Having none of the public securities, Madison was able later to take a more disinterested view of the funding system proposed by Hamilton; and the scramble of politicians and speculators which accompanied the establishment of the new government did more than anything else to disgust him with the administration party and drive him into opposition. Writing to Jefferson in July, 1791, he said: “The subscriptions [to the Bank] are consequently a mere scramble for so much public plunder, which will be engrossed by those already loaded with the spoils of individuals.... It pretty clearly appears, also, in what proportions the public debt lies in the Country, what sort of hands hold it, and by whom the people of the United States are to be governed. Of all the shameful circumstances of this business, it is among the greatest to see the members of the legislature who were most active in pushing this job openly grasping its emoluments. Schuyler is to be put at the head of the Directors, if the weight of the New York subscribers can effect it. Nothing new is talked of here. In fact, stock-jobbing drowns every other subject. The Coffee-House is in an eternal buzz with the gamblers.”[[288]]
Alexander Martin, of North Carolina, was a graduate of Princeton, and practised law. He was for a time governor of his state. Later he served in the United States Senate, and supported Adams and the alien and sedition laws; but was defeated for election in 1799.[[289]] Martin was among the well-to-do planters and slave-owners of his state;[[290]] but his tastes do not seem to have turned to dealings in public securities, for the Index to the holders of the public debt preserved in the Treasury Department does not contain his name, and a search among the papers of North Carolina fails to reveal any record of his transactions.
Luther Martin, of Maryland, was a descendant of English ancestors who had obtained “large grants of land in New Jersey [and] removed their domestic establishment there when a greater part of the colonial domain was a dense wilderness.” He was a graduate of Princeton and took up the practice of law. Being the third of nine children, and having little or no assistance from his parents, who were in pinched circumstances, he was thrown upon his own resources. He commenced his career in Virginia “where he soon acquired a full and lucrative practice, amounting, as he informs us, to about one thousand pounds per annum; which, however, was after a period diminished by the disturbance growing out of the American Revolution.”[[291]]
Luther Martin’s fortune was never very large, although he had among his clients men of great wealth and influence, like Robert Morris.[[292]] The census of 1790 records his owning only six slaves,[[293]] and his holdings of public securities were apparently meagre—a few thousand dollars at most. One entry of sixes and threes on June 15, 1791, credits him with $1992.67, and he occasionally appears in other records.[[294]] He was always more or less in sympathy with poor debtors, and was unwilling to preclude altogether the issue of paper money or moderate impairments of contract. He was accordingly a bitter opponent of the adoption of the Constitution in his state.[[295]]
George Mason, of Virginia, was born in 1725. He was the son of a rich slave owning and planting family of Dogue’s Neck, and on account of the early death of his father he came into his vast estate on attaining his majority.[[296]] His family fortunes were augmented by speculations in western lands. He married the daughter of a Maryland merchant, from whom a large estate came into his family.[[297]] He was a member of the Ohio Company which was organized in 1749, and obtained a grant of “six hundred thousand acres of land, lying mostly west of the mountains and south of the Ohio.”[[298]] In 1754 he also secured a patent for about fifteen hundred acres of land in Northern Neck.[[299]] He was constantly increasing his holdings,[[300]] and in 1769 “he seems to have come into possession of two thousand acres of land in the district of Kentucky.”[[301]] As a member of the Virginia legislature he drew a bill “to encourage the making of hemp, woollen, linen, and other manufactures.”[[302]]
His property at the time of the establishment of the Constitution was unquestionably large, for at his death in 1792 “he devised to his sons alone, some fifteen thousand acres, the greater part of his own acquisition, of the very best land in the Potomac region. Most of these estates were well improved, with large and comfortable mansions and all necessary outbuildings. But he left to be divided among his children what was solely acquired by himself: sixty thousand of among the finest acres in Kentucky, some three hundred slaves, more than fifty thousand dollars’ worth of other personal property, and at least thirty thousand dollars of debts due on his books, while his own indebtedness was absolutely nothing.”[[303]] Very little of this personal property seems to have been in public securities, for a search in the records of the Treasury Department shows one small entry of a few hundred dollars’ worth of threes and sixes to his credit.[[304]]
Mason frankly admitted his personal interest in certain landed property to be among his many objections to the Constitution—which he refused to approve and the adoption of which he bitterly opposed. Speaking on the dangers from the supremacy of the federal courts, in the Virginia ratifying convention, he said: “I am personally endangered as an inhabitant of Northern Neck. The people of that part will be obliged, by the operation of this power, to pay the quit rent of their lands.... Lord Fairfax’s title was clear and undisputed. After the revolution we taxed his lands as private property. After his death, an act of Assembly was made, in 1782, to sequester the quit rents due, at his death, in the hands of his debtors. Next year an act was made restoring them to the executor of the proprietor. Subsequent to this, the treaty of peace was made, by which it was agreed that there should be no further confiscations. But after this an act of Assembly was passed, confiscating his whole property. As Lord Fairfax’s title was indisputably good, and as treaties are to be the supreme law of the land, will not his representatives be able to recover all in the federal court? How will gentlemen like to pay an additional tax on lands in the Northern Neck?”[[305]]
Mason proposed to limit the judicial power in such a manner that it should “extend to no case where the cause of action shall have originated before the ratification of this Constitution, except in suits for debts due the United States, disputes between states about their territory, and disputes between persons claiming lands under grants of different states.” He expressed a fear that under the Constitution as it stood the titles to all the country between the Blue Ridge and Alleghany Mountains would be upset in the federal courts and that the vast Indiana purchase would be rendered a subject of dispute.[[306]]
James McClurg, of Virginia, was an accomplished man of letters and distinguished physician of his native state. He was born there in 1747, studied at the college of William and Mary, and finished his training in medicine at Edinburgh and Paris. He established himself in the practice first at Williamsburg, and about 1783 he settled in Richmond, where he took first rank as a physician, scholar, and man of the world.[[307]]
McClurg’s knowledge of government was not academic. He knew the subject practically, as well as theoretically; for as early as November 23, 1790, he was engaged in operations in federal securities.[[308]] And on February 17, 1791, he presented to the local loan office Virginia certificates to the amount of $26,819, all of which, except a few hundred pounds originally subscribed by himself, he had evidently bought for speculation.[[309]] McClurg was also an investor in stock in the first United States Bank and one of the directors.[[310]]