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character was Maryland, and they said: "By your letter you have taught us how to value, preserve, and improve that liberty which your services under the smiles of Providence have secured. If the powers given to congress by the confederation should be found incompetent to the purposes of the union, our constituents will readily consent to enlarge them."*

On the part of congress, its president, Elias Boudinot of New Jersey, transmitted to the ministers of America in Europe the circular letter of Washington as the most perfect evidence of "his inimitable character." +

Before the end of June, raw recruits of the Pennsylvania line, in the barracks at Philadelphia, many of them foreign born, joined by others from Lancaster, "soldiers of a day, who could have very few hardships to complain of," # with some returning veterans whom they forced into their ranks, encouraged by no officer of note, surrounding congress ◊ and the council of Pennsylvania, mutinously presented to them demands for pay. Congress insisted with the state authorities that the militia should be called out to restore order, and, the request being refused, † it adjourned to Princeton. On the rumor that the commander-in-chief was sending troops to quell the mutiny, the insurgents, about three hundred in number, made their submission to the president of the state.

The incident hastened the selection of a place for the permanent residence of congress. The articles of confederation left congress free to meet where it would. With the knowledge of the treaty of peace, the idea naturally arose of a federal town, and for its site there were many competitors. Of the thirteen states which at that time fringed the Atlantic, the central point was in Maryland or Virginia. In March 1783, New York tendered Kingston; in May, Maryland urged the choice of Annapolis; in June, New Jersey offered a district below the falls of the Delaware. Virginia, having George* Address of the Maryland legislature, 22 December 1783. MS.

+ Diplomatic Correspondence, 1783–1789, i., 14. Ibid., i., 9.

#Sparks, viii., 455.

Diplomatic Correspondence, 1783-1789, i., 10, 22, 23; Hamilton, i., 387.

A Diplomatic Correspondence, ii., 514; i., 37, 50.

Gilpin, 548; Colonial Records, xiii., 655.

Diplomatic Correspondence, i., 12.

Hamilton, ii., 276.

town for its object,* invited Maryland to join in a cession of equal portions of territory lying together on the Potomac; leaving congress to fix its residence on either side. †

During the summer, congress appointed a committee to consider what jurisdiction it should exercise in its abidingplace. Madison took counsel with Randolph, and especially with Jefferson; and in September the committee of which he was a member reported that the state ceding the territory must give up all jurisdiction over it; the inhabitants were to be assured of a government of laws made by representatives of their own election.# In October, congress took up the question of its permanent residence. Gerry struggled hard for the district on the Potomac; but, by the vote of Delaware and all the northern states, "a place on the Delaware near the falls" was selected. Within a few days the fear of an overpowering influence of the middle states led to what was called "the happy coalition;" on the seventeenth Gerry insisted that the alternate residence of congress in two places would secure the mutual confidence and affections of the states and preserve the federal balance of power. After a debate of several days, New England, with Maryland, Virginia, and the two Carolinas, decided that congress should reside for equal periods on the Delaware and near the lower falls of the Potomac. Till buildings for its use should be erected, it was to meet alternately in Annapolis and Trenton. To carry out the engagement, a committee, of which James Monroe was a member, made an excursion from Annapolis in the following May to view the country round Georgetown; and they reported in favor of the position on which the city of Washington now stands. ◊

The farewell circular letter of Washington addressed to all his countrymen had attracted the attention of congress, and in particular of Hamilton, who roused himself from his own

* Madison to Randolph, 13 October 1783. Gilpin, 578.

Journals of the Virginia House of Delegates, 28 June 1783, p. 97.

Madison to Jefferson, 20 September 1783. Gilpin, 573.

#Gilpin, 559, 571-575.

Madison to Randolph, 13 October 1783. Gilpin, 576.

A Higginson to Bland, January 1784. Bland Papers, ii., 113, 114. Compare Boudinot to R. R. Livingston, 23 October 1783.

◊ Monroe to Jefferson, 20 May and 25 May 1784.

desponding mood when he saw the great chieftain go forth. alone to combat "the epidemic phrenzy" of the supreme sovereignty of the separate states. During the time of disturbances in the army, "could force have availed, he had almost wished to see it employed."+ Knowing nothing beforehand of Washington's intention to address the people, he had favored some combined action of congress and the general to compel the states forthwith to choose between national anarchy and a consolidated union. No sooner had congress established itself in Princeton # than the youthful statesman drafted a most elaborate and comprehensive series of resolutions embodying in clear and definite language the defects in the confederation as a form of federal government; and closing with an earnest recommendation to the several states to appoint a convention to meet at a fixed time and place, with full powers to revise the confederation, and adopt and propose such alterations as to them should appear necessary; to be finally approved or rejected by the states respectively.

But in the congress of that day he found little disposition to second an immediate effort for a new constitution. Of the committee elected on the twenty-eighth of April, which counted among its members the great names of Ellsworth, Wilson, and Hamilton, Wilson and two others had gone home; Ellsworth followed in the first half of July, but not till he had announced to the governor of Connecticut: "It will soon be of very little consequence where congress go, if they are not made respectable as well as responsible; which can never be done without giving them a power to perform engagements as well as make them. There must be a revenue somehow established that can be relied on and applied for national purposes, independent of the will of a single state, or it will be impossible to support national faith, or national existence. powers of congress must be adequate to the purposes of their constitution. It is possible there may be abuses and misapplications; still it is better to hazard something than to hazard

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Ibid., i., 402.

# Hamilton's endorsement on his own paper is: "Resolutions intended to be submitted to congress at Princeton in 1783, but abandoned for want of support." MS.

all." * Nearly at the same moment Hamilton wrote to Greene: "There is so little disposition, either in or out of congress, to give solidity to our national system, that there is no motive to a man to lose his time in the public service who has no other view than to promote its welfare. Experience must convince us that our present establishments are utopian before we shall be ready to part with them for better." To Jay his words were: "It is to be hoped that, when prejudice and folly have run themselves out of breath, we may return to reason and correct our errors." + Confirmed in "his ill forebodings as to the future system of the country," + "he abandoned his resolutions for the want of support."

In congress, which he left near the end of July, three months before the period for which he was chosen expired, we know through an ardent friend that "his homilies were recollected with pleasure;" that his extreme zeal made impressions in favor of his integrity, honor, and republican principles; that he had displayed various knowledge, had been sometimes intemperate and sometimes, though rarely, visionary; that cautious statesmen thought, if he could pursue an object with as much cold perseverance as he could defend it with ardor and argument, he would prove irresistible.# From the goodness of his heart, his pride, and his sense of duty, he gave up "future views of public life," | to toil for the support of his wife and children in a profession of which to him the labors were alike engrossing and irksome. In four successive years, with few to heed him, he had written and spoken for a constituent federal convention. His last official word to Clinton was: "Strengthen the confederation." ◊

On the second of September, more than a month after Hamilton had withdrawn, the remnant of the committee of the twenty-eighth of April, increased by Samuel Huntington, of Connecticut, reported that "until the effect of the resolu

*Ellsworth, infra, 324.

Hamilton, i., 352.

Johnson, ii., 442. Jay's Jay, ii., 123.

#McHenry to Hamilton, 22 October 1783. Hamilton, i., 411.

Hamilton to Clinton, 14 May 1783. Hamilton, i., 368.

▲ That Hamilton disliked the labors of a lawyer, I received from Eliphalet

Nott.

Hamilton to Clinton, 3 October 1783. Hamilton, i., 407.

tion of congress, of April last, relating to revenue, should be known, it would be proper to postpone the further consideration of the concurrent resolutions of the senate and assembly of New York." In this way the first proposition by a state for reforming the government through a federal convention was put to sleep.

*

All this while the British commander was preparing for the evacuation of New York. The malignant cruelty of royalists, especially in New York and South Carolina, who prompted and loved to execute the ruthless orders of Germain, aroused against them, as had been foretold, a just indignation, which unhappily extended to thousands of families in the United States who had taken no part in the excesses. Toward these Washington and Adams, Jay and Hamilton, and Jefferson who was especially called "their protector and support,” † and many of the best counselled forbearance and forgiveness. Motives of policy urged their absorption into the population of the union now that the sovereign to whom they had continued their allegiance had given them their release. But a dread of their political influence prevailed, and before the end of 1783 thousands of loyalists, families of superior culture, like the original planters of Massachusetts, were driven to seek homes in the wilds of Nova Scotia. In this way the United States out of their own children built up on their border a colony of rivals in navigation and the fishery whose loyalty to the British crown was sanctified by misfortunes. Nor did the British parliament hesitate for a moment to compensate all refugees for the confiscation of their property, and, when the amount was ascertained, it voted them from the British treasury as an indemnity very nearly fifteen and a half millions of dollars.#

The American army being nearly disbanded, Washington, on the eighteenth of July, with Governor Clinton as his companion, made an excursion into the interior, during which he personally examined the lines of water communication between branches of the Hudson and the Saint Lawrence, the lakes and the Susquehanna. By these observations, he comprehended

* Report of Peters, McHenry, Izard, Duane, and S. Huntingdon, of 2 September 1783. Luzerne to Rayneval, of 18 June 1784. MS. #Sabine's Loyalists, 111.

Haliburton's Nova Scotia, i., 263.

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