BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
Written Constitutions.—Very little has been written or published with reference to the history of the development of the idea of a written constitution. The student will find some suggestive hints in Hannis Taylor's Origin and Growth of the English Constitution, vol. i, Boston, 1889. See Henry Hitchcock's American State Constitutions; a Study of their Growth, N.Y., 1887, a learned and valuable essay. See also J.H.U. Studies, I., xi., Alexander Johnston, The Genesis of a New England State (Connecticut); III., ix.-x., Horace Davis, American Constitutions; also Preston's Documents Illustrative of American History, 1606-1863, N.Y., 1886; Stubbs, Select Charters and other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, Oxford, 1870; Gardiner's Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, Oxford, 1888.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FEDERAL UNION.
Section 1. Origin of the Federal Union.
Having now sketched the origin and nature of written constitutions, we are prepared to understand how by means of such a document the government of our Federal Union was called into existence. We have already described so much of the civil government in operation in the United States that this account can be made much more concise than if we had started at the top instead of the bottom and begun to portray our national government before saying a word about states and counties and towns. Bit by bit the general theory of American self-government has already been set before the reader. We have now to observe, in conclusion, what a magnificent piece of constructive work has been performed in accordance with that general theory. We have to observe the building up of a vast empire out of strictly self-governing elements.
[Sidenote: English institutions in all the colonies.] There was always one important circumstance in favour of the union of the thirteen American colonies into a federal nation. The inhabitants were all substantially one people. It is true that in some of the colonies there were a good many persons not of English ancestry, but the English type absorbed and assimilated everything else.
All spoke the English language, all had English institutions. Except the development of the written constitution, every bit of civil government described in the preceding pages came to America directly from England, and not a bit of it from any other country, unless by being first filtered through England. Our institutions were as English as our speech. It was therefore comparatively easy for people in one colony to understand people in another, not only as to their words but as to their political ideas. Moreover, during the first half of the eighteenth century, the common danger from the aggressive French enemy on the north and west went far toward awakening in the thirteen colonies a common interest. And after the French enemy had been removed, the assertion by parliament of its alleged right to tax the Americans threatened all the thirteen legislatures at once, and thus in fact drove the colonies into a kind of federal union.
[Sidenote: The New England confederacy (1643-84).] [Sidenote: Albany Congress(1754).] [Sidenote: Stamp Act Congress (1765).] Confederations among states have generally owed their origin, in the first instance, to military necessities. The earliest league in America, among white people at least, was the confederacy of New England colonies formed in 1643, chiefly for defence against the Indians. It was finally dissolved amid the troubles of 1684, when the first government of Massachusetts was overthrown. Along the Atlantic coast the northern and the southern colonies were for some time distinct groups, separated by the unsettled portion of the central zone. The settlement of Pennsylvania, beginning in 1681, filled this gap and made the colonies continuous from the French frontier of Canada to the Spanish frontier of Florida. The danger from France began to be clearly apprehended after 1689, and in 1698 one of the earliest plans of union was proposed by William Penn. In 1754, just as the final struggle with France was about to begin, there came Franklin's famous plan for a permanent federal union; and this plan was laid before a congress assembled at Albany for renewing the alliances with the Six Nations.[1] Only seven colonies were represented in this congress. Observe the word "congress." If it had been a legislative body it would more likely have been called a "parliament." But of course it was nothing of the sort. It was a diplomatic body, composed of delegates representing state governments, like European congresses,—like the Congress of Berlin, for example, which tried to adjust the Eastern Question in 1878. Eleven years after the Albany Congress, upon the news that parliament had passed the Stamp Act, a congress of nine colonies assembled at New York in October, 1765, to take action thereon.
[Footnote 1: Franklin's plan was afterward submitted to the several legislatures of the colonies, and was everywhere rejected because the need for union was nowhere strongly felt by the people.]