Randolph "humbly supplicated one parting word" before the last vote was taken. It was a word of excuse and self-justification. His vote, he said, would be "ascribed by malice to motives unknown to his breast." He would "ask the mercy of God for every other act of his life," but for this he requested only Heaven's justice. He still objected to the Constitution, but the ratification of it by eight States had now "reduced our deliberations to the single question of Union or no Union."[1349] So closed the greatest debate ever held over the Constitution and one of the ablest parliamentary contests of history.
A committee was appointed to report "a form of ratification pursuant to the first resolution"; and another was selected "to prepare and report such amendments as by them shall be deemed necessary."[1350] Marshall was chosen as a member of both these important committees.
The lengths to which the Constitutionalists were driven in order to secure ratification are measured by the amendments they were forced to bring in. These numbered twenty, in addition to a Bill of Rights, which also had twenty articles. The ten amendments afterwards made to the Constitution were hardly a shadow of those recommended by the Virginia Convention of 1788.
That body actually proposed that National excise or direct tax laws should not operate in any State, in case the State itself should collect its quota under State laws and through State officials; that two thirds of both houses of Congress, present, should be necessary to pass navigation laws or laws regulating commerce; that no army or regular troops should be "raised or kept up in time of peace" without the consent of two thirds of both houses, present; that the power of Congress over the seat of the National Government should be confined to police and administrative regulation. The Judiciary amendment would have imprisoned the Supreme Court within limits so narrow as to render that tribunal almost powerless and would have absolutely prevented the establishment of inferior National Courts, except those of Admiralty.[1351] Yet only on such terms could ratification be secured even by the small and uncertain majority that finally voted for it.
On June 25, Clinton's suppressed letter to Randolph was laid before the House of Delegates which had just convened.[1352] Mason was so furious that he drew up resolutions for an investigation of Randolph's conduct.[1353] But the deed was done, anger was unavailing, and the resolutions never were offered.[1354]
So frail was the Constitutionalist strength that if the news of the New Hampshire ratification had not reached Virginia, it is more than probable that Jefferson's advice would have been followed and that the Old Dominion would have held back until all the amendments desired by the opposition had been made a part of the fundamental law;[1355] and the Constitution would have been a far different and infinitely weaker instrument than it is.
Burning with wrath, the Anti-Constitutionalists held a meeting on the night of the day of the vote for ratification, to consider measures for resisting the new National Government. The character of Patrick Henry never shone with greater luster than when he took the chair at this determined gathering of furious men. He had done his best against the Constitution, said Henry, but he had done it in the "proper place"; the question was settled now and he advised his colleagues that "as true and faithful republicans, they had all better go home!"[1356] Well might Washington write that only "conciliatory conduct" got the Constitution through;[1357] well might he declare that "it is nearly impossible for anybody who has not been on the spot (from any description) to conceive what the delicacy and danger of our situation have been."[1358]
And Marshall had been on the spot. Marshall had seen it all. Marshall had been a part of it all. From the first careful election programme of the Constitutionalists, the young Richmond lawyer had been in every meeting where the plans of the managers were laid and the order of battle arranged. No man in all the country knew better than he, the hair's breadth by which the ordinance of our National Government escaped strangulation at its very birth. No one in America better understood how carefully and yet how boldly Nationalism must be advanced if it were to grow stronger or even to survive.
It was plain to Marshall that the formal adoption of the Constitution did not end the battle. That conflict, indeed, was only beginning. The fight over ratification had been but the first phase of the struggle. We are now to behold the next stages of that great contest, each as dramatic as it was vital; and we shall observe how Marshall bore himself on every field of this mighty civil strife, note his development and mark his progress toward that supreme station for which events prepared him. We are to witness his efforts to uphold the National Government, not only with argument and political activity, but also with a readiness to draw the sword and employ military force. We shall look upon the mad scenes resulting in America from the terrific and bloody convulsion in Europe and measure the lasting effect the French Revolution produced upon the statesmen and people of the United States. In short, we are to survey a strange swirl of forces, economic and emotional, throwing to the surface now one "issue" and now another, all of them centering in the sovereign question of Nationalism or States' Rights.