paper has been employed, it has in every case thrown upon its authors the burden of exculpation under the plea of pressing necessity. Paper money has no hold, and from its very nature can acquire no hold, on the conscience or affections of the people. It impairs all certainty of possession, and taxes none so heavily as the class who earn their scant possession by daily labor. It injures the husbandman by a twofold diminution of the exchangeable value of his harvest. It is the favorite of those who seek gain without willingness to toil; it is the deadly foe of industry. No powerful political party ever permanently rested for support on the theory that it is wise and right. No statesman has been thought well of by his kind in a succeeding generation for having been its promoter. * In the plan of government, concerted between the members from Connecticut, especially Sherman and Ellsworth, there was this further article: "That the legislatures of the individual states ought not to possess a right to emit bills of credit for a currency, or to make any tender laws for the payment or discharge of debts or contracts in any manner different from the agreement of the parties, or in any manner to obstruct or impede the recovery of debts, whereby the interests of foreigners or the citizens of any other state may be affected."+ The committee of detail had reported: "No state, without the consent of the legislature of the United States, shall emit bills of credit." With a nobler and safer trust in the power of truth and right over opinion, Sherman on the twenty-eighth, scorning compromise, cried out: "This is the favorable crisis for crushing paper money," and, joining Wilson, they two proposed to make the prohibition absolute. Gorham feared that ston. *This paragraph is a very feeble abstract of the avowed convictions of the great statesmen and jurists who made the constitution. Their words are homely and direct condemnation; and they come not from one party. Richard Henry Lee is as strong in his denunciation as Washington, Sherman, or Robert R. LivingWilliam Paterson of New Jersey wrote in 1786 as follows: "An increase of paper money, especially if it be a tender, will destroy what little credit is left; will bewilder conscience in the mazes of dishonest speculations; will allure some and constrain others into the perpetration of knavish tricks; will turn vice into a legal virtue; and sanctify iniquity by law," etc.-From the holograph of William Paterson. Sherman's Life, in Biography of the Signers, ii., 43. the absolute prohibition would rouse the most desperate opposition; but four northern states and four southern states, Maryland being divided, New Jersey absent, and Virginia alone in the negative, placed in the constitution these unequivocal words: "No state shall emit bills of credit." The second part of the clause, "No state shall make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts," was accepted without a dissentient state. So the adoption of the constitution is to be the end forever of paper money, whether issued by the several states or by the United states, if the constitution shall be rightly interpreted and honestly obeyed. It was ever the wish of Sherman and Ellsworth to prohibit "the discharge of debts or contracts in any manner different from the agreement of the parties." Among the aggressions made by the states on the rights of other states, Madison, in his enumeration,* names the enforced payment of debts in paper money, the enforced discharge of debts by the conveyance of land or other property, the instalment of debts, and the "occlusion" of courts. For the two last of these remedy was as yet provided. wrongs no King moved to add, as in the ordinance of congress for the establishment of new states, "a prohibition on the states to interfere in private contracts." + "This would be going too far," interposed Gouverneur Morris. "There are a thousand laws relating to bringing actions, limitations of actions, and the like, which affect contracts. The judicial power of the United States will be a protection in cases within their jurisdiction; within the state itself a majority must rule, whatever may be the mischief done among themselves." "Why, then, prohibit bills of credit?" inquired Sherman. Wilson was in favor of King's motion. Madison admitted that inconveniences might arise from such a prohibition, but thought on the whole its utility would overbalance them. He conceived, however, that a negative on the state laws could alone secure the end. Evasions might and would be devised by the ingenuity of legislatures. His colleague Mason replied: "The motion" of King "is carrying the restraint too far. Cases will * Madison, i., 321. + Ibid. # Ibid. happen that cannot be foreseen, where some kind of interference will be proper and essential." He mentioned the case of limiting the period for bringing actions on open account, that of bonds after a lapse of time, asking whether it was proper to tie the hands of the states from making provision in such cases.* "The answer to these objections is," Wilson explained, "that retrospective interferences only are to be prohibited." "Is not that already done," asked Madison, "by the prohibition of ex post facto laws, which will oblige the judges to declare such interferences null and void?"+ But the prohibi. tion which, on the motion of Gerry and McHenry, had been adopted six days before, was a limitation on the powers of congress. Instead of King's motion, Rutledge advised to extend that limitation to the individual states; and accordingly they, too, were now forbidden to pass bills of attainder or ex post facto laws by the vote of seven states against Connecticut, Maryland, and Virginia, Massachusetts being absent. So the motion of King, which had received hearty support only from Wilson, was set aside by a very great majority. The next morning "Dickinson mentioned to the house that, on examining Blackstone's Commentaries, he found that the term ex post facto related to criminal cases only; that the words would consequently not restrain the states from retrospective laws in civil cases; and that some further provision for this purpose would be requisite." # Of this remark the convention at the moment took no note; and the clause of Rutledge was left in the draft then making of the constitution, as the provision against the "stay laws and occlusion of courts so much warned against by Madison, "the payment or discharge of debts or contracts in any manner different from the agreement of the parties," as demanded by Sherman and Ellsworth. I Correct *Gilpin, 1443; Elliot, 485. Gilpin, 1399, 1444; Elliot, 462, 485. Ex post facto, not retrospective, was the form used by Rutledge. Gilpin, 1444, by the Journal of the Convention, in Elliot, i., 271, and compare Elliot, i., 257. #Gilpin, 1450; Elliot, 488. That no other motion in form or substance was adopted by the convention till after the draft went into the hands of the committee of style and revision, appears from a most careful comparison of the printed journal of the convention, of Among the prohibitions on the states which the committee of detail reported on the twenty-eighth, was that of laying duties on imports. "Particular states," observed Mason, "may wish to encourage by impost duties certain manufactures for which they enjoy natural advantages, as Virginia the manufacture of hemp, etc." * Madison replied: "The encouragement of manufactures in that mode requires duties, not only on imports directly from foreign countries, but from the other states in the union, which would revive all the mischiefs experienced from the want of a general government over commerce." + King proposed to extend the prohibition not to imports only, but also to exports, so as to prohibit the states from taxing either. Sherman added, that, even with the consent of the United States, the several states should not levy taxes on importations except for the use of the United States. This movement Gouverneur Morris supported as a regulation necessary to prevent the Atlantic states from endeavoring to tax the western states and promote their separate interest by opposing the navigation of the Mississippi, which would drive the western people into the arms of Great Britain. George Clymer of Pennsylvania "thought the encouragement of the western country was suicide on the part of the old states. If the states have such different interests that they cannot be left to regulate their own manufactures, without encountering the interests of other states, it is a proof that they are not fit to compose one nation." King did not wish to "interfere too much with the policy of states respecting their manufactures," holding that such a policy of protection in a separate state might be necessary. "Revenue," he reminded the house, " was the object of the general legislature." # By a large majority the prohibition on the several states of taxing imports was made dependent on the consent of the legislature of the United States; its journal as preserved in manuscript, of every scrap of paper containing any motion or sketch of a motion preserved among the records of the convention in the state department, of the debates of the convention as reported by Madison, and of the several copies of the broadside which were used for the entry of amendments by Washington, by Madison, by Brearley, by Gilman, by Johnson, and another, which seems to be that of the secretary, Jackson. * Gilpin, 1445; Elliot, 486. + Ibid. Gilpin, 1446, 1447; Elliot, 487 #Gilpin, 1447; Elliot, 478. and with this limitation it was carried without a dissentient vote. The extending of the prohibition to exports obtained a majority of but one. That taxes on imports or exports by the states, even with the consent of the United States, should be exclusively for the use of the United States, gained every state but Massachusetts and Maryland. The power to protect domestic manufactures by imposts was taken away from the states, and, so far as it is incident to the raising of revenue, was confined to the United States. The country had been filled with schemes for a division of the thirteen states into two or more separate groups; the convention, following its committee of detail, would suffer no state to enter into any confederation, or even into a treaty or alliance with any confederation. The restriction was absolute. To make it still more clear and peremptory, it was repeated and enlarged in another article, which declared not only that "no state shall enter into any agreement or compact with any foreign power," but that "no state shall enter into any agreement or compact with any other state." * Each state was confined in its government strictly to its own duties within itself. As to slavery, it was by a unanimous consent treated as a sectional interest; freedom existed in all the states; slavery was a relation established within a state by its own law. Under the sovereignty of the king of Great Britain the laws of a colony did not on British soil prevail over the imperial law. In like manner in America, a slave in one American colony, finding himself on the soil of another, was subject only to the laws of the colony in which he might be found. It remained so on the declaration of independence; not as an innovation, but as the continuance of an established fact. The articles of confederation took no note of slavery, except by withholding the privileges of intercitizenship from the slave. The enumeration of slaves was in the distribution of political power a matter of indifference so long as congress voted by states and proportioned its requisitions of revenue to wealth alone. In framing a constitution in which representation in one branch of the legislature was made to depend on population, it became the political interest of the states in which slaves * Article xiii. Gilpin, 1239, 1447; Elliot, 381, 487. |