easy to find any body in Virginia who needed to be persuaded that the right to the Mississippi must not be surrendered. Madison wrote to Monroe in October, 1786, that it would "be defended by the legislature with as much zeal as could be wished. Indeed, the only danger is that too much resentment may be indulged by many against the federal councils." His only apprehension was lest the Mississippi question should come up in the Assembly before the report from the Annapolis Convention should be disposed of, for if that were accepted the appointment of delegates to Philadelphia was assured. "I hope," he wrote to Washington in November, "the report will be called for before the business of the Mississippi begins to ferment." It happened as he wished. "The recommendation from Annapolis," he wrote again a week later, "in favour of a general revision of the federal system was unanimously agreed to;" (the emphasis is his own.) He afterward reported to Jefferson that "the project for bartering the Mississippi to Spain was brought before the Assembly after the preceding measure had been adopted." There was neither delay nor difficulty in securing the unanimous consent of the Assembly to resolutions instructing the members of Congress to oppose any concession to Spain. But Madison's anxiety was not in the least relieved by the speedy appointment of delegates to the Philadelphia Convention; for, he

wrote presently to Washington, "I am entirely convinced, from what I observe here (at Richmond), that, unless the project of Congress can be reversed, the hopes of carrying this State into a proper federal system will be demolished." He had already said, in the same letter, that the resolutions on the Mississippi question had been "agreed to unanimously in the House of Delegates," and three days before the letter was written the delegates to Philadelphia had been appointed.

CHAPTER VII.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION.

MR. MADISON is called "the Father of the Constitution." A paper written by him was laid before his colleagues of Virginia, before the meeting of the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, and was made the basis of the "Virginia plan," as it was called, out of which the Constitution was evolved. In another way his name is so identified with it that one cannot be forgotten so long as the other is remembered. From that full and faithful report of the proceedings of the convention, in which his own part was so active and conspicuous, we know most that we do, or ever can, know of the perplexities and trials, the concessions and triumphs, the acts of wisdom, and the acts of weakness of that body of men whose coming together time has shown to have been one of the important events in the history of mankind.

Then it is also true that no man had worked harder, perhaps none had worked so hard, to bring the public mind to a serious consideration of affairs and a recognition of the necessity of reorganizing the government, if the States were to

be held together. Never, it seemed, had men better reason to be satisfied with the result of their labors when, a few months later, the new Constitution was accepted by all the States. Yet the time was not far distant when even Madison would be in doubt as to the character of this new bond of union, and as to what sort of government had been secured by it. Nor till he had been dead near thirty years was it to be determined what union under the Constitution really meant; nor till three quarters of a century after the adoption of that instrument was the more perfect union formed, justice established, domestic tranquillity insured, the general welfare promoted, and the blessings of liberty secured to all the people, which by that great charter it was intended, in 1787, to ordain and establish. All the difficulties, which they who framed it escaped by their work, were as nothing to those which it entailed upon

their descendants.

Two parties went into the convention. On one point, of course, they were agreed, else they would never have come together at all: that a united government under the Articles of Confederation was a failure, and, unless some remedy should be speedily devised, States with common local interests would gravitate into separate and, perhaps, antagonistic nationalities. But the differences between these two parties were radical, and for a time seemed insurmountable. One proposed sim

ply to repair the Articles of Confederation as they might overhaul a machine that was out of gear; the other proposed to form an altogether new Constitution. One wanted a merely federal government; not, however, meaning by that term what the other party—soon, nevertheless, to be known as Federalists—were striving for; but a confederation of States, each independent of all the rest and supreme in its own right, while consenting to unite with the rest in a limited government for the administration of certain common interests.1

This idea of the independence of the States was a survival of the old colonial system, when each colony under its distinct relation to the crown had attained a growth of its own with its separate interests. Each of these colonies had become a

1 Those who were zealous for state-rights, and opposed to a central government, called the system they wished to reëstablish a Federal System a confederacy of States. It was too convenient, and probably too popular a term to be lost, and the other party adopted it when the new Constitution was formed. The Federalist was the name chosen for the volume in which were collected the papers, written first under the signature of "A Citizen of New York," but afterward changed to "Publius," in support of the new Constitution, by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. In one of the earlier papers, Mr. Hamilton refers to the Articles of Confederation, which were to be superseded, as the Federal Constitution; but in the later papers Madison is careful to refer to the proposed form of government as the Federal Constitution, and Federal soon came to be the distinguishing name of the party which first came into power under the new Constitution. Whatever may be said of Madison's other title, his right to that of father of the Federal party can hardly be disputed.