CHAPTER III. THE CONNECTICUT COMPROMISE. FROM 19 JUNE TO 2 JULY 1787. THE Convention, which had shown itself so resolute for consolidating the union, next bethought itself of home rule. In reply to what had fallen from Hamilton, Wilson said, on the nineteenth of June: "I am for a national government, but not one that will swallow up the state governments; these are absolutely necessary for purposes which the national government cannot reach." "I did not intend yesterday," exclaimed Hamilton, "a total extinguishment of state governments; but that a national government must have indefinite sovereignty; for if it were limited at all, the rivalship of the states would gradually subvert it.* The states must retain subordinate jurisdictions." "If the states," said King, "retain some portion of their sovereignty, they have certainly divested themselves of essential portions of it. If, in some respects, they form a confederacy, in others they form a nation." Martin held that the separation from Great Britain placed the thirteen states in a state of nature toward each other. ‡ This Wilson denied, saying: "In the declaration of independence the united colonies were declared to be free and independent states, independent, not individually, but unitedly." # Connecticut, which was in all sincerity partly federal and partly national, was now compelled to take the lead. As a * Gilpin, 904; Elliot, 212. Yates in Elliot, i., 426. # Gilpin, 906, 907; Elliot, 213. Gilpin, 907; Elliot, 213. state she was the most homogeneous and the most fixed in the character of her consociate churches and her complete system of home government. Her delegation to the convention. was thrice remarkable: they had precedence in age; in experience, from 1776 to 1786 on committees to frame or amend a constitution for the country; and in illustrating the force of religion in human life. Roger Sherman was a unique man. No one in the convention had had so large experience in legislating for the United States. Next to Franklin the oldest man in the convention, like Franklin he had had no education but in the common school of his birthplace hard by Boston; and as the one learned the trade of a tallow-chandler, so the other had been apprenticed to a shoemaker. Left at nineteen an orphan on the father's side, he ministered to his mother during her long life; and having suffered from the want of a liberal education, he provided it for his younger brothers. Resolved to conquer poverty, at the age of two-and-twenty he wrapped himself in his own manliness, and, bearing with him the tools of his trade, he migrated on foot to New Milford, in Connecticut, where he gained a living by his craft or by traffic, until in December 1754, after careful study, he was admitted to the bar. There was in him kind-heartedness and industry, penetration and close reasoning, an unclouded intellect, superiority to passion, intrepid patriotism, solid judgment, and a directness which went straight to its end; so that the country people among whom he lived, first at New Milford and then at New Haven, gave him every possible sign of their confidence. The church made him its deacon; Yale college its treasurer; New Haven its representative, and, when it became a city, its first mayor, re-electing him as long as he lived. For nineteen years he was annually chosen one of the fourteen assistants, or upper house of the legislature; and for twenty-three years a judge of the court of common pleas, or of the superior court. A plurality of offices being then allowed, Sherman was sent to the first congress in 1774, and to every other congress to the last hour of his life, except when excluded by the fundamental law of rotation. In congress he served on most of the important committees, the board of war, the board of the marine, the board of finance. He signed the declaration of 1774, which some writers regard as the date of our nationality; was of the committee to write, and was a signer of the declaration of independence; was of the committee to frame the articles of the confederation, and a signer of that instrument. No one is known to have complained of his filling too many offices, or to have found fault with the manner in which he filled them. In the convention he never made long speeches, but would intuitively seize on the turning-point of a question, and present it in terse language which showed his own opinion and the strength on which it rested. By the side of Sherman stood William Samuel Johnson, then sixty years of age. He took his first degree at Yale, his second, after a few months' further study, at Harvard; became a representative in the Connecticut assembly; was a delegate to the stamp-act congress of 1765, and assisted in writing its address to the king. He became the able and faithful agent of his state in England, where Oxford made him a doctor of civil law. After his return in 1771, he was chosen one of the fourteen assistants, and one of the judges of the superior court. He was sent by Connecticut on a peace mission to Gage at Boston; but from the war for independence he kept aloof. His state, nevertheless, appointed him its leading counsel in its territorial disputes with Pennsylvania. A delegate to the fifth congress and the sixth, he acted in 1786 on a grand committee and its sub-committee for reforming the federal government. He had just been unanimously chosen president of Columbia college. His calm and conservative character made him tardy in coming up to a new position, so that he had even opposed the call of the federal convention.* He was of good-humor, composedness, and candor, and he knew how to conciliate and to convince. The third member of the Connecticut delegation was Oliver Ellsworth, whom we have seen on the committee of 1781 for amending the constitution, and on the committee of 1783 for addressing the states in behalf of further reforms. A native of Connecticut, he was at Yale for two years, and in * Gale to Johnson, 19 April 1787; Gilpin, 589; Elliot, 96. 1766, after two years more of study, graduated in the college of New Jersey, where Luther Martin was his classmate. Of a robust habit of mind, he was full of energy and by nature hopeful; devoid of sentimentality and safe against the seductions of feeling or the delusions of imagination, he was always self-possessed. Free from rancor and superior to flattery, he could neither be intimidated nor cajoled. His mind advanced cautiously, but with great moving force. Knowing what he needed, he could not be turned from its pursuit; obtaining it, he never wrangled for more. He had been the attorney of his own state, a member of its assembly, one of its delegates in congress, a colleague of Sherman in its superior court; and now, at the age of two-and-forty, rich in experience, he becomes one of the chief workmen in framing the federal constitution. By Paterson, in his notes for a New Jersey plan, the proposed new government was named "the federal government of the United States;" by Dickinson, in his resolution, "the government of the United States." In the Virginia plan it was described as "national" nineteen times, and in the report from the convention in committee of the whole to the house, twentysix times. Ellsworth, who then and ever after did not scruple to use the word "national," moved to substitute in the amended Virginia plan the phrase of Dickinson as the proper title.* To avoid alarm, the friends to the national plan unhesitatingly accepted the colorless change.† Lansing then moved "that the powers of legislation ought to be vested in the United States in congress." He dwelt again on the want of power in the convention, the probable disapprobation of their constituents, the consequent dissolution of the union, the inability of a general government to pervade the whole continent, the danger of complicating the British model of government with state governments on principles which would gradually destroy the one or the other. Mason protested against a renewed agitation of the question between the two plans, and against the objection of a want of ample powers in the convention; with impassioned wisdom, he continued: "On two points the American mind is well settled: an at * Gilpin, 908, 909; Elliot, 214. + Martin in Elliot, i., 362. tachment to republican government, and an attachment to more than one branch in the legislature. The general accord of their constitutions in both these circumstances must either have been a miracle, or must have resulted from the genius of the people. Congress is the only single legislature not chosen by the people themselves, and in consequence they have been constantly averse to giving it further powers. They never will, they never can, intrust their dearest rights and liberties to one body of men not chosen by them, and yet invested with the sword and the purse; a conclave, transacting their business in secret and guided in many of their acts by factions and party spirit. It is acknowledged by the author of the New Jersey plan that it cannot be enforced without military coercion. The most jarring elements of nature, fire and water, are not more incompatible than such a mixture of civil liberty and military execution. "Notwithstanding my solicitude to establish a national government, I never will agree to abolish the state governments, or render them absolutely insignificant. They are as necessary as the general government, and I shall be equally careful to preserve them. I am aware of the difficulty of drawing the line between the two, but hope it is not insurmountable. That the one government will be productive of disputes and jealousies against the other, I believe; but it will produce mutual safety. The convention cannot make a faultless government; but I will trust posterity to mend its defects."* The day ended in a definitive refusal to take up the proposition of Lansing; the six national states standing together against the three federal ones and Connecticut, Maryland being divided. The four southernmost states aimed at no selfish advantages, when in this hour of extreme danger they came to the rescue of the union. Moreover, the people of Maryland were by a large majority on the side of the national states, and the votes of Connecticut and Delaware were given only to pave the way to an equal vote in the senate. Weary of supporting the New Jersey plan, Sherman † pleaded for two houses of the national legislature and an equal * Gilpin, 912-915; Elliot, 216, 217; Yates in Elliot, i., 428, 429. |