to General Washington. I honor him for his good qualities; but, in this house, I feel myself his superior. In private life I shall always acknowledge him to be mine." On the twentyfourth of February, when they voted to Washington mere "ideal reinforcements," and then, after a debate, in which some of the New England delegates and one from New Jersey showed a willingness to insult him, they expressed their "earnest desire" that he would "not only curb and confine the enemy within their present quarters, but, by the divine blessing, totally subdue them before they could be reinforced." Well might Washington reply: "What hope can there be of my effecting so desirable a work at this time? The whole of our numbers in New Jersey fit for duty is under three thousand." The absurd paragraph was carried by a bare majority, Richard Henry Lee bringing Virginia to the side of the four eastern states, against the two Carolinas, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

There were not wanting members more just. "Washington is the greatest man on earth," wrote Robert Morris from Philadelphia, on the first of February. From Baltimore, William Hooper, the able representative from North Carolina, replied: "Will posterity believe the tale? When it shall be consistent with policy to give the history of that man from his first introduction into our service, how often America has been rescued from ruin by the mere strength of his genius, conduct, and courage, encountering every obstacle that want of money, men, arms, ammunition, could throw in his way, an impartial world will say with you that he is the greatest man on earth. Misfortunes are the element in which he shines; they are the groundwork on which his picture appears to the greatest advantage. He rises superior to them all; they serve as foils to his fortitude and as stimulants to bring into view those great qualities which his modesty keeps concealed. I could fill the side in his praise; but anything I can say can not equal his merits."

CHAPTER IX.

THE CONSTITUTIONS OF THE SEVERAL STATES OF AMERICA.

1776-1783.

HAD the decision of the war hung on armies alone, America might not have gained the victory; but the spirit of the age assisted the young nation to own justice as older and higher than the state, and to found the rights of the citizen on the rights of man. And yet, in regenerating its institutions, it was not guided by any speculative theory. Its form of government grew naturally out of its traditions by the simple rejection of all personal hereditary authority, which in America had never had more than a representative existence. Its industrious and frugal people were accustomed to the cry of liberty and property; they harbored no dream of a community of goods; and their love of equality never degenerated into envy of the rich. No successors of the fifth-monarchy men proposed to substitute an unwritten higher law, interpreted by individual conscience, for the law of the land and the decrees of human tribunals. The people proceeded with moderation. Their large inheritance of English liberties saved them from the necessity and from the wish to uproot their old political institutions; and as, happily, the scaffold was not wet with the blood of their statesmen, there arose no desperate hatred of England, such as the Netherlands kept up for centuries against Spain. The wrongs inflicted or attempted by the British king were felt to have been avenged by independence; respect and affection remained for the parent land, from which the United States had derived trial by jury, the writ for personal liberty, the practice of representative government, and the separation

of the three great co-ordinate powers in the state. From an essentially aristocratic model America took just what suited her condition, and rejected the rest. The transition of the colonies into self-existing commonwealths was free from vindictive bitterness, and attended by no violent or wide departure from the past.

In all the states it was held that sovereignty resides in the people; that the majesty of supreme command belongs of right to their collective intelligence; that government is to be originated by their impulse, organized by their consent, and conducted by their imbodied will; that they alone possess the living energy out of which all power flows forth; that they are the sole legitimate master to name, directly or indirectly, the officers in the state, and bind them as their servants to toil only for the common good.

The American people went to the great work without misgiving. They were confident that the judgment of the sum of the individual members of the community was the safest criterion of truth in public affairs. They harbored no fear that the voice even of a wayward majority would be more capricious or more fallible than the good pleasure of an hereditary monarch; and, unappalled by the skepticism of European kings, they proceeded to extend self-government over regions which, in previous ages, had been esteemed too vast for republican rule. Of all the nations of the earth, they were conscious of having had the most varied experience in representative government, and in the application of the principles of popular power. The giant forms of absolute monarchies on their way to ruin cast over the world their fearful shadows; it was time to construct states on the basis of inherent, inalienable right. It is because England nurtured her colonies in freedom that, even in the midst of civil war, they cherished her name with affection.

Of the American statesmen who assisted to frame the new government, not one had been originally a republican. But, if the necessity of adopting purely popular institutions came upon them unexpectedly, the ages had prepared for them their plans.

The recommendations to form governments proceeded from the general congress; the work was done by the several states,

in the full enjoyment of self-direction. Each of them claimed to be of right a free, sovereign, and independent state; each bound its officers to bear to it true allegiance, and to maintain its freedom and independence. Massachusetts, which was the first state to frame a government independent of the king, deviated as little as possible from the letter of its charter; and, assuming that the place of governor was vacant from the nineteenth of July 1775, it recognised the council as the legal successor to executive power. On the first day of May 1776, in all commissions and legal processes, it substituted the name of its "government and people" for that of the king. In June 1777, its legislature assumed power to prepare a constitution; but, on a reference to the people, the act was disavowed. In September 1779, a convention, which the people themselves had specially authorized, framed a constitution. It was in a good measure the compilation of John Adams, who was guided by the English constitution, by the bill of rights of Virginia, and by the experience of Massachusetts herself; and this constitution, having been approved by the people, went into effect in 1780.

On the fifth of January 1776, New Hampshire shaped its government with the fewest possible changes from its colonial forms, like Massachusetts merging the executive power in the council. Not till June 1783 did its convention agree upon a more perfect instrument, which was approved by the people, and established on the thirty-first of the following October.

The provisional constitution of South Carolina dates from the twenty-sixth of March 1776. In March 1778, a permanent constitution was introduced by an act of the legislature.

Rhode Island enjoyed under its charter a form of government so thoroughly republican that the rejection of monarchy, in May 1776, required no change beyond a renunciation of the king's name in the style of its public acts. A disfranchisement of Catholics had stolen into its book of laws; but, so soon as it was noticed, the clause was expunged.

In like manner, Connecticut had only to substitute the people of the colony for the name of the king; this was done provisionally on the fourteenth of June 1776, and made perpetual on the tenth of the following October.

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Before the end of June of the same year Virginia, sixth in the series, first in the completeness of her work, by a legislative convention without any further consultation of the people, framed and adopted a bill of rights, a declaration of independence, and a constitution.

On the second of July 1776, New Jersey perfected its new, self-created charter.

Delaware next proclaimed its bill of rights, and, on the twentieth of September 1776, the representatives in convention having been chosen by the freemen of the state for that very purpose, finished its constitution.

The Pennsylvania convention adopted its constitution on the twenty-eighth of September 1776; but the opposition of the Quakers whom it indirectly disfranchised, and of a large body of patriots, delayed its thorough organization for more than five months.

The delegates of Maryland, meeting on the fourteenth of August 1776, framed its constitution with great deliberation; it was established on the ninth of the following November.

On the eighteenth of December 1776, the constitution of North Carolina was ratified in the congress which framed it. On the fifth of February 1777, Georgia perfected its organic law by the unanimous agreement of its convention.

Last of the thirteen came New York, whose empowered convention, on the twentieth of April 1777, established a constitution that, in humane liberality, excelled them all.

The privilege of the suffrage had been far more widely extended in the colonies than in England; by general consent, the extension of the elective franchise was postponed. The age of twenty-one was a qualification universally required So, too, was residence, except that in Virginia and South Carolina it was enough to own in the district or town a certain freehold or "lot." South Carolina required the electors to "acknowledge the being of a God, and to believe in a future state of rewards and punishments." White men alone could claim the franchise in Virginia, in South Carolina, and in Georgia; but in South Carolina a benign interpretation of the law classed the free octaroon as a white, even though descended through an unbroken line of mothers from an imported African slave; the