dwelt along the important navigable rivers. The second was more or less isolated, either within the recesses of the interior of the States, or inhabiting western and inaccessible parts of the country, and was thus removed, as it were by nature, from the active affairs of the world. The federal and anti-federal areas were distinct political sections.1

In New Hampshire, the federal area lay along the coast and in the Connecticut valley; the inhabitants of which region were fully alive to an adequate protection of commerce. The Connecticut river settlement, indeed, may be said to have faced the south and to have been economically a part of the central Massachusetts and Connecticut belt. The sentiments of its people were overwhelmingly in favor of the new plan. The anti-federal element in the State consisted chiefly of the Scotch-Irish communities west of the Merrimac river, a region shut off from the sea.2 The seaboard district in Massachusetts was overwhelmingly federal, but the middle and western portions of the State were equally anti-federal. Here were to be found Daniel Shays's friends and followers, who composed fourfifths of the opposition, all of whom favored the repudiation, or sealing of debts, public and private, and an unlimited use of paper money. In Connecticut, a State, whose people depended largely upon commerce, the sentiment in favor of the new plan was almost unanimous; and the little opposition was political rather than economic. The State

3

1 See the Geographical Distribution of the Vote of the Thirteen States on the Federal Constitution, 1787-1788, by Orin Grant Libby, M. L. Fellow in History; Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, June, 1894. This monograph presents the results of diligent and intelligent examination of the condition of the country at the time.

2 Libby, pp. 7-12. 3 Libby, 12-14.

10

NEW YORK, NEW JERSEY.

was quite at the mercy of New York, and contributed about one-third1 of the tax,-amounting in the aggregate to upwards of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which that State collected in tariff duties at its great port. The new plan would abolish the cause of this grievance.2

Rhode Island, which at this time was in the hands of fiat money men, was quite lost to reason, and practically unanimous in its opposition. New York State was a wilderness, except in the Hudson Valley. The city of New York was federal, but the remainder of the State, with slight exceptions, anti-federal. As the traveler, starting from Federal Hall, went northward, he speedily found himself in an anti-federal community, which reached quite to Albany. New York city gave the State an opportunity to monopolize the commerce of Connecticut and New Jersey, and it had long profited by the monopoly. But its gains through imposts on its neighbors was as great a grievance to New Jersey as to Connecticut. Yet, almost without exception, the mercantile class in New York was friendly to the plan, and was only surpassed in zeal by the young lawyers, who by reason of youth, of obscurity and the lack of family connections, had no prospect of a career in State politics. The people of New Jersey, who were in much the same position as those of Connecticut, were quite unanimously in favor of the Constitution. When the Articles of Confederation had been submitted to its legislature, this body had demanded that the regulation of commerce should be vested in the general government, and to this opinion it had always held. The new plan completely

1 Ellsworth in the Connecticut Convention; Elliot, II, 189. 2 Libby, 16.

3 Madison to Washington, October 14, 1787; and to Jefferson, October 24, 1787; Works, I, 342-355.

4 See Vol. I, p. 235.

PENNSYLVANIA, DELAWARE.

11

met this demand and assured the State relief from the imposts levied by New York.

Pennsylvania was a divided State. In Philadelphia, the commercial class welcomed the new plan, but the traveler could not go thirty miles westward from the Delaware before encountering many evidences of the anti-federal opinions, held almost to a man by the inhabitants of the western counties. About Pittsburg centered the influence of the Scotch-Irish emigrants. They were satisfied with the constitution of the State, which was distinguished from the prevailing American type in having only one House. But, as in New York, it was the office-holding class in the State, who declaimed most loudly against the new Constitution.1 In the eastern and older part of Pennsylvania, where the English and German element predominated, where most of the population was found, and the wealth and influence of the State were centered, opinion was strongly federal.

Delaware, in its early history a part of Pennsylvania, was in close commercial association with Philadelphia. Its principal city, Wilmington, had prospered even under the restrictions that had so long injured the country. The people of the State were homogeneous, and since all danger to its equality in the Senate had vanished, it had everything to gain and nothing to lose by approving the new plan. Federalism in Delaware, therefore, rested on the double foundation of politics and economy.

Maryland was a commercial State, and therefore public opinion inclined to be federal. The mercantile interests, centering at Baltimore, and extending thence in all directions tended to unify opinion. Whatever the political leaders of the State may have thought as individuals, it

1 Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, McMaster and Stone, 10.

12

MARYLAND, VIRGINIA.

was to their interest to conform to public sentiment. Luther Martin's somewhat noisy objections to the Constitution did not increase his popularity. The working class were confident that the new plan would lower the rates of interest, would stimulate industry, would equalize the burdens of life, and, above all, free the masses from the tax gatherer.1

The commercial interests of Virginia were confined chiefly to the tide water district, and here federal sentiment prevailed. Here, too, were found the large towns, the lawyers in lucrative practice and in general the best informed people of the State. Westward, extending as far as the Blue Ridge mountains, lay a region possessed by small farmers, poorer in slaves than the tide water planters and far less prosperous. Their opinions were as pronouncedly anti-federal as those in the tide water region were federal. Passing over the mountains, where the Scotch-Irish and German emigrants had settled, sentiment again became federal. The economic condition of the country was not unlike that of Delaware. The Constitution promised the people advantages to be had from no other source.

But when the traveler had reached the people living in the Kanawha and Kentucky valleys, he found himself in an anti-federal stronghold. Here public sentiment grew out of those discords which had long been separating Kentucky from Virginia, clamoring for independence, and prone to interpret any form of national government as an intolerable burden. But anti-federalism here may be said to have rested on local prejudices. The suspicion that by the new plan the Mississippi would be under the control of Spain did not win it any friends. The Anti-Federalists 1 Pennsylvania Gazette, April 2, 1788. 2 Mr. Libby estimates it at 80 per cent.

of Virginia found an advocate in George Mason, who did not delay to publish his objections to the Constitution,1 already familiar to the members of the Philadelphia Con

vention.

In no other southern State was anti-federalism so strong as in North Carolina; yet, opposition there took the form of apathy rather than agitation. Population was widely scattered, and it was difficult to obtain its aggregate opinion on any question. Yet, in the few larger towns a respectable federal feeling existed. Many of the merchants were from Virginia and Maryland, and they held the opinions of their class. As soon as the character of the new plan was made known to the people of the State, their apathy began to disappear and the wealthier portion developed federal opinions. Leaving the federal towns of Hillsboro and Wilmington, and passing westward, the traveler found himself in an almost untouched wilderness, with here and there a settlement, whose people were mostly anti-federal in sentiment. After he had crossed the mountains into the settlements on the Wautauga and the Cumberland and had visited the people of Frankland, he soon detected a change, for the people of these new regions were aspiring to become an independent State, and saw in the Constitution an opportunity to realize their wishes.2

South Carolina, like Pennsylvania, consisted of rival sections of population. The people of Charleston and the sea-board towns were strongly federal, but the country districts, comprising the middle and western portions of

1 The objections of the Honorable George Mason to the proposed Constitution, addressed to the citizens of Virginia; Ford's Pamphlet, 329-332; see the answer to them by James Iredell, Id., 333-370.

2 See Caldwell's Constitutional History of Tennessee, Chapters I-III.