No one can read the acts of ratification in which these proposed amendments were incorporated or added without being impressed by the fear of the States that they were hazarding their hard-earned liberties in this experiment. It is easy to make light of them in the successful experience of a hundred years. It is clear now that whatever precautions the States took would be swept aside by the hand of necessity, and that later generations would repudiate some of the principles laid down in their manifestos. It is useless to demand consistency in a growing body. How futile for Virginia and Rhode Island, for instance, to declare that all power granted under the Constitution proceeds from the people of the United States and that, whenever the same is perverted, it may be resumed by them! Being adopted in State conventions and voicing the sentiment of the people in these established groups, is it unlikely that they meant the people of the United States as grouped into the several States precisely as they had formed and were now adopting their Constitution? Yet a generation or two later, Virginia was to be told that she meant the people of the entire United States, regardless of State lines, and in this opinion the people of Rhode Island in that generation would join.
How useless for South Carolina to make as part of her ratification the precautionary statement that no part of the Constitution should ever be construed so that the States might be deprived of any power not expressly relinquished by them! How fruitless for New Hampshire to stipulate that all powers not expressly delegated by the Constitution should be reserved to the several States to be exercised by them! How profitless fate was to make the stipulations of New York that Congress should never lay any kind of excise except on ardent spirits, and that the clauses in the Constitution forbidding Congress to do certain things should not be construed into a permission to do anything except that which was named in the document! Time was soon to demonstrate the folly of attempting to place these barriers in the path of progress. Under such restrictions, the new Government would have been as helpless as the old, unless new powers had been added to it from time to time by the precarious method of amendment. Advancement must have been hindered constantly by waiting on the slow process of adding provisions to the Constitution. Such crises as the purchase of Louisiana, the suppression of domestic insurrection, and the adjustment of the national finances after the War of 1812 could never have been met because of constitutional limitations.
Several of the States incorporated in their acts of ratification a kind of political creed of the inalienable rights of the individual. Although not intended as amendments or even as conditions of ratification, they were supposed to be a kind of perpetual compact between the State and the nation. They were modelled after the Bill or Declaration of Rights in some of the State constitutions. Rhode Island, for instance, declared that "the rights aforesaid cannot be abridged or violated and that the explanations aforesaid are consistent with the said Constitution." Time was to show in seasons of national aggrandisement, during the reconstruction period, for instance, how futile such State barriers would be in hedging about the national powers. These sticklers for individualism and fearing souls could not see that the central clearing-house, which the people of the respective States were creating, could not be confined to a few expressed powers; that unseen situations and sudden emergencies would call for action not specified; that to make a list of allowable acts in advance was simply an impossibility. In their alarm, they failed to see that the individuals of which the States were composed would come in contact more closely with local than with national affairs; that they would participate more frequently in State than in Federal Government; and that this very participation for the regulation of local affairs would perpetuate a fealty to the State which would guarantee its perpetuity within its proper sphere. But, at the time, many agreed with Lowndes, who predicted in the South Carolina Convention that despite all precautions the State powers under the Constitution would soon be confined to the regulation of ferries and roads.
All anxiety about ratification ceased on the second day of July, the anniversary of the motion for independence, when the favourable act of New Hampshire, the ninth State necessary, reached Congress. The matter of arranging for putting the new Government into motion was referred to a committee. In taking this action, the old Congress was sealing its death-warrant. It would cease to exist, and be replaced by two houses of Congress under the Constitution. It had served well its purpose. Called into life by the necessity of colonial co-operation in 1774, the Continental Congress had gradually assumed sufficient power to bring a great war to a successful conclusion. Deprived of much of this power under the Articles, circumscribed by the suspicious bounds of State sovereignty, the Congress had become a thing of contempt. Not a member was now present who had been among those assembled at the hall of the Carpenters' Association in Philadelphia fourteen years before. Not a man now present was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Nevertheless the body assumed an unwonted activity in these, its last days. A quorum was had during several of the summer months of 1788. The business of settling accounts between the Confederation and the several States was actively carried on, and further arrangement was made for selling the public lands in the North-West Territory. The form of levying quotas upon the States, amounting to a million and a half dollars, was again gone through with. Since it was unlikely that these assessments would be paid, John Adams borrowed one million guilders in Holland for ten years with which to inaugurate the new Government.
A petition for statehood from the settlers in Kentucky, the second in the long list of additions to the Union, reached Congress, accompanied by the consent of Virginia to the severance of her western district. Since the time for the beginning of the new Government was so near at hand, the petition was returned with the suggestion that it be renewed after that event.
The principal item of domestic expenditure was found to be that for supporting the United States army of 595 officers and men scattered along the frontier. They were garrisoned in Fort Pitt, at the head of the Ohio River; Fort Franklin and Fort McIntosh, between Pitt and Lake Erie; Fort Harmar, at the mouth of the Muskingum; Fort Steuben, at the falls of the Ohio, now Louisville; and Fort Vincennes, on the Wabash, now in Indiana. Also a force consisting of an officer, one sergeant, and fifteen privates was stationed at West Point. To meet the expenses for these troops, and also those for Indians and pensions, there was available in the domestic treasury the sum total of $22,000.
The committee of Congress to whom had been given the arrangement for putting the new Government into motion found that the election of senators and representatives was left by the Constitution to the States; that the creation of the Federal judiciary belonged to the new Congress; and that only the measures necessary for the election of a President were left to them. They therefore set the first Wednesdays of the first three months in the following year for the three steps of appointing presidential electors, having them cast their ballots, and for commencing proceedings under the Constitution. These dates were adjusted to the meetings of the State Legislatures, as Madison explained to a correspondent. No objection was found to this arrangement of time, but the selection of a place in which to begin the new Government aroused the old sectional fear and avarice, and precipitated a two-months' contest, during which New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Wilmington, Lancaster, and Annapolis were considered. "The present seat of Congress" was finally adopted largely through impossibility of agreeing on another.
[Illustration: LAST PAGE OF THE MINUTES OF THE OLD CONGRESS. Preserved in the archives of the Department of State. It shows that members appeared occasionally as late as March 2, two days before the new government was to be inaugurated; the printed journals differ, stating that members appeared until the first of November only.]
Having thus planned for its successor, having arranged the finances, the army, the post-office, the public land system, and other national affairs as best it could, the Continental or Confederation Congress slowly dwindled in membership until it lacked a quorum early in October, 1788. A few members attended at intervals until the beginning of the following March, when the thirty-nine foolscap volumes recording the birth of the United States were closed, to be deposited among the archives of the United States under the Constitution. A successor was now ready to undertake the task for which the Confederation had been found inadequate.