42 THE CONSTITUTION DISCUSSED. layed, until the wavering members could be won over; therefore, they avoided everything that might irritate their opponents. Because the Anti-Federalists were so strong, the discussions were prolonged and exhaustive. In the Pennsylvania convention, the Federalists, conscious of their strength, had ridden rough-shod over their opponents. The Massachusetts Federalists were compelled to use caution and treat their opponents with respect. The Constitution was read, paragraph by paragraph that every member might have opportunity to express his sentiments; and then the whole plan was debated under the general question of ratification. This program was liberally carried out.1 The objections to the plan were not new, and most of them had come up in the Federal Convention. Massachusetts was the citadel of annual elections, as it still is, and the Anti-Federalists made much of the differences between this local custom and the method proposed in the Constitution. Strong explained that the biennial provision was the result of a compromise between the party for one, and that for three years; a compromise between the Massachusetts and the South Carolina method.2 Ames defended biennial elections not as a compromise, but on the principle that they were better adapted to a country so extensive as our own, and to a government whose objects of legislation would be such as those arising under the new plan; indeed, the new method would more perfectly secure our liberties. But the compromise and the arrangements of a federal cast in the plan, did not satisfy Thompson and Bishop, both of whom de 1 Debates, 100, 103. 2 Id., 103. * Id., 106. 3 SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE. 43 nounced biennial elections as perilous to public interests.1 One Anti-Federalist would have a property qualification,2 and pay the members of Congress from the State treasury; another insisted upon a religious test in order to exclude Roman Catholics, but not one of the seventeen clergymen present favored the proposed exclusion. It seems somewhat paradoxical that a demand for a property qualification should have been made by an Anti-Federalist, and that a Federalist should have declared that the objection was founded on undemocratic principles. 3 Protection to slavery and the slave trade furnished the Anti-Federalists many arguments, expressed summarily by Widgery, who remarked that one southern man with sixty slaves would have as much influence as thirty-seven freemen in New England. As in the Pennsylvania convention so here, the chief objection to the plan was to the power which it gave to Congress. Thomas Dawes, of Boston, argued, that Congress should be given power to encourage manufactures. But this idea which was destined to become a dominant principle of a great political party, in later years, alarmed the Anti-Federalists. It was not perfectly clear, to the majority of the friends or the opponents of the Constitution just how a government could derive an income from a tariff and not burden the people. The Americans at this time were familiar with direct taxes and quotas, but they had not yet pursued the sinuous ways of indirect taxation; thus a familiar argument with 1 Id., 113, 121. 2 Id., 133. 3 Id., 251. 4 Theodore Sedgwick, Id., 133. For the part Sedgwick played in bringing about the adoption of the eleventh amendment, see p. 289. 5 Id., Parsons' Minutes, 303.. • Id., 158. 42 THE CONSTITUTION DISCUSSED. layed, until the wavering members could be won over; therefore, they avoided everything that might irritate their opponents. Because the Anti-Federalists were so strong, the discussions were prolonged and exhaustive. In the Pennsylvania convention, the Federalists, conscious of their strength, had ridden rough-shod over their opponents. The Massachusetts Federalists were compelled to use caution and treat their opponents with respect. The Constitution was read, paragraph by paragraph that every member might have opportunity to express his sentiments; and then the whole plan was debated under the general question of ratification. This program was liberally carried out.1 The objections to the plan were not new, and most of them had come up in the Federal Convention. Massachusetts was the citadel of annual elections, as it still is, and the Anti-Federalists made much of the differences between this local custom and the method proposed in the Constitution. Strong explained that the biennial provision was the result of a compromise between the party for one, and that for three years; a compromise between the Massachusetts and the South Carolina method.2 Ames defended biennial elections not as a compromise, but on the principle that they were better adapted to a country so extensive as our own, and to a government whose objects of legislation would be such as those arising under the new plan; indeed, the new method would more perfectly secure our liberties.3 But the compromise and the arrangements of a federal cast in the plan, did not satisfy Thompson and Bishop, both of whom de 1 Debates, 100, 103. 2 Id., 103. • Id., 106. SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE. 43 nounced biennial elections as perilous to public interests.1 One Anti-Federalist would have a property qualification,2 and pay the members of Congress from the State treasury; another insisted upon a religious test in order to exclude Roman Catholics, but not one of the seventeen clergymen present favored the proposed exclusion. It seems somewhat paradoxical that a demand for a property qualification should have been made by an Anti-Federalist, and that a Federalist should have declared that the objection was founded on undemocratic principles. 3 Protection to slavery and the slave trade furnished the Anti-Federalists many arguments, expressed summarily by Widgery, who remarked that one southern man with sixty slaves would have as much influence as thirty-seven freemen in New England. As in the Pennsylvania convention so here, the chief objection to the plan was to the power which it gave to Congress. Thomas Dawes, of Boston, argued, that Congress should be given power to encourage manufactures. But this idea which was destined to become a dominant principle of a great political party, in later years, alarmed the Anti-Federalists. It was not perfectly clear, to the majority of the friends or the opponents of the Constitution just how a government could derive an income from a tariff and not burden the people. The Americans at this time were familiar with direct taxes and quotas, but they had not yet pursued the sinuous ways of indirect taxation; thus a familiar argument with 4 Theodore Sedgwick, Id., 133. For the part Sedgwick played in bringing about the adoption of the eleventh amendment, see p. 289. 5 Id., Parsons' Minutes, 303.. • Id., 158. the Anti-Federalists was the probable inability of the new government to raise sufficient revenue by tariff, and, consequently, the necessity it would be under to tax land and personal property.1 Undoubtedly this favorite AntiFederal objection was inevitable, but as yet a tariff had not been tried. It is not strange that men, who, like the majority of the Americans, at this time, were obliged to work hard for a living, and whose annual income was not on an average much above two hundred dollars a year, should view, with alarm, the grant of power to Congress to levy and collect taxes at its discretion. This distrust of delegated power was well founded and lay at the bottom of all the Anti-Federal arguments against the legislative department.2 Many Federalists shared it. Yet, carried to an extreme it would destroy all government.3 Local antagonisms divided the members into the agricultural and the commercial party. The New England farmers habitually believed that the merchants, in the large towns, led a very easy life and nowhere was this conviction stronger than in rural Massachusetts. Out of it grew another belief, equally potent, that whatever the merchants favored, would be autocratic, and that true democracy was to be found in the thoughts of the farmers.* The industrial seam ran all along the coast dividing the tillers of the soil from the shop-keepers, the countrymen from the townspeople. Richard Henry Lee had his audience in mind when he wrote his Letters of a Farmer. So Centinel in his letters to the people of Pennsylvania," told them that the new government was intended for the 1 Id., 203. 2 Harding, 74. 3 Knox to Washington, February 10, 1788; Id., 409; Harding, 74. 4 Harding, 75. Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 626-628. |