The Legislature instructed the Virginia Senators in Congress "to use their utmost endeavors to procure the admission of the citizens of the United States to hear the debates of their House, whenever they are sitting in their legislative capacity."[138]
An address glowing with love, confidence, and veneration was sent to Washington.[139] Then Jefferson came to Richmond; and the Legislature appointed a committee to greet him with polite but coldly formal congratulations.[140] No one then foresaw that a few short years would turn the reverence and affection for Washington into disrespect and hostility, and the indifference toward Jefferson into fiery enthusiasm.
The first skirmish in the engagement between the friends and foes of a stronger National Government soon came on. On November 30, 1789, the House ratified the first twelve amendments to the Constitution,[141] which the new Congress had submitted to the States; but three days later it was proposed that the Legislature urge Congress to reconsider the amendments recommended by Virginia which Congress had not adopted.[142] An attempt to make this resolution stronger was defeated by the deciding vote of the Speaker, Marshall voting against it.[143]
The Anti-Nationalist State Senate refused to concur in the House's ratification of the amendments proposed by Congress;[144] and Marshall was one of the committee to hold a conference with the Senate committee on the subject.
After Congress had passed the laws necessary to set the National Government in motion, Madison had reluctantly offered his summary of the volume of amendments to the Constitution recommended by the States "in order," as he said, "to quiet that anxiety which prevails in the public mind."[145] The debate is illuminating. The amendments, as agreed to, fell far short of the radical and extensive alterations which the States had asked and were understood to be palliatives to popular discontent.[146]
Randolph in Richmond wrote that the amendments were "much approved by the strong federalists ... being considered as an anodyne to the discontented. Some others ... expect to hear, ... that a real amelioration of the Constitution was not so much intended, as a soporific draught to the restless. I believe, indeed," declared Randolph, "that nothing—nay, not even the abolishment of direct taxation—would satisfy those who are most clamorous."[147]
The amendments were used by many, who changed from advocates to opponents of broad National powers, as a pretext for reversed views and conduct; but such as were actually adopted were not a sufficient justification for their action.[148]
The great question, however, with which the First Congress had to deal, was the vexed and vital problem of finance. It was the heart of the whole constitutional movement.[149] Without a solution of it the National Government was, at best, a doubtful experiment. The public debt was a chaos of variegated obligations, including the foreign and domestic debts contracted by the Confederation, the debts of the various States, the heavy accumulation of interest on all.[150] Public and private credit, which had risen when the Constitution finally became an accomplished fact, was now declining with capital's frail timidity of the uncertain.
In his "First Report on the Public Credit," Hamilton showed the way out of this maddening jungle. Pay the foreign debt, said Hamilton, assume as a National obligation the debts of the States and fund them, together with those of the Confederation. All had been contracted for a common purpose in a common cause; all were "the price of liberty." Let the owners of certificates, both State and Continental, be paid in full with arrears of interest, without discrimination between original holders and those who had purchased from them. And let this be done by exchanging for the old certificates those of the new National Government bearing interest and transferable. These latter then would pass as specie;[151] the country would be supplied with a great volume of sound money, so badly needed,[152] and the debt be in the process of extinguishment.[153]
Hamilton's entire financial system was assailed with fury both in Congress and among the people. The funding plan, said its opponents, was a stock-jobbing scheme, the bank a speculator's contrivance, the National Assumption of State debts a dishonest trick. The whole was a plot designed to array the moneyed interests in support of the National Government.[154] Assumption of State debts was a device to increase the National power and influence and to lessen still more the strength and importance of the States.[155] The speculators, who had bought the depreciated certificates of the needy, would be enriched from the substance of the whole people.