NOTES. RUFUS KING. 1. Rufus King was born in Scarborough, Maine, then a part of Massachusetts, on March 24, 1755. He graduated from Harvard College in 1777. While at college he earned a reputation by his proficiency in the classics and by unusual powers in oratory, to which he gave special attention. During a portion of the Revolutionary War he served as an aide-decamp to General Sullivan in the expedition against the British in Rhode Island. He was admitted to the bar in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1780. He won early and notable success in the law, and in 1783 he was elected to the Massachusetts Legislature. In this Legislature Mr. King showed the national bent of his mind by urging that full authority be granted to the general government to regulate the commerce of the States and that the five-per-cent. impost be granted to Congress. In 1784 he was elected by the Legislature of Massachusetts to the Congress of the Confederation. In this Congress he was an earnest advocate of the prohibition of slavery in the territory and prospective States of the Northwest. Mr. King was a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and in the discussions of that Convention he bore an able and prominent part. Few men contributed more than he to the making of the Constitution. He was on the committee to which was assigned the duty of making the final draft of the Constitution. King was also in the Massachusetts Convention for the ratification of the Constitution, and it is largely owing to his efforts there that Massachusetts was persuaded to ratify. He and Fisher Ames were to the Massachusetts Convention what Hamilton was to that in New York and Madison and Marshall to that in Virginia. In 1788 Mr. King moved to the city of New York. The same year in which he came to New York he was elected to the State Legislature, and in 1789 he "received the unexampled welcome" of an election as one of New York's first Senators in the United States Congress. King was a pronounced Federalist in politics. Albert Gallatin having been elected a Senator from Pennsylvania, and the question of his eligibility having been raised, King made a notable speech in answer to Burr in opposition to Gallatin's right to the seat. He was a pronounced advocate of Jay's Treaty, and in 1794 he was hissed and prevented from speaking while attempting, in company with Hamilton, to address the public in defence of the treaty. He and Hamilton then united in a series of papers over the title of Camillus, to explain and defend the treaty before the public. Of these papers, the ones relating to commercial affairs and maritime law were written by Mr. King. In 1796 he was sent by Washington as our envoy to England, where he remained for seven years, until 1803. From 1803 to 1813 he was in private life, but in the latter year he was again elected as United States Senator from New York. He was nominated for Governor by the New York Federalists in 1816, and was voted for by his party electors for President against Monroe the same year. He had also been the candidate of the Federal party for Vice-President in 1804 and 1808. In the Senate in 1818 he contributed materially to bring about the passage of the Navigation Act of that year, and his speech on that subject is a notable one. He was re-elected to the Senate in 1819, closing his Senatorial course in 1825. He then expected to retire from public life, but was persuaded by Presi dent J. Q. Adams to undertake the mission to Great Britain. He returned home in 1826 on account of ill health, and died at Jamaica, L. I., April 29, 1827. King's most notable public service in his late years was in his opposition to the admission of Missouri as a slave State. He was the recognized leader of the anti-slavery forces in this struggle. His speeches were but meagrely reported in the Annals of Congress, but the substance of the two which he made in the Senate, as he afterwards gave them to the press, contain the main arguments for his side of the controversy. No one, in that day, could speak with greater authority and more weight than he upon the Constitutional phases of the question, and his speeches formed the basis for many of the subsequent Congressional debates on slavery. References: Lalor's, Johnson's, and Appleton's Cyclopædias. MacMaster's and Schouler's History of the United States. Benton's Abridgment of Debates. 2. Historical Note on the Missouri Question. The struggle over the admission of Missouri into the Union was one of the most important in the long slavery controversy. The Missouri struggle lasted for three years, from March, 1818, to March, 1821. The immediate result of that struggle was the admission of Missouri without restriction as to slavery, accompanied with the provision that slavery should be forever excluded from all the Louisiana purchase north of 36° 30′; the line which formed the southern boundary of Missouri. In these few words is stated the substance of the Missouri Compromise, the basis of adjustment of one of the most violent political struggles, the outcome of one of the ablest, most |