departments of the General Government or between it and the component States. The people of some section might refuse to be bound by the General Government. During the heat of debate in the South Carolina Convention, a delegate had defiantly declared that his people would not take part in the new Government, if adopted, if not compelled to do so by force; unless a standing army which the new autocrat would possess should ram it down their throats with the points of bayonets, like the Turkish Janizaries enforcing despotic laws. As time went on and none of these calamities happened, a general confidence took possession of the people. At last they had come into a time of general agreement which would allow the experiment of self-government a fair test. Two States remained out of the Union, but time was expected to bring them in.
Even before the executive part of the new Government had been initiated, Congress attacked the most serious problem it had received from its predecessor. All were agreed that the chief difficulty in carrying on the Revolutionary War had been the lack of sufficient funds. The administration of the Articles of Confederation had been hampered constantly by the same need. The nation was even now millions upon millions of dollars in debt. In order to pay the interest on the French and Spanish loans it had been the custom for several years to borrow more money from the Dutch bankers. This was accomplished with no little difficulty. From the same source John Adams had secured funds with which to install the Government under the Constitution. The President-elect had been compelled to borrow money from a neighbour at Alexandria to meet the expenses of his journey to the capital to be inaugurated.
Public credit both at home and abroad was in ill-repute. To meet the foreign interest and installments due in 1789, over four million dollars must be raised. "Not worth a continental," sighed the merchant as he turned over a heap of depreciated Continental currency in a corner of his strong box. "Acknowledgment to pay by the 'untied States,'" said the owner of a pile of worthless United States certificates of indebtedness. His patriotic zeal in lending money to the National Government in her hour of need now bade fair to ruin him. The veteran of the Revolutionary War carried his half-pay certificate to the money-lender, glad to get even five shillings in the pound for it. Holders of various forms of State indebtedness besieged their State authorities for payment, rapidly approaching a point where they would welcome any agency which would get them their due.
According to Madison, the Continental Congress had chosen such an unseasonable date as the first Wednesday in March for beginning the new Government in the hope of levying a duty at once which would catch the spring importations of goods from Europe. It was this purpose which brought him to his feet in the House of Representatives on the eighth day of the first session to introduce a subject which he declared to be of the first magnitude, and one that required their first attention and their united exertions. This was the deficiency in the national treasury. For a remedy, he had chosen an impost on certain imported goods.
Fortunately, an impost was not a novelty requiring time and instruction to secure. Imposts had been instituted generations before to obtain funds for clearing the seas of pirates and for making safe the merchant marine. Because of these laudable objects, imposts had come to be regarded as a legitimate form of external taxation and as a means of raising a revenue to meet the expenses of government. The American people had been familiar with imposts from colonial times; they had been commonly levied by individual States since independence; and they had been associated in thought with the National Government in the vain attempts to revise the Articles by giving it this method of raising a revenue. "To lay and collect imposts" was indisputably stated in the Constitution as a power of the Federal Government. All that was necessary to do was to determine what goods should be liable to a duty and what the amount of duty should be.
Madison submitted for specific duties a fixed list of articles, which the Congress had determined upon in 1783, at the time it was requesting the States to allow it to collect a duty. The list was made up of rum, molasses, wine, tea, pepper, sugar, cocoa, and coffee. These were regarded at the time as luxuries likely to be consumed by those able to pay the duty. Other imported articles were to have an ad valorem duty. Madison had in mind, as he said, a productive tariff to secure money for the bankrupt national treasury. If more money was needed, the rates could be raised at any time. But early in the debate a member from Pennsylvania moved an amendment adding a number of articles to the specified list. They included beef, butter, candles, soap, boots, steel, cordage, nails, salt, tobacco, paper, hats, shoes, coaches, and spices. "Among these," said he, in explaining his motion, "are some calculated to encourage the productions of our country and protect our infant manufactures." At once, members from States which did not produce these articles protested that the addition of an impost would keep out foreign competition and make them pay higher prices for the goods. Other members from States which produced articles in neither list were equally urgent in getting their special products added. The tradesmen, manufacturers, and others of Baltimore sent in a petition "to the supreme Legislature of the United States as the guardians of the whole empire," begging them to impose on all foreign articles, which were made in America, such duties as would give a just preference to their labours. The shipwrights of Charleston in a petition pictured their distress under the present condition of trade and begged relief by proper legislation. Petitions soon followed from coach-makers, soap-boilers, snuff-grinders, makers of mathematical instruments, manufacturers of sheepskin trousers—in fact, nearly every form of industry wished to take advantage of this opportunity to secure national where they had formerly been able to get only local protection. The members of Congress described in their letters to friends the fish battles, the salt battles, and other manifestations in legislative halls of the cupidity of mankind when opportunity is once presented.
In this way it came about that the first revenue measure in the first session of the first efficient National Legislature brought the members face to face with the question of the purpose for which government exists. The Declaration of Independence had declared it to be the securing of certain inalienable rights with which men are endowed by their Creator. This French conception of certain abstract and general rights had taken in British and colonial minds the very concrete shape of property. It is scarcely just to say that even unconsciously the British people had instituted government for the protection of property and invested interests; but it is within the bounds of truth to say that a large part of the legislation of Parliament, in the formative days of the American colonies, had been inaugurated with this end in view. With the abuses of the monopolies granted by the mother country, the colonists were only too familiar. But the principle had been inherited, and it had been put into practice in the shape of legislative aid granted by colonial assemblies for the inauguration of various commercial and manufacturing enterprises. Sometimes this assistance had taken the form of money; at other times, of a patent or monopoly granted for a number of years. Petitions for such aid had been presented to the Continental Congress at various times. It was not strange that they should appear in the new Congress, as has just been described.
Political parties had not yet been developed, but the debates on this first tariff bill showed a strong tendency to sectionalism, arising from the varied interests of an extensive territory. It was a sectionalism which, if it prevailed, would tend to weaken the Central Government, but, if overcome by compromise or force, would strengthen the national authority by the very fact of the victory. At the time the differences of opinion arising from the various parts seemed so irreconcilable that Madison frequently confessed his despair of getting any tariff measure passed at the session; so early did the sectional interests appear, which were destined later to threaten seriously the very existence of the Union.
If the distillers of Philadelphia, for example, petitioned for a greater discrimination in the duties on rum and on molasses, the citizens of Portland, then in Massachusetts, assured Congress that any duty on the latter commodity would operate injuriously and be attended with pernicious consequences to all the New England States. Once entered upon, this protective policy could not be stopped. By mutually aiding each other, members could get articles added to the protected list more easily than the unorganised opposition could keep them out. By comparing such co-operation with the united efforts by which the first settlers had cleared their fields, the phrase "log-rolling" was invented. Thus it happened that the first import bill, intended by Madison as a measure for raising revenue, was turned virtually into a protective-tariff measure, and was so called in the preamble. Few realised the importance of the change at the time. Madison called it the "collective" bill, and wrote to a friend that it had cost much trouble to adjust its regulations to the varied geographical and other circumstances of the States. However unconsciously done, the principle of protective-tariff legislation by the National Government had been adopted.
It is prophetic of the future to note that in this first debate a difference of opinion was shown to exist concerning the proper function of government. One speaker cited the history of the ancient world to prove that the protection of industries and the establishment of manufactures was a very proper aim of government. Others held to a contrary opinion. Madison was among those who thought that business should be left to take its natural course without government interference. He said:
"I own myself the friend to a very free system of commerce and to hold it as a truth that commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive, and impolitic; it is also a truth that if industry and labour are left to take their own course, they will generally be directed to those objects which are the most productive, and this in a more certain and direct manner than the wisdom of the most enlightened legislature could point out."
This was the voice of the country member, unaccustomed to the fostering hand of government. It was also the voice of the minority. The Constitution had been framed and adopted by the commercial interests generally, who took quite an opposite view of the duty of government toward business.
No one at this time seemed to feel the potency of the protective principle in enlarging the power of the Union. It was unseen until fully developed some thirty years later. Yet to appreciate the full force of this tariff bill of July 4, 1789, with its protective preamble, as a sample of Union-making legislation, one need only consider the gratitude which the National Government has won through such protective measures; the attachment of leading men to the Union from guarding their interests; the accumulated strength of moneyed interests in time of danger to the Republic; the use made of the tariff in protecting workingmen; the revenue derived from high tariffs, which has been spent on public improvements; and the force of public opinion which has been frequently rallied by both employer and employee to the support of the execution of a national revenue law.
Above all members of the first administration, Hamilton stood for an efficient National Government. He saw opportunity in the administration and interpretation of the written document to correct the weak places which he had sought in vain to avoid when the frame was being made. A constructive genius by birth, a financier by study, a leader of men by nature, Hamilton had, in the Treasury Department, that function of the new Government which needed the most strengthening, and in its present condition the necessity which would support the strongest measures. Called upon by Congress at the time of its first adjournment to inform them of the exact financial condition of the country, he drew up an exhaustive report showing that the National and State governments together owed something like fifty-two millions of dollars. The national obligation to-day is twenty times that sum. Its proportion to eighty millions of people is not much less than the fifty-two millions were to the three and a half millions of people who faced the debt of Hamilton's time. But the debt now is of fixed form and assured payment before it is incurred. The debt which Hamilton presented to Congress was heterogeneous in form and without means of payment. Arguing that a national debt properly funded had contributed largely to the prosperity of Great Britain, Hamilton proposed to collect all these evidences of debt into a national obligation, which would bring interest to its holders until paid. The faith of the United States toward its creditors must be redeemed. To secure a revenue with which to pay this interest and evidently to redeem the principal in addition to meeting the running expenses of the Government was the first task. Hamilton proposed to place additional duties on imported goods and to lay a tonnage on vessels using American ports, the latter of which he estimated would yield more than a million dollars. He would also put an excise on distilled spirits manufactured in the United States and on those imported, both bringing in nearly three million dollars. The profits of the post-office he estimated at almost a million dollars annually, to be applied also to the national expenses.
[Illustration: CERTIFICATE OF DEBT AGAINST THE UNITED STATES. From theManuscript Division of the Library of Congress. This was one of theRevolutionary obligations assumed and paid under Hamilton's financialmeasures.]
The members of Congress, at the subsequent session, with remarkable unanimity, concurred in these recommendations of the Secretary of the Treasury for the redemption of the national obligations, including both the debt owed to foreign nations and that incurred to domestic holders during the exigencies of the war. But upon another proposition, that the United States should assume the debts incurred by the several States during the war, there was strong opposition. It was said that such action would lead to speculation and stock-jobbery in buying up these debts and converting them into new forms. The original holders had long since disposed of them to brokers, who would be enriched by national legislation. It was the old clash between the moneyed and the moneyless classes. Although the action would be a direct interference of the National Government with State affairs, the debates turned on economic rather than constitutional grounds. If Hamilton had the foresight with which he is credited by his admirers, if he saw that the allegiance of the people would gradually be won away from the States to the Central Government because the latter was redeeming promises which the States had long been endeavouring to meet, if he was taking advantage of the selfishness and cupidity of the deeply indebted States, there is no evidence to show that the States saw or appreciated the danger.
Virginia, whose representatives bore the brunt of the opposition, had a source of revenue in her western lands from which she could easily discharge her obligations, and naturally had no desire to share the liabilities of others. But her State Legislature, after Hamilton agreed with Jefferson to buy off the Virginia opposition in Congress by locating the national capital on the Potomac, protested in strong and exact terms against the State-debts-assumption proposition. These resolutions recited that the people of Virginia had adopted the Federal Constitution under the impression and upon positive condition that "every power not granted was retained," and that they had read the document in vain to find the right given to assume the debts of the States. Here, within two years after the adoption of the Constitution, was a State Legislature protesting against the usurpation of power under it. It was the first of many futile protests.
Hamilton, sending a copy of the Virginia resolutions to Jay, saw "the first symptom of a spirit which must either be killed or will kill the Constitution of the United States." He thought the collective weight of the different parts of the Government ought to be employed in exploding the principles they contained. Theoretically, the Legislature of Virginia may have been correct in its attitude; but no theoretical protest could avail against the worthy sentiment that the entire national credit must be restored, backed by the practical demands of the creditors, and by the desires of those who saw an opportunity of investment or speculation.
Those people, both officials and citizens, who took the stand in these formative days of political parties that the Federal Government should be restricted in its workings to the powers expressly given to it in the Constitution, a "strict construction" of that document, as they called it, were generally country bred, of the borrowing rather than the lending class, depending upon individual initiative rather than mass action, strangers to the paternal aspects and fostering hand of government, and inexperienced in the intricacies of finance. Gen. Henry Lee, of Virginia, complained to Madison of the complexity of Hamilton's plan. "It departs," replied Madison, "from that simplicity which ought to be preserved in finance more than anything else." Inability to comprehend naturally breeds suspicion.
Hamilton's followers were, for the most part, from the Northern and Middle States, city dwellers, money-lenders rather than borrowers, business men, and manufacturers, who saw no wrong in having the Government promote the general welfare by legislation. The sudden revival of business which followed the adoption of Hamilton's plan to redeem all the debts seemed to them both natural and legitimate. The other group looked upon the entire matter as a corrupt transaction, contrived by Hamilton, and a prostitution of government from its legitimate purposes. Madison wrote that just before the report came out the value of the various forms of debt rose from a few shillings to eight or ten shillings in the pound, and that emissaries were still exploring the interior and distant parts of the Union in order to take advantage of the ignorance of the holders. To meet the occasion Jefferson invented the phrases, "corrupt squadron," "stock-jobbing herd," and "votaries of the treasury," upon which he rang the changes during a long lifetime.
To this indignation was added dismay when the effects of national assumption of State obligations began to be appreciated; when creditors who had besieged the State treasury for years found the Union satisfying their just demands; when the evidences of national government, which had heretofore been confined to a wandering Congress, began to appear at every hearthstone. A realisation of these results brought from Jefferson the complaint that he had been duped by Hamilton in the assumption-capital bargain; that he had been "most innocently and most ignorantly made to hold the candle for a wicked scheme."
A similar aggrandisement of the National Government was the motive, according to the eulogists of Hamilton, which prompted him to make a suggestion for another novelty, a United States bank. Ostensibly he claimed that it would have the effect of bringing immediate financial relief, as well as safeguarding the future. The arguments presented by him to Congress for the incorporation of a bank in which the National Government should be a stockholder were purely utilitarian. The bank would benefit the public by offering an opportunity for the investment of capital. It would benefit the Government by lending it money in an emergency and by collecting its revenues. Its notes would also form a circulating medium. The bill drawn by Hamilton incorporating such a bank passed the Senate without material change and without a division. One Senator from Pennsylvania, suggesting amendments to his colleague, was informed that Hamilton's father-in-law, a Senator from New York, had said Hamilton did not wish the bill altered. The hopeless minority in the Senate claimed that the chances of subscribing to the proposed bank, guaranteeing an investment at six per cent, for twenty years, won many to its support. They also saw here another link in the chain which Hamilton was welding about the States. The debts having been assumed, the certificates would be accepted as subscriptions to bank stock. Thus one measure would be made to play into another.
In the House, the right of the Federal Government to found a bank was attacked by Madison, who here parted from Hamilton, with whom he had laboured in getting the Constitution adopted. The line-up of parties had begun. Madison found himself opposed to the way in which the Government was being perverted by Hamilton under the Constitution. His speech is the first extensive exposition of the doctrine of strict construction of the written instrument; that the central power must be held strictly to the powers numerated in the document. Strict construction exhibits the vice of a written Constitution—the impossibility of growth or even continued life within the bonds of the written word. Stagnation and death must result from binding the limbs of the body politic. Loosening by interpretation is the remedy. Madison was correct in saying that the right to incorporate bodies was proposed in the Philadelphia Convention and abandoned; that the power to incorporate a bank was nowhere given in the Constitution to the Federal Government; that banking was presumed to be a matter for State control; that in all the debates and papers written on the Constitution it was understood that "the powers not given were retained; and that those given were not to be extended by remote implications."
In reply, Boudinot did not deny that all powers, vested heretofore in any individual State, and not granted by this instrument, were still retained by the people of such State and could not be exercised by Congress. But he then showed that the power to incorporate the bank was "drawn by necessary implication" from those expressed. The preamble declared in general terms the objects of the Constitution; one of the expressed functions under it was "to borrow money"; and the circle was completed by the liberal clause to "make all laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers." Now to provide for the general welfare it might be necessary to borrow money; a bank was essential to the borrowing of money in adequate sums; therefore the power to establish a bank was deduced by the strongest and most decisive implication.
Here was the first complete exposition of the doctrine of a loose construction for the wording of the Constitution. If that be correct reasoning, said the opposition, the Constitution may as well stop with the preamble, since there is no power under heaven which could not be exercised within its limits. It would mean the consolidation of all powers, and the practical extinction of local government. The attitude of the two sides in the debate may be shown by one illustration employed. Suppose the power to make a treaty or to raise an army had been omitted from the Constitution, asked the Hamiltonians, could the National Government in an emergency assume such rights from the preamble and the powers expressed? Must it hesitate and temporise while the blood of its citizens was being shed? Such an assumption of power, replied the strict interpreters, might be excusable in an emergency, but could be warranted as a practice only by an amendment to the Constitution made in the manner it prescribed.
The present situation and the compelling force which had produced it were manifest when those who favoured giving the Union such implied powers as would make it effective pointed out many instances of implication of which Congress had already been guilty; such as accepting land for lighthouses, defining crimes under power to establish courts, and even creating corporations in the shape of the North-West and the South-West territories. One of these lesions of the written word, that which interpreted a clause so as to give the President power over removals from office, Madison himself had favoured.
This first constitutional debate also outlined the geographical sectionalism which has penetrated and influenced every feature of American political as well as commercial and social life. The Northern and Middle States contained the cities, made up of the trading class, whose capital was chiefly in ready money. The capital of the rural dwellers of the South was in land and slaves, not easily converted into cash. The latter became the borrowing, the former the lending section. The spirit of unionism was engendered in the first by reason of their urban life, their commercial employment, and their frequent contact in business. The feeling of individualism was as naturally bred in the latter by their rural surroundings, their agricultural occupation, and the self-reliance induced by their solitary environment. The opposition to the Constitution in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Pennsylvania had been confined almost entirely to the country. The rural States of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina did not adopt the new frame without a struggle. Georgia was a Southern exception; but population dwelt so exclusively along the coast in the new State of Georgia that it was really a commercial State, settled largely by New Englanders.
The mercantile class of the Northern and Central States, after Anti- Federalism had been silenced by the success of the new Government, was ready to adopt the theory of loose construction or interpretation by inclusion, which would tend toward the realisation of a more potent union. At the same time, a bank, supported by the patronage of the National Government, with no danger of competition for twenty years, offered not only a security for capital against such dangers as it had previously known, but also, through its branches, an extended agency for transacting business. Many details of the bill, such as the advantages given to holders of national rather than State certificates in subscribing for stock, contributed to the sectional division. The national certificates were held in the commercial centres. The influence of the city of New York, where the Congress met, no doubt contributed to the passage of the bank and other commercial measures.
Precisely the opposite feelings held in the Southern States. Every vote cast in the House against the bank came from Maryland or a State to the south of it. There were a few scattering votes from the Southern States in favour of the measure, but as a whole political lines were here unconsciously drawn for a century to come, if not for the entire existence of the Republic. The "court and country" parties of colonial days had been born again.
Many of the members were surprised to find sentiment toward these financial measures assuming such a sectional trend. Sectional interests had been only too manifest in the convention, but compromises had settled them, presumably for ever. Compromise is only a relief; it is never a remedy. After each compromise in American history it has been a matter of surprise to the participants that others were needed. On the bank bill, a member wrote to a correspondent: "You may think it unaccountable, but so it is that the differences in climate seem to govern the opinions on this bill, and Potomac seems to be near the dividing line with few exceptions."
Virginia was the leader of the section south of the Potomac, and Jefferson was the leader of Virginia. Although debarred from the congressional debates by his Cabinet position, he filled his letters to his friends with warnings against the dangerous assumptions of the Hamilton measures. In response to Washington's inquiry to his Cabinet upon the constitutionality of the bank, Jefferson drew up a paper setting forth in strong terms his opinion that the Central Government had no power to engage in business. Hamilton presented an equally strong argument for the bank in his reply.
Madison, the leader of individualism in the House, could not agree with Hamilton's interpretation of the "general welfare" clause of the Constitution. The former co-labourers for efficient government parted at this point. Madison thought the adoption of such an interpretation would change the National Government from a limited one, possessing certain specified powers, to an indefinite one, subject only to particular exceptions. The phrase concerning "the general welfare" had been taken from the Articles, he said, where it was understood to be nothing more than a general caption to specified powers, and had been retained because it was less liable to misconstruction than any other. Whatever had been the original intent, the spirit of the implied powers had been summoned from the vasty deep of uncertainty to aid in making a confederated republic from confederated States.
No one can accuse Hamilton of failing to take advantage of these formative years in giving the new Government a strong bias toward centralisation. Although opposed by Jefferson, Madison, and Richard Henry Lee, Hamilton had the assistance of Knox, and frequently of Randolph, in the Cabinet, as well as Fisher Ames and others in Congress. He also possessed the esteem and confidence of the President, and the advantage which the commercial environment of New York as well as the influence of the Schuyler family alliance could give him.
Among his numerous suggestions to Congress for cancelling eventually the eighty million dollars of the national debt, to which business men of the Northern States were subscribing freely, was an excise. Although this debt, the "Hamiltonian debt," as the Jeffersonians called it, was an iniquitous burden saddled upon the common people, an excise was to them a most offensive way of meeting it. Being for the most part agriculturists and country people, accustomed in regions far from markets to manufacture their grain into spirits, they were not likely to be persuaded that the consumer pays the tax in the end. It was a direct tax, and, although constitutional, in form the most obvious and objectionable. To have an inspector prying into your private affairs in this manner was in ill-accord with the freedom for which America stood. To put a tax on a still and its product was to them equivalent to taxing their hand-mills and the meal or flour thus produced.
Having secured the passage of the excise tax as a permanent source of income, Hamilton turned to meet the most pressing national obligations. To pay the interest on the foreign debt, he had arranged a loan from Holland. To provide money for circulation at home he revived the oft-repeated project of a national mint, which should coin gold, silver, and copper coins of a decimal denomination, the gold bearing a ratio to the silver of one grain to fifteen grains. This ratio he arrived at by making a computation of the respective amounts of these two metals available in the world. It is interesting to note that the ratio has changed but little in a century. Hamilton also drew up an exhaustive report on the sources and conditions of American manufactures, with a strong plea for the encouragement, by a protective tariff, of such industries as had already been established.
The influence of Hamilton and the Federalist majority in both branches of Congress made possible the adoption of these so-called "Hamilton measures" as rapidly as they were suggested by him. They have been praised, and justly praised, because they restored the public credit of the National Government both at home and abroad. The receipts for the first time met the expenditures. Never before had the national resources been so adequately provided and so judiciously administered. Hamilton's financial measures must also be praised because they first demonstrated the efficiency of the new Government over the old form. They made the first serious inroads on the affection which the people had uniformly bestowed upon the individual States. They mark great steps toward the centralisation of the National Government at a time when they were most needed.
Nor did Hamilton, in his great constructive statesmanship, neglect the details of his department, although a complete organisation awaited the painstaking Gallatin a few years later. The States were divided into fifty-nine collection districts regardless of State lines except as they suited the purpose. Each district was supplied with all the machinery necessary for collecting the duties levied by Congress from time to time. Since the Treasury Department was so closely connected with foreign commerce, Congress placed under its control all lighthouses, beacons, buoys, and public piers, as soon as they might be ceded by the individual States in which they were located and which had constructed them. At the time, no other disposition was possible; but few foresaw the resulting effect upon the unification of the States. By another act, the Treasury Department was given charge of the registration and clearing of vessels. A duty of six cents a ton was placed upon the carrying capacity of American vessels, and fifty cents a ton upon foreign vessels. The fondness for discriminating in favour of home interests was manifested so early and in so many different directions that it could scarcely have been generic; it must have been absorbed in the mother's milk of British colonialism in the eighteenth century.
The necessity for these measures was so manifest, and the popularity and the novelty of the new Government at first so attractive, that little resistance was met with in passing them and still less in enforcing them. Resistance to national measures and neglect of national duty were no longer a menace to national existence, because the nation now possessed the power of compulsion in a Federal judiciary. Upon the day named in the judiciary act, the first Monday in February, 1790, the Supreme Court held its initial meeting in the court-room of the New York Exchange, which had been prepared for its use. According to the newspapers "the jury from the district court attended; some of the members of Congress, and a number of respectable citizens also." Several meetings of the Supreme and district courts were held at this session, a seal was adopted by the former, and several attorneys admitted to practice before it; but there were no cases to be heard. The term closed with a banquet given by the grand jury of the district court to the justices and officers of both courts at Fraunce's Tavern in Cortland Street. So gradually did appellate and original cases find their way into the Supreme Court that three sessions were held before it had a case on its docket. The legislative function of government was, at that time, the most important and formed the basis of popular hope. Time has gradually transferred this dignity and trust to the judiciary department, whilst the legislative—national, State, and municipal alike—has lost in public confidence and esteem.
The Federal judiciary, as the most novel feature, was apt, in making a place for itself, to come into conflict with older agencies. Within three years it gave a hearing to a citizen of South Carolina, who had sued the sovereign State of Georgia on a money claim for damages. Although the Constitution implicitly gave jurisdiction to the Supreme Court over controversies between a State and citizens of another State, the Legislature of South Carolina refused to pay attention to the suit, insisting that the retained sovereignty of the State could not be impaired by a clause of the Constitution. By four to one, the justices of the Supreme Court held that South Carolina, by the act of entering the Federal Union, was bound by all provisions of the Constitution. Justice Wilson, of Pennsylvania, thought the question involved even a higher point—do the people of the United States form a nation? Many commentators on the Constitution before its adoption, including even Hamilton himself, in commenting on this clause had assured the people that it was not rational to suppose a sovereign State could be dragged before the national tribunal. Yet it had been done within three years after being put in force.
It is indicative of the prevalence of State-sovereignty feeling at the time to note the general alarm caused by this decision. An eleventh amendment to the Constitution, forbidding a State to be sued before the Federal courts by non-residents, immediately passed the Senate by a vote of twenty-three to two and the House by eighty-one to nine. It was ratified by every State except New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. The speed with which this remedy was applied gave confidence in amendments for the future. But the number of amendments must be endless if each aggression of the judiciary was to be met in this manner.
The last toast at the judiciary banquet of 1790 was a wish that the convention of Rhode Island, called for the early spring, would "soon introduce the stray sister to her station in the happy national family of America." Rhode Island represented the extreme of selfishness resulting from State control of commerce. Through her ports passed not only her own imports and products, but those of the adjacent parts of Connecticut and Massachusetts. This geographical situation of the State magnified her commercial interests, and made her unwilling to surrender them to the Union. The country people were equally wedded to paper money, and opposed every suggestion of giving over the right of issuing money exclusively to the Central Government. The State fell into disrepute. "Rhode Island can be relied upon for nothing that is good," said Madison in his despair. "In rebellion against integrity, plundering all the world by her paper money, and notorious for her uniform opposition to every federal duty," was the character given her by Governor Randolph, of Virginia, when by popular vote she refused to come into the Union under the Constitution. Fables were composed which described twelve people desirous of building a new house and hanging a recalcitrant thirteenth man by his garter to a limb near his cabin. A "Southern planter" was reported to have offered the services of his slaves to aid in shovelling Rhode Island into the sea.
North Carolina had also been late in assenting, but simply because her first convention was turned from immediate ratification by the temporary delusion of holding another constitutional convention to incorporate the proposed amendments in the Constitution. The general sentiment of the country had pronounced against running the risk of another convention which was unlikely to produce anything more acceptable. Hence the favourable action of North Carolina was simply a question of time necessary to call another convention. This State was doubly assured to the Federalists after favourable action in Virginia, to which she was closely bound by family ties. The hope was well grounded, for the first act, passed by the second session of the new Congress, in the autumn of 1789, was to extend the impost, tonnage, and other acts of the first session over North Carolina, whose ratification, without amendments, reached New York during the adjournment. Rhode Island was now the only recalcitrant. She still held out for individualism and complete sovereignty. Had Congress a right or the power to coerce her into the Union? Whatever action Congress might take was destined to become important in the later discussions upon the right of a State to withdraw from the partnership now being formed. Fortunately, the opinion of the House upon this point is beyond question. In the middle of the first session a motion made by a member from New York to take up the case of the rebellious Rhode Island had been voted down because it threatened a "delicate situation" for the House and was best left to time and the State itself. Although the recalcitrant sister was a maritime State, "situated in the most convenient manner for the purpose of smuggling and defrauding our revenue," nevertheless, as Madison said, "it would be improper to express a desire on an occasion when a free agency ought to be employed, which would carry with it all the force of a command." One searches equally in vain through the correspondence of the men at the head of government for suggestions of coercion. President Washington, although exasperated to a point where his Virginia temper declared that the majority of the people of Rhode Island had bid adieu to every principle of honour, common-sense, and decency, refused to send any message to the friends of the Constitution in that State other than his hopes that the Legislature would call a convention.
Nevertheless, it was impossible long to continue such an anomalous thing as a foreign State surrounded by the United States. The governor of Rhode Island had become alarmed and early sent to the President and Congress of the "eleven United States of America" assurance of the steadfast adherence of his State to the principles of the Confederation formed in the hour of danger, and begged that they should not be considered altogether as foreigners. Although Rhode Island was speaking a past language in such words, Congress by special enactment relieved her from all duties except on rum, loaf-sugar, and chocolate until January, 1790. When that time arrived, the governor pleaded for a renewal of the privilege, stating that the Legislature had just called a convention to reconsider the Constitution. Waiting several months longer, the Senate passed a bill by a vote of thirteen to eight to treat the goods of Rhode Island as if coming from a foreign country and to demand from her a sum of money to be credited to her account with the Union. In the midst of the consideration of this measure by the House, further action was stopped by the arrival of the official ratification of the Constitution by Rhode Island in a regular convention at Newport by the narrow majority of two votes. "This event," wrote Washington to one of his European correspondents, "will enable us to make a fair experiment of a Constitution which was framed solely with a view to promote the happiness of a people. Its effects have hitherto equalled the expectations of its most sanguine friends." Rhode Island escaped being coerced into the Union by an act of Congress; but she was coerced by the higher law of self-preservation. Surrounded by States in the Union, cut off from the natural channels of trade with them, she must have perished of commercial starvation in the growing trade of the nation, if she had been subjected to the discriminations which Congress placed on the commerce of foreign nations.
The adoption of an efficient government and the institution of a central control produced an immediate effect on commerce. Interstate strife ceased. In eighteen months more than twenty million dollars' worth of goods had gone abroad. Great Britain and her dependencies bought almost one-half these American products and produce, with France a second. Then came Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Denmark, Africa, the East Indies, and Sweden in decreasing order. Even the northwest coast of North America purchased some ten thousand dollars' worth of goods from the new republic. Tobacco, rice, flour, wheat, and corn were the chief articles of export. Manufactured articles were of minor value. The total amount of iron sent out was little over three thousand tons, as against three hundred thousand tons exported in 1900. Furniture to the value of $8351 went abroad, of which $30 worth went to Spain and the remainder to the West Indies.
During this same first fiscal year under the new Government, dutiable goods to the amount of nearly seventy-four million dollars came into the various ports of the United States. Brown sugar from the French West Indies led the list, molasses from the same source ranking second. Tarred cordage from England came next, with coffee from the French West Indies, dried fish from Canada, distilled spirits from the British West Indies, in order. This revival of trade did much to quiet the predictions of those who still imagined the new Government must fail. The second year gave them still less ground to stand on. It showed that the United States custom-houses had collected over three million dollars on imported goods, the largest collections being in the State of Pennsylvania, with New York second, and Massachusetts third. This was a larger sum than had been realised from all taxable sources for the eight years preceding the Constitution government. Nearly $150,000 had been realised from charging tonnage upon vessels entering and leaving American ports. The future of the finances of the National Government was assured. Those who had so long begged that the power of collecting duties might be given to it now felt their judgment vindicated. The obligation incurred to France for loans and supplies amounting to over ten million dollars, a debt of honour especially pressing, was being paid so rapidly that by 1795 the entire balance was advanced and the obligation cancelled.
Prospects brightened for the future. "I sincerely rejoice in the prosperity of your country," wrote Hartley, from London, to Jay, with whom he had negotiated the peace of 1783. "You must not expect to find it otherwise than checkered with good and ill; such is the lot of human life. To be as happy as any people in the world is a lot you must not expect to exceed." In reply Jay said: "Whether the United States will be more or less happy than other nations, God only knows; I am inclined to think they will be, because in my opinion more light and knowledge are diffused through the mass of the people of this country than any other." Brissot de Warville, a French traveller, was impressed by the American vessels venturing to the North-west coast for furs and peltry. Thinking that point not far from the head of the Mississippi, he predicted that Americans would soon find a short intracontinental way to the Pacific. He also predicted that these traders would soon open a new route between the Atlantic and the Pacific by the lake of Nicaragua. "No sea is impenetrable," he said, "to the navigating genius of the Americans. You see their flag everywhere displayed; you see them exploring all islands, studying their wants, and returning to supply them."
External commerce was not allowed to monopolise the attention of the Americans, now at peace with the world and themselves. The Constitution gave to the Central Government the exercise and care of several functions heretofore left to the States. As rapidly as possible, a mint was established to produce gold, silver, and copper coins. Laws punishing the counterfeiting of the coin were passed. The existing military system was recognised and the postal establishment with the routes and offices of the previous year adopted. The pensions paid to invalided veterans of the wars by the States were assumed by the nation. Commissioners were appointed to treat with Indians in the United States territories. Provision for making a count of the people was made. Steps for the adequate protection of the frontier were taken. Commissioners were appointed to lay out the capital city on lands granted by Virginia and Maryland. The provisions of the Ordinance of 1787, modified to meet the new conditions, were re-enacted.
Of less importance than many of these functions bestowed by the Constitution on the Federal Government, but even farther-reaching, was the indefinite power to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" by encouraging authors and inventors. The right of an inventor to a protection on his product had been saved from the monopolies so freely granted to companies in the time of James I. It was one of the birthrights of Englishmen brought to the American colonies. The right of an author to the benefit of his productions was allowed in the common law. Colonial legislatures had been accustomed to encourage both authors and inventors by rewards of money as well as by exclusive rights for a limited term of years. The Legislatures of various States continued the practice after the Revolution, although there was no system of inter-recognition of patents between the States. Fitch, the steam-navigation experimenter, secured exclusive rights on his steamboat from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, and even then was unprotected in the remaining States. This power so evidently belonged to the national instead of State governments, that it was never questioned in the convention, although it had not been included in the Articles of Confederation. Indeed, so essential was the necessity for the development of home resources felt to be that at one time the convention had considered transferring from the States to the Federal Government the general practice of "establishing public institutions, rewards, and immunities for the promotion of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures."
This paternalism was eventually confined in the Constitution to patents and copyrights. Within a fortnight after the beginning of the House sessions, David Ramsey, the South Carolina historian, petitioned Congress for the sole right to sell his books for a limited term of years. He was followed by Hannah Adams, the Massachusetts writer, Jedediah Morse, the geographer, and others. Instead of granting such petitions by individual bills, as the State Legislatures had done, Congress enacted a general copyright law which gave to any applicant exclusive control of his writings for fourteen years.
Simultaneously with the petition from Ramsey, which led to the first copyright law, came one from John Churchman asking for exclusive right to sell spheres, maps, charts, and tables on the principles of magnetism which he had invented after "several years' labour, close application, and great expense." Soon after came requests for such rights from Fitch for a boat propelled by steam, from Rumsey for one propelled by setting poles, and from Stroebel for another to run on wheels without the use of oars. Other inventors asked for patents on a machine for raising water to run a waterwheel, on one for making nails, for producing power by using a weight, for curing the bite of a mad dog, for counting the revolutions of a wheel, for a reaper and thresher, and for a lightning-rod on an umbrella. In the second session Congress passed an act making the members of the Cabinet, except the busy Secretary of the Treasury, a board to hear petitions and to grant sole rights to inventors for fourteen years.
The necessity for uniform action deprived the States of both copyright and patent control and gave it to the central agency—powers trivial in themselves, but potent in the unforeseen work of transferring the trust and gratitude of men of learning and ability from their several States to the Union. "The encouragement of learning" is sufficiently indefinite to become a giant by interpretation. This was apparent in the very first session of Congress. To his petition concerning his magnetic maps and charts, Churchman had added a prayer for "the patronage of Congress" in undertaking a voyage to Baffin's Bay for studying the cause of the variation of the magnetic needle—a problem handed down from Columbus. The proposition was defeated in the House, although only five to eight hundred dollars was suggested, because of the deranged condition of the national finances. Only one member expressed a doubt as to the constitutional power of Congress to do more than reward inventors by patents. Although the Constitution explicitly confined the encouragement to granting of exclusive rights to the use of the invention, the cause of defeat was not the lack of constitutional power, but the lack of means.
Washington, the friend in Virginia of every movement for the public benefit, showed no fear lest Government assume too much power in this particular. Years before, he had voted in the Legislature of his own State to give exclusive right to a stage-owner to carry passengers over a road because "he had expended a considerable sum of money in the purchase of carriages and horses … which will be productive of considerable public convenience and utility … and therefore it is reasonable that he should possess for a reasonable time any emoluments resulting therefrom." Once, in complaining to Jay that the Postmaster-General under the Confederation had delayed the Virginia mails by using horses and showing an antipathy to patronising the stages, Washington had said: "It has often been understood by wise politicians and enlightened patriots that giving a facility to the means of travelling for strangers and of intercourse for citizens was an object of legislative concern and a circumstance highly beneficial to any country." Now, in his message to the second session of the First Congress, he took occasion to suggest to the members "the advancement of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures," and "the promotion of science and literature." He advised them to consider whether these desirable objects could be "best promoted by affording aids to seminaries of learning already established, by the institution of a national university, or by any other expedient." These simple and, at the time, unsuspected phases of paternalism must not be ignored in an examination of the growth of the Union. The most rigid of the strict-construction Presidents became helpless before them, or never foresaw their possibilities. From such small beginnings came the various scientific expeditions, the investigations for the benefit of agriculture, the printing and distribution of books, the distribution of garden seeds, the vast donations of land and money for higher education, and the many other ways in which the Union has expanded under no other warrant than the simple requirement in the Constitution that Congress "promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for a limited time to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
In his early messages to Congress, Washington was accustomed to call the attention of members to "facilitating the intercourse between distant parts of our country by a due attention to the post-offices and post roads." This was no new power given to the Central Government as was the right to encourage learning, but it had even more possibilities of extension through interpretation. The monopoly of carrying the mails, now generally claimed by all governments, may be traced to the assumed prerogatives of the Stuarts in England. A few attempts had been made in the dependent days by individual colonies to regulate the carriage of letters, but the provisions of an act of Parliament in Queen Anne's reign for appointing deputy postmasters- general in the colonies placed the posts directly under the care of the royal Government.
The use of the mails without government censorship was essential to the patriots in the American Revolution for carrying out their plans. Nearly a year before independence, the Continental Congress set up a revolutionary postal system to replace the express riders which they had thus far used. Franklin, the colonial deputy for America, who had brought the posts to a high proficiency before he was dismissed for sympathising with his countrymen, was placed in charge. Gradually these "constitutional" post-riders and postmasters supplanted the royal officials, and Congress in time inherited the monopoly. The Articles sanctioned this assumption by giving Congress the sole and exclusive power over the transportation of the mails passing from one State to another, collecting sufficient postage to pay for the same, but tacitly leaving to each State the control of its internal postal system. So little did the postal system develop under this arrangement that, with the exception of an extension fortnightly to Pittsburg and the establishment of a few cross-lines, the main line in 1789, extending from Portland, in Maine, to Savannah, Georgia, had improved but little since Franklin established it years before. There were only seventy-five post-offices in the whole United States in 1789, and they collected less than $40,000 a year.
So essential to the intelligence and happiness of the people did a well-regulated postal system appear, and so properly an interstate agency, that no opposition was heard in the convention to that clause of the Constitution which said: "Congress shall have power to establish post-offices." In the second and in the final draft of the document the words "and post roads" were added, by a vote of six States to five, without debate, according to Madison's notes. In the series of papers now known as theFederalist, Madison, when attempting to quiet the fears of the people upon the possibility of the Central Government securing too much power under the Constitution, said of this provision: "The power of establishing post-roads must, in every view, be a harmless power." Little could he foresee that within ten years he would be called upon by his great chief, Jefferson, to decide whether "to establish" meant to lay out a road, to construct it, or simply to adopt an existing one. "Does the power toestablishpost roads given you by the Constitution mean that you shallmakethe roads or onlyselectfrom those already made, those on which there shall be a post?" wrote Jefferson, taking Madison to task for this fresh assumption of power in the Congress of which the latter was a member. "We have thought hitherto that the roads of a state could not be so well administered even by the state legislature as by the magistracy of the county on the spot. How will it be when a member from New Hampshire is to make out a road for Georgia?" Really, the carrying of the mails was a power not expressed, but deduced, if fine distinctions were to be made.
Still another power was expressly given to the Union which had not existed under the Confederation and had never been exercised—the right to create new States from original soil; to speak into existence rivals of the agencies through which the Union itself had been created. When the States gave this right to the Central Government, they furnished a weapon most deadly to their continued supremacy. "No state shall be deprived of territory for the benefit of the United States," declared the Articles. It was to guard against this danger that the States in ceding their western land, and the Central Government in accepting it, had mutually agreed to convert it into States of a limited size as rapidly as population would warrant. As has been shown, unsuccessful steps had been taken under the Confederation to carry out this agreement, "without the least colour of constitutional authority," as Hamilton said in theFederalist.
The law of balance, if not of retribution, finds an illustration in the manner in which the fear of the States lest they give the Union too much power over the lands led eventually to a greater loss of power. Their jealousy of each other prevented the land being held by any one of them. They could not hold it severally, neither could they so dispose of it. When they thought of converting it in time into new States, no workable plan could be devised for such a disposition unless they acted jointly. The control had to be given to the Union. For these reasons, the Union became the parent of all the States except the original thirteen and Texas. It was inevitable that the sympathy of the people during the preliminary condition of a Territory should be weaned away from the original States and their allegiance gradually transferred to their benefactor, the Union. Unfortunately for State supremacy, the process did not end, as then seemed probable, with the Mississippi, but was prolonged for a century by new accessions of territory.
The new Congress had not long to wait for an opportunity of fulfilling the promise made almost ten years before. In his second message, the President sent to Congress a petition for statehood from an authorised convention of the people inhabiting the district of Kentucky, together with a permission to that end from the parent State, Virginia. Both papers had been inherited from the old Congress. As the President said, they contained "sentiments of warm attachment to the Union and its present government." Such a happy termination of the sixteen years' contest between the trans-Alleghenians and their parent State, as well as such a final contradiction to the repeated rumours of the secession of Kentucky, caused the speedy enactment of a law "that upon the aforesaid first day of June, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two, the said new state by the name and style of the state of Kentucky shall be received and admitted into this Union as a new and entire member of the United States of America." A few days later it was decreed in another simple law that Vermont should be admitted on March 4, 1791. New York, the parent State, had agreed to release her on payment of thirty thousand dollars. Vermont secured the prior admission because her application named no day, as that of Kentucky did. In the creation of these two States, the nascent Union was not only adding to its strength, but was removing for ever two of the most alarming cases of possible secession which had thus far menaced it.