Kitabı oku: «The Life of John Marshall, Volume 1: Frontiersman, soldier, lawmaker, 1755-1788», sayfa 12
"And I had imbibed these sentiments so thoroughly that they constituted a part of my being. I carried them with me into the army, where I found myself associated with brave men from different States, who were risking life and everything valuable in a common cause, believed by all to be most precious; and where I was confirmed in the habit of considering America as my country, and Congress as my government… My immediate entrance into the State Legislature opened to my view the causes which had been chiefly instrumental in augmenting those sufferings [of the army]; and the general tendency of State politics convinced me that no safe and permanent remedy could be found but in a more efficient and better organized General Government."747
On the third day of the fall session of the Virginia Legislature of 1787, the debate began on the question of calling a State Convention to ratify the proposed National Constitution.748 On October 25 the debate came to a head and a resolution for calling a State Convention passed the House.749 The debate was over the question as to whether the proposed Convention should have authority either to ratify or reject the proposed scheme of government entirely; or to accept it upon the condition that it be altered and amended.
Francis Corbin, a youthful member from Middlesex, proposed a flat-footed resolution that the State Convention be called either to accept or reject the "new plan." He then opened the debate with a forthright speech for a Convention to ratify the new Constitution as it stood. Patrick Henry instantly was on his feet. He was for the Convention, he said: "No man was more truly federal than himself." But, under Corbin's resolution, the Convention could not propose amendments to the Constitution. There were "errors and defects" in that paper, said Henry. He proposed that Corbin's resolution should be changed so that the State Convention might propose amendments750 as a condition of ratification.
The debate waxed hot. George Nicholas, one of the ablest men in the country, warmly attacked Henry's idea. It would, declared Nicholas, "give the impression" that Virginia was not for the Constitution, whereas "there was, he believed, a decided majority in its favor." Henry's plan, said Nicholas, would throw cold water on the movement to ratify the Constitution in States that had not yet acted.
George Mason made a fervid and effective speech for Henry's resolution. This eminent, wealthy, and cultivated man had been a member of the Philadelphia Convention that had framed the Constitution; but he had refused to sign it. He was against it for the reasons which he afterwards gave at great length in the Virginia Convention of 1788.751 He had "deeply and maturely weighed every article of the new Constitution," avowed Mason, and if he had signed it, he "might have been justly regarded as a traitor to my country. I would have lost this hand before it should have marked my name to the new government."752
At this juncture, Marshall intervened with a compromise. The Constitutionalists were uncertain whether they could carry through Corbin's resolution. They feared that Henry's plan of proposing amendments to the Constitution might pass the House. The effect of such an Anti-Constitutional victory in Virginia, which was the largest and most populous State in the Union, would be a blow to the cause of the Constitution from which it surely could not recover. For the movement was making headway in various States for a second Federal Convention that should devise another system of government to take the place of the one which the first Federal Convention, after much quarreling and dissension, finally patched up in Philadelphia.753
So Marshall was against both Corbin's resolution and Henry's amendment to it; and also he was for the ideas of each of these gentlemen. It was plain, said Marshall, that Mr. Corbin's resolution was open to the criticism made by Mr. Henry. To be sure, the Virginia Convention should not be confined to a straight-out acceptance or rejection of the new Constitution; but, on the other hand, it would never do for the word to go out to the other States that Virginia in no event would accept the Constitution unless she could propose amendments to it. He agreed with Nicholas entirely on that point.
Marshall also pointed out that the people of Virginia ought not to be given to understand that their own Legislature was against the proposed Constitution before the people themselves had even elected a Convention to pass upon that instrument. The whole question ought to go to the people without prejudice; and so Marshall proposed a resolution of his own "that a Convention should be called and that the new Constitution should be laid before them for their free and ample discussion."754
Marshall's idea captured the House. It placated Henry, it pleased Mason; and, of course, it was more than acceptable to Corbin and Nicholas, with whom Marshall was working hand in glove, as, indeed, was the case with all the Constitutionalists. In fact, Marshall's tactics appeared to let every man have his own way and succeeded in getting the Convention definitely called. And it did let the contending factions have their own way for the time being; for, at that juncture, the friends of the new National Constitution had no doubt that they would be able to carry it through the State Convention unmarred by amendments, and its enemies were equally certain that they would be able to defeat or alter it.
Marshall's resolution, therefore, passed the House "unanimously."755 Other resolutions to carry Marshall's resolution into effect also passed without opposition, and it was "ordered that two hundred copies of these resolutions be printed and dispersed by members of the general assembly among their constituents; and that the Executive should send a copy of them to Congress and to the Legislature and Executive of the respective states."756 But the third month of the session was half spent before the Senate passed the bill.757 Not until January 8 of the following year did it become a law.758
In addition, however, to defining the privileges of the members and providing money for its expenses, the bill also authorized the Convention to send representatives "to any of the sister states or the conventions thereof which may be then met," in order to gather the views of the country "concerning the great and important change of government which hath been proposed by the federal convention."759 Thus the advocates of a second general Convention to amend the Articles of Confederation or frame another Constitution scored their point.
So ended the first skirmish of the historic battle soon to be fought out in Virginia, which would determine whether the American people should begin their career as a Nation. Just as John Marshall was among the first in the field with rifle, tomahawk, and scalping-knife, to fight for Independence, so, now, he was among those first in the field with arguments, influence, and political activities, fighting for Nationalism.
CHAPTER VII
LIFE OF THE PEOPLE: COMMUNITY ISOLATION
An infant people, spreading themselves through a wilderness occupied only by savages and wild beasts. (Marshall.)
Of the affairs of Georgia, I know as little as of those of Kamskatska. (James Madison, 1786.)
"Lean to the right," shouted the driver of a lumbering coach to his passengers; and all the jostled and bethumped travelers crowded to that side of the clumsy vehicle. "Left," roared the coachman a little later, and his fares threw themselves to the opposite side. The ruts and gullies, now on one side and now on the other, of the highway were so deep that only by acting as a shifting ballast could the voyagers maintain the stage's center of gravity and keep it from an upset.760
This passageway through the forest, called a "road," was the thoroughfare between Philadelphia and Baltimore and a part of the trunk line of communication which connected the little cities of that period. If the "road" became so bad that the coach could not be pulled through the sloughs of mud, a new way was opened in the forest; so that, in some places, there were a dozen of such cuttings all leading to the same spot and all full of stumps, rocks, and trees.761
The passengers often had to abandon this four-wheeled contraption altogether and walk in the mud; and were now and again called upon to put their shoulders to the wheels of the stage when the horses, unaided, were unable to rescue it.762 Sometimes the combined efforts of horses and men could not bring the conveyance out of the mire and it would have to be left all night in the bog until more help could be secured.763 Such was a main traveled road at the close of the Revolutionary War and for a long time after the Constitution was adopted.
The difficulty and danger of communication thus illustrated had a direct and vital bearing upon the politics and statesmanship of the times. The conditions of travel were an index to the state of the country which we are now to examine. Without such a survey we shall find ourselves floating aimlessly among the clouds of fancy instead of treading, with sure foothold, the solid ground of fact. At this point, more perhaps than at any other of our history, a definite, accurate, and comprehensive inventory of conditions is essential. For not only is this phase of American development more obscure than any other, but the want of light upon it has led to vague consideration and sometimes to erroneous conclusions.
We are about to witness the fierce and dramatic struggle from which emerged the feeble beginnings of a Nation that, even to-day, is still in the making; to behold the welter of plan and counterplot, of scheming and violence, of deal and trade, which finally resulted in the formal acceptance of the Constitution with a certainty that it would be modified, and, to some extent, mutilated, by later amendments. We are to listen to those "debates" which, alone, are supposed to have secured ratification, but which had no more, and indeed perhaps less effect than the familiar devices of "practical politics" in bringing about the adoption of our fundamental law.
Since the victory at Yorktown a serious alteration had taken place in the views of many who had fought hardest for Independence and popular government. These men were as strong as ever for the building of a separate and distinct National entity; but they no longer believed in the wisdom or virtue of democracy without extensive restrictions. They had come to think that, at the very best, the crude ore of popular judgment could be made to enrich sound counsels only when passed through many screens that would rid it of the crudities of passion, whimsicality, interest, ignorance, and dishonesty which, they believed, inhered in it. Such men esteemed less and less a people's government and valued more and more a good government. And the idea grew that this meant a government the principal purpose of which was to enforce order, facilitate business, and safeguard property.
During his early years in the Legislature, as has appeared, Marshall's opinions were changing. Washington, as we shall see, soon after peace was declared, lost much of his faith in the people; Madison arrived at the opinion that the majority were unequal to the weightier tasks of popular rule; and Marshall also finally came to entertain the melancholy fear that the people were not capable of self-government. Indeed, almost all of the foremost men of the period now under review were brought to doubt the good sense or sound heart of the multitude. The fires of Jefferson's faith still burned, and, indeed, burned more brightly; for that great reformer was in France and neither experienced nor witnessed any of those popular phenomena which fell like a drenching rain upon the enthusiasm of American statesmen at home for democratic government.
This revolution in the views of men like Washington, Madison, and Marshall was caused largely by the conduct of the masses, which, to such men, seemed to be selfish, violent, capricious, vindictive, and dangerous. The state of the country explains much of this popular attitude and disposition. The development of Marshall's public ideas cannot be entirely understood by considering merely his altered circumstances and business and social connections. More important is a review of the people, their environment and condition.
The extreme isolation of communities caused by want of roads and the difficulties and dangers of communication; the general ignorance of the masses; their childish credulity, and yet their quick and acute suspicion springing, largely, from isolation and lack of knowledge; their savage and narrow individualism, which resisted the establishment of a central authority and was antagonistic to any but the loosest local control; their envy and distrust of the prosperous and successful which their own economic condition strengthened, if, indeed, this circumstance did not create that sullen and dangerous state of mind – an understanding of all these elements of American life at that time is vital if we are to trace the development of Marshall's thinking and explore the origins of the questions that confronted our early statesmen.
The majority of the people everywhere were poor; most of them owed debts; and they were readily influenced against any man who favored payment, and against any plan of government that might compel it. Also, the redemption of State and Continental debts, which was a hard and ever-present problem, was abhorrent to them. Much of the scrip had passed into the hands of wealthy purchasers. Why, exclaimed the popular voice, should this expedient of war be recognized? Discharge of such public obligations meant very definite individual taxes. It was as easy to inflame a people so situated and inclined as it was hard to get accurate information to them or to induce them to accept any reasoning that made for personal inconvenience or for public burdens.
Marshall could not foresee the age of railway and telegraph and universal education. He had no vision of a period when speedy and accurate information would reach the great body of our population and the common hearthstone thus become the place of purest and soundest judgment. So it is impossible to comprehend or even apprehend his intellectual metamorphosis during this period unless we survey the physical, mental, and spiritual state of the country. How the people lived, their habits, the extent of their education, their tendency of thought, and, underlying all and vitally affecting all, the means or rather want of means of communication – a knowledge of these things is essential to an understanding of the times.764 The absence of roads and the condition of the few that did exist were thoroughly characteristic of the general situation and, indeed, important causes of it. It becomes indispensable, then, to visualize the highways of the period and to picture the elements that produced the thinking and acting of the larger part of the people. Many examples are necessary to bring all this, adequately and in just proportion, before the eye of the present.
When Washington, as President, was on his way to meet Congress, his carriage stuck in the mud, and only after it had been pried up with poles and pulled out by ropes could the Father of his Country proceed on his journey;765 and this, too, over the principal highway of Maryland. "My nerves have not yet quite recovered the shock of the wagon," wrote Samuel Johnston of a stage trip from Baltimore to New York two years after our present Government was established.766 Richard Henry Lee objected to the Constitution, because, among other things, "many citizens will be more than three hundred miles from the seat of this [National] government";767 and "as many assessors and collectors of federal taxes will be above three hundred miles from the seat of the federal government as will be less."768
The best road throughout its course, in the entire country, was the one between Boston and New York; yet the public conveyance which made regular trips with relays of horses in the most favorable season of the year usually took an entire week for the journey.769 The stage was "shackling"; the horses' harness "made of ropes"; one team hauled the stage only eighteen miles; the stop for the night was made at ten o'clock, the start next morning at half-past two; the passengers often had to "help the coachman lift the coach out of the quagmire."770
Over parts even of this, the finest long highway in the United States, the stage had to struggle against rocks and to escape precipices. "I knew not which to admire the most in the driver, his intrepidity or dexterity. I cannot conceive how he avoided twenty times dashing the carriage to pieces,"771 testifies a traveler. In central Massachusetts, the roads "were intolerable" even to a New Englander; and "the country was sparsely inhabited by a rude population."772 In Rhode Island not far from Providence the traveler was forced to keep mounting and dismounting from his horse in order to get along at all.773 Dr. Taylor, in the Massachusetts Convention of 1788, arguing for frequent elections, said that it would take less than three weeks for Massachusetts members of Congress to go from Boston to Philadelphia.774
Farmers only a short distance from New York could not bring their produce to the city in the winter because the roads were impassable.775 Up State, in Cooper's Otsego settlement, "not one in twenty of the settlers had a horse and the way lay through rapid streams, across swamps or over bogs… If the father of a family went abroad to labour for bread, it cost him three times its value before he could bring it home."776 As late as 1790, after forty thousand acres in this region had been taken up "by the poorest order of men … there were neither roads nor bridges"; and about Otsego itself there was not even "any trace of a road."777 Where Utica now stands, the opening through the wilderness, which went by the name of a road, was so nearly impassable that a horseback traveler could make no more than two miles an hour over it. Rocks, stumps, and muddy holes in which the horse sank, made progress not only slow and toilsome, but dangerous.778
Twenty days was not an unusual time for ordinary wagons, carrying adventurous settlers to the wilderness west of the Alleghanies, to cross Pennsylvania from Philadelphia to Pittsburg;779 and it cost a hundred and twenty dollars a ton to haul freight between these points.780 Three years after our present Government was established, twenty out of twenty-six lawsuits pending in Philadelphia were settled out of court "rather than go ninety miles from Phila for trial."781
Talleyrand, journeying inland from the Quaker City about 1795, was "struck with astonishment" at what he beheld: "At less than a hundred and fifty miles distance from the Capital," he writes, "all trace of men's presence disappeared; nature in all her primeval vigor confronted us. Forests old as the world itself; decayed plants and trees covering the very ground where they once grew in luxuriance." And Talleyrand testifies that the fields, only a few miles' walk out of the "cities," had been "mere wildernesses of forest" at the time the Constitution was adopted.782
"The length and badness of the roads from hence [Mount Vernon] to Philadelphia" made Washington grumble with vexation and disgust;783 and Jefferson wrote of the President's Southern tour in 1791: "I shall be happy to hear that no accident has happened to you in the bad roads … that you are better prepared for those to come by lowering the hang [body] of your carriage and exchanging the coachman for two postilions … which [are] … essential to your safety."784
No more comfortable or expeditious, if less dangerous, was travel by boat on the rivers. "Having lain all night in my Great Coat and Boots in a berth not long enough for me," chronicles Washington of this same Presidential journey, "we found ourselves in the morning still fast aground."785
So difficult were the New Jersey roads that the stout and well-kept harness with which Washington always equipped his horses was badly broken going through New Jersey in 1789.786 "The roads [from Richmond to New York] thro' the whole were so bad that we could never go more than three miles an hour, some times not more than two, and in the night, but one," wrote Jefferson787 in March, 1790.
A traveler starting from Alexandria, Virginia, to visit Mount Vernon, nine miles distant, was all day on the road, having become lost, in the "very thick woods." So confusing was the way through this forest that part of this time he was within three miles of his destination.788 Twelve years after our present Government was established James A. Bayard records of his journey to the Capital: "Tho' traveling in the mail stage … we were unable to move at more than the rate of two or three miles an hour."789
Throughout Virginia the roads were execrable and scarcely deserved the name. The few bridges usually were broken.790 The best road in the State was from Williamsburg, the old Capital, to Richmond, the new, a distance of only sixty-three miles; yet, going at highest speed, it required two days to make the trip.791 Traveling in Virginia was almost exclusively by horseback; only negroes walked.792 According to Grigsby, the familiar vision in our minds of the picturesque coach comfortably rolling over attractive highways, with postilions and outriders, which we now picture when we think of traveling in old Virginia, is mostly an historical mirage; for, says Grigsby, "coaches were rarely seen. There were thousands of respectable men in the Commonwealth who had never seen any other four-wheeled vehicle than a wagon and there were thousands who had never seen a wagon" at the time when the Constitution was ratified.793
If horseback journeys were sore trials to the rider, they were desperately hard and sometimes fatal to the poor brute that carried him. In crossing unfordable rivers on the rude ferryboats, the horses' legs frequently were broken or the animals themselves often killed or drowned.794 From Fredericksburg to Alexandria the roads were "frightfully bad."795 As late as 1801 the wilderness was so dense just above where the City of Washington now stands that Davis called it "the wilds of the Potomac." In most parts of Virginia a person unacquainted with the locality often became lost in the forests.796 South of Jamestown the crude and hazardous highways led through "eternal woods."797
A short time before the Revolution, General Wilkinson's father bought five hundred acres on the present site of the National Capital, including the spot where the White House now stands; but his wife refused to go there from a little hamlet near Baltimore where her family then lived, because it was so far away from the settlements in the backwoods of Maryland.798 A valuable horse was stolen from a Virginia planter who lived one hundred and forty miles from Richmond; but, although the thief was known, the expense of going to the Capital with witnesses was double the value of the horse, and so the planter pocketed his loss.799 It cost more to transport tobacco from Augusta County, Virginia, to market than the tobacco was worth, so difficult and expensive was the carriage.800
A sergeant in a Virginia regiment during the Revolutionary War, living in a part of the State which at present is not two hours' ride from the Capital, petitioned the House of Delegates in 1790 for payment of his arrears because he lived so far away from Richmond that he had found it impossible to apply within the time allowed for the settlement of his accounts in the regular way.801 In 1785 the price of tobacco on the James River or the Rappahannock, and in Philadelphia varied from twenty to ninety-five per cent, although each of these places was "the same distance from its ultimate market,"802 so seriously did want of transportation affect commerce. "The trade of this Country is in a deplorable Condition … the loss direct on our produce & indirect on our imports is not less than 50 per ct.," testifies Madison.803
Only in the immediate neighborhood of Philadelphia, Boston,804 or New York, neither of which "cities" was as large as a moderate-sized inland town of to-day, were highways good, even from the point of view of the eighteenth century. In all other parts of America the roads in the present-day sense did not exist at all. Very often such trails as had been made were hard to find and harder to keep after they had been found. Near the close of the Revolution, Chastellux became tangled up in the woods on his way to visit Jefferson at Monticello "and travelled a long time without seeing any habitation."805
Whoever dared to take in North Carolina what, at present, would be a brief and pleasant jaunt, then had to go through scores of miles of "dreary pines" in which the traveler often lost his way and became bewildered in the maze of the forest.806 Again, the wanderer would find himself in a desolation of swamp and wood without the hint of a highway to follow out of it; and sleeping on the ground beneath the trees of this wilderness, with only wild animals about him, was, for the ordinary traveler, not an uncommon experience.807
Even when the road could be traced, bears would follow it, so much was it still a part of their savage domain.808 The little traveling possible when the weather was good was sometimes entirely suspended for days after a rain or snowfall, even out of a "city" like Baltimore.809 Six years after the Constitution was adopted, Talleyrand found the buildings of that ambitious town "disput[ing] the ground with trees whose stumps have not yet been removed."810
Such were the means of communication of a people scattered over a territory of almost half a million square miles. The total population of the United States was about three and a quarter millions; the same part of the country to-day has a population of not far from fifty-five millions. Including cities, and adding to these the more thickly settled portions adjoining them, there were not in the original States seven men, women, and children, all told, to the square mile. If we add Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, into which the restless settlers already were moving, the people then living in the United States were fewer than five persons to the square mile.
The various little clusters of this scanty and widely separated population were almost entirely out of touch one with another. Inhabitants were scattered through those far-flung stretches called the United States, but they were not a people. Scarcely any communication existed between them; while such a thing as mail service was unknown to all but a comparatively few thousands. It required six days and sometimes nine to carry mail between Boston and New York. As late as 1794 a letter of Jefferson, then in Charlottesville, Virginia, to Madison at Philadelphia, reached the latter nine days after it was sent; and another letter between the same correspondents was eight days on the journey.811
Yet this was unusually expeditious. One month later, on January 26, 1795, Madison wrote Jefferson that "I have received your favor of Decṛ 28, but [not] till three weeks after the date of it."812 Summer, when the post-riders made better time, seemed not greatly to increase the dispatch of mail; for it took more than a month for a letter posted in New York in that season of the year to reach an accessible Virginia county seat.813 Letters from Richmond, Virginia, to New York often did not arrive until two months after they were sent.814 But better time was frequently made and a letter between these points was, commonly, hurried through in a month.815
Many weeks would go by before one could send a letter from an interior town in Pennsylvania. "This Uniontown is the most obscure spot on the face of the globe… I have been here seven or eight weeks without one opportunity of writing to the land of the living," complains a disgusted visitor.816 A letter posted by Rufus King in Boston, February 6, 1788, to Madison in New York was received February 15;817 and although anxiously awaiting news, Madison had not, on February 11, heard that Massachusetts had ratified the Constitution, although that momentous event had occurred five days before.818 New York first learned of that historic action eight days after it was taken.819 But for the snail-like slowness of the post, the Constitution would certainly have been defeated in the Virginia Convention of 1788.820
Transatlantic mail service was far more expeditious considering the distance; a letter from Jay in London reached Wolcott at Philadelphia in less than eight weeks.821 But it sometimes required five months to carry mail across the ocean;822 even this was very much faster than one could travel by land in America. Four weeks from Cowes, England, to Lynnhaven Bay, Virginia, was a record-breaking voyage.823
Such letters as went through the post-offices were opened by the postmasters as a matter of course, if these officials imagined that the missives contained information, or especially if they revealed the secret or familiar correspondence of well-known public men.824 "By passing through the post-office they [letters] should become known to all" men, Washington cautioned Lafayette in 1788.825 In 1791, the first year of the Post-Office under our present Government, there were only eighty-nine post-offices in the entire country.826 "As late as 1791 there were only six post-offices in New Jersey and none south of Trenton."827
Yet letters were the principal means by which accounts of what was happening in one part of the country were made known to the people who lived in other sections; and this personal correspondence was by far the most trustworthy source of information, although tinctured as it naturally was by the prejudice of the writer and often nothing but report of mere rumor.
