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EULOGY 
 
 o I* 
 
 
 JAMES MADISON. 
 
 BY JOHN QUINCY ADAMS 
 
 ■■<■ 
 

 
AN 
 
 EULOGY 
 
 ON THE 
 
 LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 OF 
 
 JAMES MADI SON, 
 
 FOURTH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES; 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE REQUEST OF THE 
 
 MAYOR, ALDERMEN, AND COMMON COUNCIL 
 
 OF THE 
 
 CITY OF BOSTON, 
 
 SEPTEMBER 27, 1836. 
 
 BY JOHN QU1NCY ADAMS. 
 
 i 
 
 BOSTON: 
 JOHN II. EASTBURN, CITY PRINTER, 
 
 No. 18 State Street. 
 
 1836. 
 

 E?34 
 
I 
 
 CITY OF BOSTON 
 
 In the Board of Aldermen, September 28, 1836. 
 
 Resolved, That the thanks of the City Council be presented to the Hon. 
 John Quincy Adams, for the eloquent Eulogy delivered by him, on the 
 27th instant, in the Odeon, at their request, in memory of the late venerable 
 James Madison, and that a copy be requested for the press. 
 
 Sent down for concurrence. 
 
 SAMUEL T. ARMSTRONG, Mayor. 
 
 I? 
 
 Read and concurred. 
 
 In Common Council, September 29, 1836. 
 JOSIAH QUINCY, Jr., President. 
 
 A true copy. — Attest, 
 
 S. F. McCLEARY, City Clerk. 
 
EULOGY. 
 
 When the imperial despot of Persia, surveyed 
 the myriads of his vassals, whom he had assembled 
 for the invasion and conquest of Greece, we are told 
 by the father of profane history,* that the monarch's 
 heart, at first, distended with pride, but immediately 
 afterwards sunk within him, and turned to tears of 
 anguish at the thought, that within one hundred 
 years from that day, not one of all the countless 
 numbers of his host would remain in the land of the 
 living. 
 
 The brevity of human life, had afforded a melan- 
 choly contemplation to wiser and better men than 
 Xer\t v s. in ages long before that of his own existence. 
 It is still the subject of philosophical reflection or of 
 Christian resignation, to the living man of the pres- 
 ent age. It will continue such, so long as the race 
 of man shall exist upon earth. 
 
 But it is the condition of our nature to look before 
 and after : The Persian tyrant looked forward, and 
 lamented the shortness of life ; but in that century 
 which bounded his mental vision, he knew not what 
 was to come to pass, for weal or woe, to the race 
 whose transitory nature he deplored, and his own 
 purposes, happily baffled by the elements which he 
 with absurd presumption would have chastised, were 
 of the most odious and detestable character. 
 
 * Herodotus. 
 
4 
 
 Reflections upon the shortness of time allotted to 
 individual man upon this planet, may be turned to 
 more useful account, by connecting them with ages 
 past than with those that are to come. The family 
 of man is placed upon this congregated ball to earn 
 an improved condition hereafter by improving his own 
 condition here — and this duty of improvement is not 
 less a social than a selfish principle. We are bound 
 to exert all the faculties bestowed upon us by our 
 Maker, to improve our own condition, by improving 
 that of our fellow men, and the precepts that we 
 should love our neighbor as ourselves, and that we 
 should do to others as we would that they should do 
 unto us, are but examples of that duty of co-opera- 
 tion to the improvement of his kind, which is the first 
 law of God to man, unfolded alike in the volumes of 
 nature and of inspiration. 
 
 Let us look back then for consolation from the 
 thought of the shortness of human life, as urged upon 
 us by the recent decease of James Madison, one of 
 the pillars and ornaments of his country and of his 
 age. His time on earth was short, yet he died full 
 of years and of glory — less, far less than one hundred 
 years have elapsed since the day of his birth — yet 
 has he fulfilled, nobly fulfilled, his destinies as a man 
 and a Christian. He has improved his own condi- 
 tion by improving that of his country and his kind. 
 
 He was born in Orange County in the British Col- 
 ony of Virginia on the 5th of March, 1750; or ac- 
 cording to the computation of time by the Gregorian 
 Calender, adopted the year after that of his birth, on 
 the 16th of March 1751, of a distinguished and opu- 
 lent family ; and received the earl) elements of edu- 
 cation parti) at a public school under the charge ol 
 
Donald Robertson, and afterwards in the paternal 
 mansion under the private tuition of the Rev. Thomas 
 Martin ; l>\ whose instructions he was prepared for 
 admission at Princeton College. 
 
 There arc three stages in the history of the North 
 American Revolution — The first of which may be 
 considered as commencing with the order of the 
 British Council for enforcing the acts of trade in 
 1760, and as having reached its crisis at the meeting 
 of the first Congress fourteen years after at Phila- 
 delphia. It was a struggle for the preservation and 
 recovery of the rights and liberties of the British 
 Colonies. It terminated in a civil war, the character 
 and object of which were changed by the Declaration 
 of Independence. \ 
 
 The second stage is that of the War of Indepen- 
 dence, usually so called — but it began fifteen months 
 before the Declaration, and was itself the immediate 
 cause and not the effect of that event. It closed by 
 the preliminary Treaty of Peace concluded at Paris 
 on the 30th of November, 1782. 
 
 The third is the formation of the Anglo-American 
 People and Nation of North America. This event 
 was completed by the meeting of the first Congress 
 of the United States under their present Constitution 
 of the 4th of March, 1789. Thirty years is the 
 usual computation for the duration of one generation 
 of the human race. The space of time from 1760 
 to 1790 includes the generation with which the North 
 American Revolution began, passed through all its 
 stages and ended. 
 
 The attention of the civilized European world and 
 perhaps an undue proportion of our own has been 
 drawn to the second of these three stages — to the 
 
6 
 
 contest with Great Britain for Independence. It 
 was an arduous and apparently a very unequal con- 
 flict. But it was not without example in the annals 
 of mankind. It has often been remarked that the 
 distinction between rebellion and revolution consists 
 only in the event, and is marked only by difference 
 of success. But to a just estimate of human affairs 
 there are other elementary materials of estimation. 
 A revolution of government to the leading minds by 
 which it is undertaken is an object to be accomplish- 
 ed. William Tell, Gustavus Vasa, William of 
 Orange, had been the leaders of revolutions, the ob- 
 ject of which had been the establishment or the re- 
 covery of popular liberties. But in neither of those 
 cases had the part performed by those individuals 
 been the result of deliberation or design. The 
 sphere of action in all those cases was incomparably 
 more limited and confined, the geographical aimen- 
 sions of the scene narrow and contracted — the polit- 
 ical principles brought into collisions of small compass 
 — no foundations'of the social compact to be laid — no 
 people to be formed — the popular movement of the 
 American revolution had been preceded by a foresee- 
 ing and directing mind. I mean not to say by one 
 mind ; but by a pervading mind, which in a preced- 
 ing age had inspired the prophetic verses of Berkley, 
 and which may be traced back to the first Puritan 
 settlers of Plymouth and of Massachusetts Bay. 
 " From the first Institution of the Company of Mas- 
 sachusetts Bay," says Dr. Robertson, " its members 
 seem to have been animated with a spirit of innova- 
 tion in civil policy as well as in religion : and by the 
 habit of rejecting established usages in the one, the\ 
 were prepared for deviating from them in the other. 
 
They had applied for a royal charter, in order to give 
 legal effect to their operations in England, as acts of 
 a body politic ; but the persons whom thej sent out 
 to America as soon as they landed there, considered 
 themselves as individuals, united together by volun- 
 tary association, possessing the natural right of men 
 who form a society to adopt what mode of govern- 
 ment and to enact what laws the) deemed most con- 
 ducive to general felicity." 
 
 And such had continued to be the prevailing spirit 
 of the people of New England from the period of 
 their settlement to that of the revolution. The 
 people of Virginia too, notwithstanding their primi- 
 tive loyalty, had been trained to revolutionary doc- 
 trines and to warlike habits ; by their frequent col- 
 lisions with Indian wars ; by the convulsions of 
 Bacon's rebellion, and by the wars with France, of 
 which their own borders were the theatre, down 
 to the close of the war which immediately preceded 
 that of the revolution. The contemplation and the 
 defiance of danger, a qualification for all great enter- 
 prise and achievement upon earth, was from the very 
 condition of their existence, a property almost univer- 
 sal to the British Colonists in North America, and 
 hardihood of body, unfettered energy of intellect and 
 intrepidity of spirit, fitted them for trials, which the 
 feeble and enervated races of other ages and climes 
 could never have gone through. 
 
 For the three several stages of this new r Epocha 
 in the earthly condition of man, a superintending 
 Providence had ordained that there should arise from 
 the native population of the soil, individuals with 
 minds organized and with spirits trained to the exi- 
 gencies of the times, and to the successive aspects of 
 
8 
 
 the social state. In the contest of principle which 
 originated with the attempt of* the British Govern- 
 ment to burden their Colonies with taxation by act 
 of Parliament, the natural rights of mankind found 
 efficient defenders in James Otis, Patrick Henry, 
 John Dickinson, Josiah Quincy, Benjamin Franklin, 
 Arthur Lee and numerous other writers of inferior 
 note. As the contest changed its character, Samuel 
 and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were among 
 the first who raised the standard of Independence 
 and prepared the people for the conflict through 
 which they were to pass. For the contest of physi- 
 cal force by arms, Washington, Charles Lee, Put- 
 nam, Green, Gates, and a graduation of others of in- 
 ferior ranks had been prepared by the preceding 
 wars — by the conquest of Canada and by the previ- 
 ous capture of Louisburg. From the beginning of 
 the war, every action was disputed with the perse- 
 verance and tenacity of veteran combatants, and the 
 minute men of Lexington and Bunker's Hill were as 
 little prepared for flight at the onset as the Macedo- 
 nian phalanx of Alexander or the tenth legion of 
 Julius Caesar. 
 
 But the great work of the North American revolu- 
 tion was not in the maintenance of the rights of the 
 British Colonies by argument, nor in the conflict of 
 physical force by war. The Declination of Indepen- 
 dence annulled the national character of the Ameri- 
 can people. That character had been common to 
 them all as subjects of one and the same sovereign, 
 and that sovereign was a king. Tin; dissolution of 
 that tie was pronounced by one act common to them 
 all, and it left them as members of distinct communi- 
 ties in the relations towards each other, bound only 
 
by the obligations of the law of nature and of the 
 Union. In which they had renounced their connexion 
 with the mother coiintn . 
 
 But what was to he the condition of their national 
 existence? This was the problem of difficult solu- 
 tion for them; and this was the opening of the new 
 era in the science of government and in the history 
 of mankind. 
 
 Their municipal governments were founded upon 
 the common law of England, modified by their re- 
 spective charters; by the Parliamentary law of Eng- 
 land so far as it had been adopted by their usages, 
 and by the enactments of their own Legislative as- 
 semblies. This was a complicated system of law, 
 and has formed a subject of much internal perplexity 
 to many of the States of the Union, and in several of 
 them continues unadjusted to this day. By the 
 common consent of all, however, this was reserved 
 for the separate and exclusive regulation of each State 
 within itself. 
 
 As a member of the community of nations, it was 
 also agreed that they should constitute one body — 
 "Epluribus unuwiP was the devise which they as- 
 sumed as the motto for their common standard. And 
 there was one great change from their former condi- 
 tion, which they adopted with an unanimity so abso- 
 lute, that no proposition of a different character was 
 ever made before them. It was that all their gov- 
 ernments should be republican. They were deter- 
 mined not only to be separately republics, but to 
 tolerate no other form of government as constituting 
 a part of their community. A natural consequence 
 of this determination was that they should remain 
 separate independences, and the first suggestion which 
 
10 
 
 presented itself to them, was that their Union should 
 be merely a confederation. 
 
 In the first and in the early part of the second 
 stage of the revolution, the name of James Madison 
 had not appeared. At the commencement of the 
 contest he was but ten years of age. When the first 
 blood was shed, here in the streets of Boston, he was 
 a student in the process of his education at Princeton 
 College, where the next year, 1771, he received the 
 degree of bachelor of Arts. He was even then so 
 highly distinguished by the power of application and 
 the rapidity of his progress, that he performed all the 
 exercises of the two senior Collegiate years in one — 
 while at the same time his deportment was so exem- 
 plary, that Dr. Witherspoon, then at the head of that 
 College, and afterwards himself one of the most emi- 
 nent Patriots and Sages of our revolution, always de- 
 lighted in bearing testimony to the excellency of his 
 character at that early stage of his career ; and said 
 to Thomas Jefferson long afterwards, when they 
 were all colleagues in the revolutionary Congress, 
 that in the whole career of Mr. Madison at Prince- 
 ton, he had never known him to say or do an indis- 
 creet thing. 
 
 Discretion in its influence upon the conduct of 
 men is the parent of moderate and conciliatory coun- 
 sels, and these were peculiarly indispensable to the 
 perpetuation of the American Union : and to the pros- 
 perous advancement and termination of the revolution, 
 precisely at the period when Mr. Madison was first 
 introduced into public life. 
 
 In 1775, among the earliest movements of tin 1 iw- 
 olutionar} contest, he was a member of the Commit- 
 tee of Public Safety of the County of Orange, and in 
 
11 
 
 1776, of the Convention substituted for the ordinary 
 Legislature of the Colony. By one of those transient 
 caprices of popular favour, which sometimes influence 
 elections, he was not returned to the House of Dele- 
 gates in 1777, but was immediately after elected by 
 that body to the Executive Council, of which he con- 
 tinued a leading member till the close of the year 
 1779, and was then transferred by the Legislature to 
 the representation of the Commonwealth in the Con- 
 tinental Congress. His first entrance into public life 
 was signalized by the resolution of the Convention of 
 the State, instructing their Delegates to vote for the 
 Independence of the Colonies ; by the adoption of a 
 declaration of rights, and by their organization of a 
 State government which continued for more than half 
 a century the Constitution of the Commonwealth be- 
 fore it underwent the revision of the people ; an event 
 in which he was destined again to take a conspicuous 
 part. On the 20th of March, 1780, he took his seat 
 as a delegate in the Congress of the Confederation. It 
 was then, in the midst of the revolution, and under 
 the influence of its most trying scenes, that his polit- 
 ical character was formed, and then it was that the 
 virtue of discretion, the spirit of moderation, the con- 
 ciliatory temper of compromise found room for exer- 
 cise in its most comprehensive extent. 
 
 One of the provisions in the articles of Confedera- 
 tion most strongly marked with that same spirit of 
 Liberty, the vital breath of the contest in which our 
 fathers were engaged ; the true and undying conserv- 
 ative spirit by which we their children enjoy that 
 Freedom which they achieved ; but which like all oth- 
 er pure and virtuous principles sometimes leads to er- 
 ror by its excess was that no member of this impotent 
 2 
 
12 
 
 Congress should hold that office more than three years 
 in six. This provision however, was construed not to 
 have commenced its operation until the final ratifica- 
 tion of the articles by all the States on the first of 
 March, 1781. Mr. Madison remained in Congress 
 nearly four years from the 20th of March, 1780 till the 
 first Monday in November, 1783. He was thus a 
 member of that body during the last stages of the rev- 
 olutionary war and for one year after the conclusion of 
 the Peace. He had during that period, unceasing 
 opportunities to observe the mortifying inefficiency of 
 the merely federative principle upon which the Union 
 of the States had been organized, and had taken 
 an active part in all the remedial measures proposed 
 by Congress for amending the Articles of Confedera- 
 tion. 
 
 A Confederation is not a country. There is no mag- 
 net of attraction in any league of Sovereign and Inde- 
 pendent States which causes the heart strings of the 
 individual man to vibrate in unison with those of his 
 neighbour. Confederates are not Countrymen, as the 
 tie of affinity by convention can never be so close as 
 the tie of kindred by blood. The Confederation of the 
 North-American States was an experiment of inesti- 
 mable value, even by its failure. It taught our fath- 
 ers the lesson, that they had more, infinitely more to 
 do than merely to achieve their Independence by War. 
 That they must form their social compact upon prin- 
 ciples never before attempted upon earth. That the 
 Achean leagues of ancient days, the Hanseatic league 
 of the middle ages, the leagues of Switzerland or of 
 the Netherlands of later times, furnished no precedent 
 upon which they could safely build their labouring 
 plan of State. The Confederation was perhaps as 
 
13 
 
 closely knit together as it was possible that such 
 a form of polity could be grappled ; but it was 
 matured by the State Legislatures without consultation 
 with the People, and the jealousy of sectional collis- 
 ions, and the distrust of all delegation of power, stamp- 
 ed every feature of the work with inefficiency. 
 
 The deficiency of powers in the Confederation was 
 immediately manifested in their inability to regulate 
 the commerce of the country, and to raise a revenue, 
 indispensable for the discharge of the debt accumula- 
 ted in the progress of the Revolution. Repeated ef- 
 forts were made to supply this deficiency ; but always 
 without success. 
 
 On the 3d of February, 1781, it was recommended 
 to the several States as indispensably necessary that 
 they should vest a power in Congress to levy for the 
 use of the United States a duty of five per cent, ad 
 valorem upon foreign importations, and all prize goods 
 condemned in a Court of Admiralty ; the money aris- 
 ing from those duties to be appropriated to the dis- 
 charge of the debts contracted for the support of the 
 War. 
 
 On the 18th of April, 1783, a new recommendation 
 was adopted by Resolutions of nine States, as indis- 
 pensably necessary to the restoration of public credit, 
 and to the punctual and honorable discharge of the 
 public debt to invest the Congress with a power to lay 
 certain specific duties upon spirituous liquors, tea, su- 
 gar, coffee and cocoa, and five per cent, ad valorem up- 
 on all other imported articles of merchandise, to be 
 exclusively appropriated to the payment of the princi- 
 pal or interest of the public debt. 
 
 And that as a further provision for the payment of 
 the interest of the debt, the States themselves should 
 
14 
 
 levy a revenue to furnish their respective quotas of an 
 a oro T e o-ate annual sum of one million five hundred thous- 
 and dollars. 
 
 And that to provide a further guard for the payment 
 of the same debts, to hasten their extinguishment, and 
 to establish the harmony of the United States the sev- 
 eral States should make liberal cessions to the Union 
 of their territorial claims. 
 
 With this act a Committee consisting of Mr. Mad- 
 ison, Mr. Ellsworth and Mr. Hamilton was appointed 
 to prepare an address to the States, which on the 26th 
 of the same month was adopted, and transmitted to- 
 gether with eight documentary papers, demonstrating 
 the necessity that the measures recommended by the 
 act should be adopted by the States. 
 
 This address, one of those incomparable State pa- 
 pers which more than all the deeds of arms, immortal- 
 ized the rise, progress and termination of the North 
 American revolution was the composition of James 
 Madison. After compressing into a brief and lumin- 
 ous summary all the unanswerable arguments to in- 
 duce the restoration and maintenance of the public 
 faith ; it concluded with the following solemn and pro- 
 phetic admonition. 
 
 "Let it be remembered finally, that it has ever been 
 the pride and boast of America, that the rights for 
 which she contended, were the rights of human na- 
 ture. By the blessing of the author of these rights 
 on the means exerted for their defence, they have pre- 
 vailed over all opposition, and form the basis of thir- 
 teen independent States. No instance has heretofore 
 occurred nor can any instance be expected hereafter 
 to occur, in which the unadulterated forms of republi- 
 can Government can pretend to so fair an opportunity 
 
15 
 
 of justifying themselves by their fruits. In this view 
 the citizens of the United States are responsible for 
 the greatest trust ever confided to a political society. 
 If justice, good faith, honor, gratitude and all the oth- 
 er qualities, which ennoble the character of a nation, 
 and fulfil the ends of Government be the fruits of our 
 establishments, the cause of Liberty will acquire a 
 dignity and lustre which it has never yet enjoyed ; 
 and an example will be set which cannot but have the 
 most favorable influence on the rights of mankind. If 
 on the other side, our Governments should be unfor- 
 tunately blotted with the reverse of these cardinal and 
 essential virtues, the great cause which we have en- 
 gaged to vindicate will be dishonored and betrayed ; 
 the last and fairest experiment in favor of the rights of 
 human nature will be turned against them ; and their 
 patrons and friends exposed to be insulted and silen- 
 ced by the votaries of tyranny and usurpation." 
 
 My countrymen ! do not your hearts burn within 
 you at the recital of these words, when the retrospect 
 brings to your minds the time when, and the persons 
 by whom they were spoken ? Compare them with the 
 closing paragraphs of the address from the first Con- 
 gress of 1774, to your forefathers, the people of the 
 Colonies. 
 
 " Your own salvation and that of your posterity now 
 depends upon yourselves. Against the temporary in- 
 conveniences you may suffer from a stoppage of Trade, 
 you will weigh in the opposite balance the endless mis- 
 eries you and your descendants must endure from an 
 established arbitrary power. You will not forget the 
 Honor of your Country that must from your behavior 
 take its title in the estimation of the world to Glory 
 or to Shame ; and you will, with the deepest attention 
 
16 
 
 reflect, that if the peaceable mode of opposition re- 
 commended by us be broken and rendered ineffectual ; 
 you must inevitably be reduced to choose either a 
 more dangerous contest, or a final ruinous and infa- 
 mous submission. We think ourselves bound in duty 
 to observe to you that the schemes agitated against 
 these Colonies have been so conducted as to render it 
 prudent that you should extend your views to mourn- 
 ful events and be in all respects prepared for every 
 contingency." 
 
 That was the trumpet of summons to the conflict 
 of the revolution; as the address of April, 1783 was 
 the note of triumph at its close. They were the first 
 and the last words of the Spirit, which in the germ of 
 the Colonial contest, brooded over its final fruit, the 
 universal emancipation of civilized man. 
 
 Compare them both with the opening and closing 
 paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, too 
 deeply riveted in your memories to need the repeti- 
 tion of them by me ; and you have the unity of action 
 essential to all heroic achievement for the benefit of 
 mankind, and you have the character from its open- 
 ing to its close ; the beginning the middle and the end 
 of that unexampled, and yet unimitated moral and po- 
 litical agent, the Revolutionary North American Con- 
 gress. 
 
 But the Address of 1783 marks the commencement 
 of one aera in American History as well as the close 
 of another. Madison, Ellsworth, Hamilton, were not 
 of the Congress of 1774, nor yet of the Congress 
 which declared Independence. They were of a 
 succeeding generation, men formed in and by the 
 revolution itself. They had imbibed the Spirit of 
 the revolution, but the nature of their task was 
 
17 
 
 changed. Theirs was no longer the duty to call up- 
 on their countrymen to extend their views to mourn- 
 ful events, and to prepare themselves for every con- 
 tingency. But more emphatically than even the 
 Congress o(* 1774 were they required to warn their 
 fellow citizens that their salvation and that of their 
 posterity depended upon themselves. 
 
 The warfare of self-defence against foreign oppres- 
 sion was accomplished. Independence, unqualified, 
 commercial and political was achieved and recognised. 
 But there was yet in substance no nation — no people 
 — no country common to the Union. These had 
 been self-formed in the heat of the common struggle 
 for freedom ; and evaporated in the very success of 
 the energies they had inspired. A Confederation of 
 separate State Sovereignties, never sanctioned by the 
 body of the people, could furnish no effective Govern- 
 ment for the nation. A cold and lifeless indifference 
 to the rights, the interests, and the duties of the Union 
 had fallen like a palsy upon all their faculties instead 
 of that almost supernatural vigor which at the origin 
 of their contest had inscribed upon their banners, and 
 upon their hearts "join or die." 
 
 In November, 1783, Mr. Madison's constitutional 
 term of service in Congress as limited bv the restric- 
 tion in the articles of Confederation, expired. But 
 his talents were not lost to his Country. He was 
 elected the succeeding year a member of the Legisla- 
 ture of his native State, and continued by annual elec- 
 tion in that station till November, 1786, when having 
 become re-eligible to Congress, he was again returned 
 to that body, and on the 12th of February, 1787, re- 
 sumed his seat among its members. 
 
 In the Legislature of Virginia, his labors, during his 
 
18 
 
 absence of three years from the general councils of 
 the Confederacy, were not less arduous and unremit- 
 ting, nor less devoted to the great purposes of revolu- 
 tionary legislation, than while he had been in Con- 
 gress. The Colony of Virginia had been settled under 
 the auspices of the Episcopal Church of England. It 
 was there the established Church ; and all other reli- 
 gious denominations, there, as in England, were stig- 
 matized with the name of dissenters. For the sup- 
 port of this Church the Colonial laws prior to the rev- 
 olution had subjected to taxation all the inhabitants of 
 the Colony, and it had been endowed with grants of 
 property by the Crown. The effect of this had nat- 
 urally been to render the Church establishment un- 
 popular, and the clergy of that Establishment general- 
 ly unfriendly to the revolution. After the close of the 
 War, in the year 1784, Mr. Jefferson introduced into 
 the Legislature a Bill for the establishment of Reli- 
 gious Freedom. The principle of the Bill was the 
 abolition of all taxation for the support of Religion, or 
 of its Ministers, and to place the freedom of all reli- 
 gious opinions wholly beyond the control of the Legis- 
 lature. These purposes were avowed, and supported 
 by a long argumentative preamble. The Bill failed 
 however to obtain the assent of the assembly, and in- 
 stead of it they prepared and caused to be printed a 
 Bill establishing a provision for teachers of the Chris- 
 tian Religion. At the succeeding session of the Leg- 
 islature, Mr. Jefferson was absent from the country, 
 but Mr. Madison, as the champion of Religious Lib- 
 erty supplied his place. A memorial and Remon- 
 strance against the Bill making provision for the teach- 
 ers of the Christian Religion was composed by Mr. 
 Madison, and signed by multitudes of the citizens of 
 
19 
 
 the Commonwealth, and the Bill drafted by Mr. Jef- 
 ferson, together with its preamble, was by the influ- 
 ence of his friend triumphantly carried against all op- 
 position through the Legislature. 
 
 The principle thai religious opinions are altogether 
 beyond the sphere of legislative controul, is but one 
 modification of a more extensive axiom, which in- 
 cludes the unlimited freedom of the press ; of speech, 
 and of the communication of thought in all its forms. 
 An authoritative provision by law for the support of 
 teachers of the Christian Religion was prescribed by 
 the third Article of the Bill of Rights in the Consti- 
 tution of this Commonwealth. An amendment re- 
 cently adopted by the people has given their sanction 
 to the opinions of Jefferson and Madison, and the 
 substance of the Virginian Statute for the establish- 
 ment of Religious Freedom, now forms a part of the 
 Constitution of Massachusetts. That the freedom 
 and communication of thoughl is paramount to all 
 legislative authority, is a sentiment becoming from 
 day to day more prevalent throughout the civilized 
 world, and which it is fervently to be hoped will 
 henceforth remain inviolate by the legislative author- 
 ities not only of the Union, but of all its confeder- 
 ated States. 
 
 At the Session of 1 785, a general revisal was made 
 of the Statute Laws of Virginia, and the great bur- 
 den of the task devolved upon Mr. Madison as 
 chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the House. 
 The general principle which pervaded this operation 
 was the adaptation of the civil code of the Common- 
 wealth, to its republican and unfettered independence 
 as a Sovereign State, and he carried it through with 
 that same spirit of liberty and liberality which had 
 3 
 
20 
 
 dictated the Act for the establishment of Religious 
 Freedom. The untiring industry, the searching and 
 penetrating application, the imperturbable patience, 
 the moderation and gentleness of disposition, which 
 smoothed his way over the ruggedest and most thorny 
 paths of life, accompanied him through this transac- 
 tion as through all the rest. While a member of the 
 Legislature of Virginia, he had contributed more 
 than any other person to the adjustment of that vital 
 interest of the Union, the disposal of the Public 
 Lands. It was the collision of opinions and of in- 
 terests relating to them which had delayed the con- 
 clusion of the Articles of Confederation, and the 
 cession afterwards made of the North Western Ter- 
 ritory was encumbered with conditions which further 
 delayed its acceptance. By the influence of Mr. 
 Madison, the terms of the cession were so modified, 
 that in conformity with them the ordinance for the 
 government of the North Western Territory was 
 finally adopted and established by Congress on the 
 13th of July, 1787, in the midst of the labors of the 
 Convention at Philadelphia, which two months later 
 presented to the People of the United States for their 
 acceptance, that Constitution of Government, thence- 
 forth the polar star of their Union. 
 
 The experience of four years in the Congress of 
 the Confederation, had convinced Mr. Madison that 
 the Union could not be preserved by means of that 
 institution. That its inherent infirmity was a de- 
 ficiency of power in the federal head, and that an in- 
 surmountable objection to the grant of further powers 
 to Congress, always arose from the adverse prejudices 
 and jealousy with which the demand of them was 
 urged by that body itself. The difficulty of obtain- 
 
21 
 
 ing such grant of power, was aggravated by the con- 
 sideration that it \\ as to be invested in those In w horn 
 it was solicited, and was at the same time, and in the 
 same degree, to abridge the power of those In whom 
 it was to he granted. 
 
 To avoid these obstacles it occurred to Mr. Mad- 
 ison thai the agency of a distinct, delegated body, 
 having no invidious interest of its own, or of its 
 members, might be better adapted, deliberately to 
 discuss the deficiencies of the federal compact, than 
 the bod v itself by whom it was administered. 'The 
 friends with whom he consulted in the Legislature of 
 Virginia, concurred with him in these opinions, and 
 the motion for the appointment of Commissioners to 
 consider of the state of trade in the confederacy sug- 
 gested by him, was made in the Legislature by his 
 friend, Mr. Tyler, and carried by the weight of his 
 opinions, and the exertion of his influence, without 
 opposition. 
 
 This proposition was made and Commissioners 
 were appointed by the Legislature of Virginia, on the 
 21st of January, 1786. The Governor of the Com- 
 monwealth, Edmund Randolph, was placed at the 
 head of the delegation from the State. Mr. Madi- 
 son and six others, men of the first character and 
 influence in the State, were the other Commission- 
 ers. The meeting was held at Annapolis in Septem- 
 ber, and two Commissioners from New York, three 
 from New Jersey, one from Pennsylvania, three from 
 Delaware, and three from Virginia, constituted the 
 whole number of this Convention. Five States 
 only were represented, and among them, Pennsyl- 
 vania by a single member. Four States, among 
 
22 
 
 whom was Maryland, the very State within which 
 the Assembly was held, had not even appointed 
 Commissioners and the deputies from four others, 
 amons: whom was our own beloved, native Common- 
 wealth, suffering, even then, the awful calamity of a 
 civil war, generated by the imbecility of the federal 
 compact of union, did not even think it worth while 
 to give their attendance. 
 
 Yet even in that Convention of Annapolis, was the 
 gem of a better order of things. The Commission- 
 ers elected John Dickinson, of Delaware, their chair- 
 man, and after a session of three days, agreed upon a 
 report, doubtless drafted by Mr. Madison, — address- 
 ed to the Legislatures by which they had been ap- 
 pointed, and copies of which were transmitted to the 
 other State Legislatures and to Congress. 
 
 In this report they availed themselves of a sugges- 
 tion derived from the powers which the Legislature 
 of New Jersey had conferred upon their Commission- 
 ers, and which contemplated a more enlarged revision 
 of the Articles of Confederation, and they urgently 
 recommended that a second convention of delegates 
 to which all the States should be invited to appoint 
 Commissioners, should be held at Philadelphia, on the 
 second Monday of the next May, for a general revisal 
 of the Constitution of the Federal Government, to 
 render it adequate to the exigencies of the Union, and 
 to report to Congress an act, which, when agreed to 
 by them and confirmed by all the State Legislatures, 
 should effectually provide for the same. In this re- 
 port, first occurred the use of the terms Constitution 
 of the Federal Government as applied to the United 
 States — and the sentiment was avowed that it should 
 
23 
 
 be made adequate to the exigencies of the Union. 
 There was, however, yet no proposal for recurring to 
 the great body of the people. 
 
 The recommendation of the report was repeated 
 by Congress without direct reference to it, upon a 
 resolution offered by the delegation of Massachusetts, 
 founded upon a proviso in the Articles of Confedera- 
 tion and upon instructions from the State of New 
 York to their delegates in Congress, and upon the 
 susrjrestion of several States. The Convention as- 
 
 Do 
 
 sembled accordingly at Philadelphia, on the 9th of 
 May, 1787. 
 
 In most of the inspirations of genius, there is a 
 simplicity, which, when they are familiarized to the 
 general understanding of men by their effects, de- 
 tracts from the opinion of their greatness. That the 
 people of the British Colonies, who, by their united 
 counsels and energies had achieved their indepen- 
 dence, should continue to be one people, and consti- 
 tute a nation under the form of one organized gov- 
 ernment, was an idea, in itself so simple, and ad- 
 dressed itself at once so forcibly to the reason, to the 
 imagination, and to the benevolent feelings of all, 
 that it can scarcely be supposed to have escaped the 
 mind of any reflecting man from Maine to Georgia. 
 It was the dictate of nature. But no sooner was it 
 conceived than it was met by obstacles innumerable 
 and insuperable to the general mass of mankind. 
 They resulted from the existing social institutions, 
 diversified among the parties to the projected national 
 union, and seeming to render it impracticable. There 
 were chartered rights for the maintenance of which 
 the war of the revolution itself had first been waged. 
 There were State Sovereignties, corporate feudal 
 
24 
 
 baronies, tenacious of their own liberty, impatient of 
 a superior and jealous, and disdainful of a paramount 
 Sovereign, even in the whole democracy of the na- 
 tion. There were collisions of boundary and of pro- 
 prietary right westward in the soil — southward, in its 
 cultivator. In fine the diversities of interests, of 
 opinions, of manners, of habits, and even of extrac- 
 tion were so great, that the plan of constituting them 
 one People, appears not even to have occurred to any 
 of the members of the Convention before they were 
 assembled together. 
 
 It was earnestly contested in the Convention itself. 
 A large proportion of the members adhered to the 
 principle of merely revising the articles of the Confed- 
 eration and of vesting the powers of Government in 
 the confederate Congress. A proposition to that ef- 
 fect was made by Mr. Patterson of New Jersey, in a 
 series of Resolutions, offered as a substitute for those 
 of Mr. Randolph immediately after the first discus- 
 sions upon them. 
 
 Nearly four months of anxious deliberation were em- 
 ployed by an assembly composed of the men who had 
 been the most distinguished for their services civil and 
 military, in conducting the country through the ardu- 
 ous struggles of the revolution — of men who to the 
 fire of genius added all the lights of experience and 
 were stimulated by the impulses at once of ardent pat- 
 riotism and of individual ambition aspiring to that last 
 and most arduous labor of constituting a nation des- 
 tined in after times to present a model of Government 
 for all the civilized nations of the earth. On the 17th 
 of September 1787, they reported. 
 
 When the substance of their work was gone through 
 a Committee of five members of whom Mr. Madison 
 
25 
 
 was one, was appointed to revise the style, and to 
 arrange the Articles which had been agreed to by the 
 Convention, and this Committee was afterwards char- 
 ged with the preparation of an address to the People 
 of the United States. 
 
 The address to the People was reported in the form 
 of a Letter from Washington the President of the 
 Convention to the President of Congress ; a Letter, 
 admirable for the brevity and the force with which it 
 presents the concentrated argument for the great 
 change of their condition, which they called upon their 
 fellow citizens to sanction. And this Letter, together 
 with an addition of two or three lines in the pream- 
 ble, reported by the same Committee, did indeed com- 
 prise the most powerful appeal that could sway the 
 heart of man, ever exhibited to the contemplation and 
 to the hopes of the human race. 
 
 It did not escape the notice or the animadversion 
 of the adversaries to this new national organization. 
 They were at the time when the Constitution was 
 promulgated, perhaps more numerous, and scarcely 
 less respectable, than the adherents to the Constitu- 
 tion themselves. They had also in the management 
 of the discussion, almost all the popular side of the 
 argument. 
 
 Government in the first and most obvious aspect 
 which it assumes, is a restraint upon human action, 
 and as such a restraint upon Liberty. The Constitu- 
 tion of the United States Avas intended to be a gov- 
 ernment of great energy, and of course of extensive 
 restriction not only upon individual Liberty but upon 
 the corporate action of States claiming to be Sovereign 
 and Independent. The Convention had been aware 
 that such restraints upon the People, could be imposed 
 
26 
 
 by no earthly power other than the People themselves. 
 They were aware that to induce the People to im- 
 pose upon themselves such binding ligaments, motives 
 not less cogent than those, which form the basis of 
 human association were indispensably necessary. 
 That the first principles of politics must be indisso- 
 lubly linked with the first principles of morals. They 
 assumed therefore the existence of a People of the 
 United States, and made them declare the Consti- 
 tution to be their own work — speaking in the first 
 person and saying We the People of the United States, 
 do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Uni- 
 ted States of America — and then the allegation of 
 motives — to form a more perfect union, to establish 
 justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the 
 common defence, promote the general welfare, and se- 
 cure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our pos- 
 terity. These are precisely the purposes for which 
 it has pleased the author of nature to make man a so- 
 cial being, and has blended into one his happiness 
 with that of his kind. 
 
 So cogent were these motives and so forcibly were 
 they compressed within the compass of this preamble, 
 and in the Letter from President Washington to the 
 President of Congress, that this body immediately and 
 unanimously adopted the resolutions of the Conven- 
 tion, recommending that the projected Constitution 
 should be transmitted to the Legislatures of the sev- 
 eral States, to be by them submitted to Conventions 
 of Delegates, to be chosen in each State by the Peo- 
 ple thereof, under the recommendation of its Legisla- 
 ture, for their assent and ratification. This unanim- 
 ity of Congress is perhaps the strongest evidence 
 ever manifested of the utter contempt into which the 
 
27 
 
 Articles of Confederation had fallen. The Congress 
 w hich gave its unanimous sanction to the measure was 
 itself to be annihilated by the Constitution thus propos- 
 ed. The Articles of Confederation were to be annihi- 
 lated wiih it. Yet all the members of the Congress 
 so ready to sanction its dissolution, had been elected 
 by virtue of those Articles of Confederation — to them 
 the faith of all the States had been pledged, and they 
 had expressly prescribed that no alteration of them 
 should be adopted, but by the unanimous consent of 
 the States. 
 
 Thus far the proposal first made by Mr. Madison 
 in the Legislature of Virginia, for the new political or- 
 ganization of the Union, had been completely success- 
 ful. A People of the United States was formed. A 
 Government, Legislative, Executive and Judicial was 
 prepared for them, and by a daring though unavoida- 
 ble anticipation, had been declared by its authors to 
 be the Ordinance of that people themselves. It could 
 be made so only by their adoption. But the greatest 
 labor still remained to be performed. The people 
 throughout the Union were suffering, but a vast pro- 
 portion of them were unaware of the cause of the evil 
 that was preying upon their vitals. A still greater 
 number were bewildered in darkness in search of a 
 remedy, and there were not wanting those among the 
 most ardent and zealous votaries of Freedom, who in- 
 stead of adding to the powers of the general Con- 
 gress, inefficient and imbecile as they were, inclined 
 rather to redeem the confederacy from the forlorn con- 
 dition to which it was reduced by stripping the Con- 
 gress of the pittance of power which they possessed. 
 In the indulgence of this spirit the Delegates from our 
 own Commonwealth of Massachusetts, by express in- 
 4 
 
28- 
 
 structions from their constituents moved a Resolution 
 that the election and acceptance of any person as a 
 member of Congress should forever thereafter be 
 deemed to disqualify such person from being elected 
 by Congress to any office of trust or profit under the 
 United States for the term for which he should have 
 been elected a member of that body. 
 
 This morbid terror of patronage, this patriotic anx- 
 iety lest corruption should creep in by appointments 
 of members of Congress to office under the authorities 
 of the Union, has often been reproduced down even 
 to recent days under the present Government of the 
 Union. Upon the theories or the practice of the 
 present age, it is not the time or the place here to 
 comment. But we cannot forbear to remark upon the 
 solicitude of our venerable forefathers in this Com- 
 monwealth, to remedy the imperfection of the Arti- 
 cles of Confederation, the abuses of power, by the 
 Congress of that day, and the avenues to corruption 
 by the appointment of their members to office, when 
 we consider that under the exclusions thus proposed, 
 Washington could never have commanded the armies 
 of the United States : That neither Franklin, John 
 Adams, Arthur Lee, John Jay, Henry Laurens, Thom- 
 as Jefferson, Robert Morris, nor Robert R. Living- 
 ston could have served them as Ministers abroad, or 
 in any ministerial capacity at home — and when we 
 reflect that two public Ministers in Europe with their 
 Secretaries, one Secretary of Foreign Affairs, one 
 Secretary of War and three Commissioners of an emp- 
 ty Treasury, constituted the whole list of lucrative of- 
 fices civil and military which they had to bestow. 
 
 This incident may serve as an illustration of the 
 difficulties which were yet to be encountered before 
 
29 
 
 the People of the United States could be prevailed 
 upon to fix their seal of approbation upon a constitu- 
 tion issued in their name, and which granted to a cen- 
 tral Government destined to rule over them all, powers 
 of energy surpassing those of the most absolute mon- 
 archy, and forming in the declared opinion of Jeffer- 
 son, the strongest Government in the world. 
 
 In a people inhabiting so great an extent of Terri- 
 tory, the difficulties to be surmounted before they could 
 be persuaded to adopt this Constitution, were aggra- 
 vated both by their dissensions and by their agree- 
 ments — by the diversity of their interests and the 
 community of their principles. The collision of in- 
 terests strongly tended to alienate them from one an- 
 other, and all were alike imbued with a deep aversion 
 to any unnecessary grant of power. The Constitu- 
 tion was no sooner promulgated, than it was assailed 
 in the public journals from all quarters of the Union. 
 The Convention was boldly and not unjustly charg- 
 ed with having transcended their powers, and the 
 Congress of the Confederation, were censured in no 
 measured terms for having even referred it to the 
 State Legislatures, to be submitted to the considera- 
 tion of Conventions of the People. 
 
 The Congress of the Confederation were in session 
 at New York. Several of its members had been at 
 the same time members of the Convention at Phila- 
 delphia — and among them were James Madison and 
 Alexander Hamilton. John Jay was not then a 
 member of Congress nor had he been a member of the 
 Convention — but he was the Secretary of Congress 
 for foreign affairs and had held that office, from the 
 time of his return from Europe, immediately after 
 the conclusion of the definitive Treaty of Peace. He 
 
30 
 
 had therefore felt in its most painful form the imbe- 
 cility of the Confederacy of which he was the minis- 
 ter, equally incapable of contracting engagements with 
 foreign powers with the consciousness of the power to 
 fulfil them, or of energy to hold foreign nations to the 
 responsibility of performing the engagements contract- 
 ed on their part with the United States. New York 
 then the central point of the confederacy was the spot 
 whence the most effective impression could be made 
 by cool dispassionate argument on the public mind ; 
 and in the midst of the tempest of excitement through- 
 out the country occasioned by the sudden and unex- 
 pected promulgation of a system so totally different 
 from that of the Confederation, these three persons 
 undertook in concert, by a series of popular Essays 
 published in the daily journals of the time, to review 
 the system of the confederation, to demonstrate its in- 
 aptitude not only to all the functions of Government, 
 but even to the preservation of the Union, and the ne- 
 cessity of an establishment at least as energetic as the 
 proposed Constitution to the very existence of the 
 United States as a Nation. 
 
 The papers under the signature of Publius were 
 addressed to the People of the State of New York, 
 and the introductory Essay written by Hamilton, de- 
 clared the purpose to discuss all the topics of interest 
 connected with the adoption of the Constitution. The 
 utility of the Union to the prosperity of the People : 
 The insufficiency of the Confederation to preserve that 
 Union : The necessity of an energetic Government : 
 The conformity of the proposed Constitution to the 
 true principles of a republican Government : Its an- 
 alogy to the Constitution of the State of New- York, 
 and the additional security which its adoption would 
 
31 
 
 afford to the preservation of republican Government, 
 to liberty and to property. The fulfilment of this pur- 
 pose was accomplished in eighty six numbers frequent- 
 ly since republished, and now constituting a classical 
 work in the English language, and a commentary up- 
 on the Constitution of the United States, of scarcely 
 less authority than the Constitution itself. Written 
 in separate numbers, and in very unequal proportions, 
 it has not indeed that entire unity of design, or exe- 
 cution which might have been expected had it been 
 the production of a single mind. Nearly two thirds 
 of the papers were written by Mr. Hamilton. Nearly 
 one third by Mr. Madison and five numbers only by 
 Mr. Jay. 
 
 In the distribution of the several subjects embraced 
 in the plan of the work, the inducements to adopt the 
 Constitution arising from the relations of the Union 
 with foreign nations, were presented by Mr Jay ; the 
 defects of the Confederation in this respect were so 
 obvious and the evil consequences flowing from them 
 were so deeply and universally felt, that the task was 
 of comparative ease, and brevity, with that of the 
 other two contributors. The defects of the Confed- 
 eration were indeed a copious theme for them all ; 
 and in the analysis of them, for the exposition of their 
 bearing on the Legislation of the several States the 
 two principal writers treated the subject so as to in- 
 terlace with each other. The 18th, 19th and 20th 
 numbers are the joint composition of both. In exam- 
 ining closely the points selected by these two great 
 co-operators to a common cause, and their course of 
 argument for its support, it is not difficult to perceive 
 that diversity of genius and of character which after- 
 wards separated them so widely from each other on 
 
32 
 
 questions of political interest, affecting the construc- 
 tion of the Constitution which they so ably defended, 
 and so strenuously urged their countrymen to adopt. 
 The ninth and tenth numbers are devoted to the con- 
 sideration of the utility of the Union as a safeguard 
 against domestic faction and insurrection. They are 
 rival dissertations upon Faction and its remedy. The 
 propensity of all free governments to the convulsions 
 of faction is admitted by both. The advantages of 
 a confederated republic of extensive dimensions to 
 control this admitted and unavoidable evil, are insist- 
 ed on with equal energy in both — but the ninth num- 
 ber written by Hamilton, draws its principal illustra- 
 tions from the history of the Grecian Republics ; while 
 the tenth written by Madison, searches for the disease 
 and for its remedies in the nature and the faculties of 
 Man. There is in each of these numbers a disquisi- 
 tion of critical and somewhat metaphysical refinement. 
 That of Hamilton, upon a distinction, which he pro- 
 nounces more subtle than accurate between a confed- 
 eracy and consolidation of the States. That of Madi- 
 son upon the difference between a Democracy and a 
 Republic, as differently affected by Faction, meaning 
 by a Democracy, a Government administered by the 
 People themselves, and by a Republic, a Government 
 by elective representation. These distinctions in both 
 cases have, in our experience of the administration of 
 the general Government, assumed occasional impor- 
 tance, and formed the elements of warm and obstinate 
 party collisions. 
 
 The fourteenth number of the Federalist, the next 
 in the series written by Mr. Madison, is an elaborate 
 answer to an objection which had been urged against 
 the Constitution, drawn from the extent of country, 
 
33 
 
 then comprised within the United States. From the 
 deep anxiety pervading the whole of this paper, and a 
 most eloquent and pathetic appeal to the spirit of 
 union, with which it concludes, it is apparent that the 
 objection itself was in the mind of the writer, of the 
 most formidable and most plausible character. He en- 
 counters it with all the acuteness of his intellect and all 
 the energy of his heart. His chief argument is a re- 
 currence to his previous distinction between a Republic 
 and a Democracy — and next to that by an accurate 
 definition of the boundaries within which the United 
 States were then comprised. The range between 
 the 31st and 45th degree of North Latitude, the At- 
 lantic and the Mississippi — he contends that such an 
 extent of territory, with the great improvements which 
 were to be expected in the facilities of communication 
 between its remotest extremes, was not incompatible 
 with the existence of a confederated republic — or at 
 least that from the vital interest of the people of the 
 Union, and of the Liberties of mankind in the success 
 of the American Revolution, it was worthy of an ex- 
 periment yet untried in the annals of the world. 
 
 The question to what extent of territory a confed- 
 erate Republic, under one general government may 
 be adopted, without breaking into fragments by its 
 own weight, or settling into a monarchy, subversive 
 of the liberties of the people, is yet of transcendent 
 interest, and of fearful portent to the people of the 
 Union. The Constitution of the United States was 
 formed for a people inhabiting a territory confined to 
 narrow bounds, compared with those which can 
 scarcely be said to confine them now. The acquisi- 
 tion of Louisiana and of Florida have more than 
 doubled our domain; and our settlements and our 
 
34 
 
 treaties have already removed our Western bounda- 
 ries from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. A 
 colonial establishment of immense extent still hangs 
 upon our Northern borders, and another confederate 
 Republic, seems to offer the most alluring spoils, to 
 our ambition and avarice at the South. The idea of 
 embracing in one confederated government the whole 
 continent of North America, has, at this day, nothing 
 chimerical in its conception, and long before a lapse 
 of time equal to that which has past since the 14th 
 number of the Federalist was written, may require 
 the invincible spirit and the uncompromising energy 
 of our revolutionary struggle for its solution. 
 
 The other papers of the Federalist, written by 
 Mr. Madison, are from the 37th to the 58th number 
 inclusive. They relate to the difficulties which the 
 Convention had experienced in the formation of a 
 proper plan. To its conformity with Republican 
 principles, with an apologetic defence of the body for 
 transcending their powers. To a general view of the 
 powers vested by the plan in the general government, 
 and a comparative estimate of the reciprocal influ- 
 ence of the general and of the State governments with 
 each other. They contain a laborious investigation 
 of the maxim which requires a separation of the de- 
 partments of power, and a discussion of the means 
 for giving to it practical efficacy — and they close with 
 an examination critical and philosophical of the or- 
 ganization of the House of Representatives in the 
 Constitution of the United States — with reference 
 to the qualifications of the electors and elected — to 
 the term of service of the members ; to the ratio of 
 representation; to the total number of the body; and 
 to the expected subsequent augmentation of the mem- 
 
35 
 
 bers— and here he met and refuted an objection to 
 the plan founded upon its supposed tendency to ele- 
 vate the few above the many. These were the 
 topics discussed by James Madison, and in leaving 
 to his illustrious associate the devclopcment of the 
 other Departments of the Senate, of the Executive, 
 of the Judiciary, and the bearing of the whole sys- 
 tems upon the militia, the commerce and revenues, 
 the military and naval establishments, and to the 
 public economy, it was doubtless because both from 
 inclination and principle he preferred the considera- 
 tion of those parts of the instrument which bore upon 
 popular right, and the freedom of the citizens to that 
 of the aristocratic and monarchical elements of the 
 whole fabrick. 
 
 The papers of the Federalist had a powerful, but 
 limited influence upon the public mind. The Con- 
 stitution was successively submitted to Conventions 
 of the People, in each of the thirteen States, and in 
 almost every one of them was debated against oppo- 
 sitions of deep feeling, and strong party excitement. 
 The authors of the Federalist were again called to 
 buckle on their armour in defence of their plan. 
 The Convention for the Commonwealth of Virginia, 
 met in June, 1788, nine months after the Constitution 
 had been promulgated. It had already been ratified 
 by seven of the States, and New Hampshire, at an 
 adjourned session of her Convention, adopted it while 
 the Convention of Virginia were in session. The 
 assent of that State was therefore to complete the 
 number of nine, which the Constitution itself had 
 provided should be sufficient for undertaking its ex- 
 ecution between the ratifying States. A deeper in- 
 terest was then involved in the decision of Virginia, 
 5 
 
36 
 
 than in that of any other member of the Confeder- 
 acy, and in no State had the opposition to the plan 
 been so deep, so extensive, so formidable as there. 
 Two of her citizens, second only to Washington, by 
 the weight of their characters, the splendor of their 
 public services and the reputation of their genius and 
 talents, Patrick Henry, the first herald of the Revo- 
 lution in the South, as James Otis had been at the 
 North, and Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Dec- 
 laration of Independence, and the most intimate and 
 confidential friend of Madison himself, disapproved 
 the Constitution. Jefferson was indeed at that time 
 absent from the State and the country, as the repre- 
 sentative of the United States at the Court of France. 
 His objections to the Constitution were less fervent 
 and radical. Patrick Henry's opposition was to the 
 whole plan, and to its fundamental principle the 
 change from a confederation of Independent States, 
 to a complicated government, partly federal, and 
 partly national. He was a member of the Virginia 
 Convention ; and there it was that Mr. Madison was 
 destined to meet and encounter, and overcome the all 
 but irresistible power of his eloquence, and the inex- 
 haustible resources of his gigantic mind. 
 
 The debates in the Virginia Convention furnish an 
 exposition of the principles of the Constitution, and 
 a Commentary upon its provisions not inferior to the 
 papers of the Federalist. Patrick Henry pursued his 
 hostility to the system into all its details ; objecting not 
 only to the Preamble and the first Article, but to the 
 Senate, to the President, to the Judicial Power, to 
 the treaty making power, to the controul given to 
 Congress over the militia, and especially to the omis- 
 sion of a Bill of Rights — seconded and sustained 
 
37 
 
 with great ability by George Mason, who had been a 
 member of the Convention which formed the Con- 
 stitution, by James Monroe and William Grayson, 
 there was not a controvertible point, real or imagi- 
 nary in the whole instrument which escaped their 
 embittered opposition ; while upon every point Mr. 
 Madison was prepared to meet them, with cogent 
 argument, with intense and anxious feeling, and with 
 mild, conciliatory gentleness of temper, disarming the 
 adversary by the very act of seeming to decline con- 
 tention with him. Mr. Madison devoted himself 
 particularly to the task of answering and replying to 
 the objections of Patrick Henry, following him step 
 by step, and meeting him at every turn. His prin- 
 cipal co-adjutors were Governor Randolph, Edmund 
 Pendleton, the President of the Convention, John 
 Marshall, George Nicholas, and Henry Lee of West- 
 moreland. Never was there assembled in Virginia a 
 body of men, of more surpassing talent, of bolder 
 energy, or of purer integrity than in that Convention. 
 The volume of their debates should be the pocket 
 and the pillow companion of every youthful American 
 aspiring to the honor of rendering important service 
 to his country ; and there as he reads and meditates, 
 will he not fail to perceive the steady, unfaltering 
 mind of James Madison, marching from victory to 
 victory, over the dazzling but then beclouded genius 
 and eloquence of Patrick Henry. 
 
 The result was the unconditional ratification by a 
 majority of only eight votes, of the Constitution of the 
 United States on the part of the Commonwealth of 
 Virginia, together with resolutions, recommending 
 sundry amendments to supply the omission of a Bill of 
 Rights. The example for this had been first set by 
 
38 
 
 the Convention of Massachusetts, at the motion of 
 John Hancock, and it was followed by several other 
 of the State Conventions, and gave occasion to the 
 first ten Articles, amendatory of the Constitution pre- 
 pared by the first Congress of the United States and 
 ratified by the competent number of the State Legis- 
 latures, and which supply the place of a Bill of rights. 
 
 In the organization of the Government of the Uni- 
 ted States, Washington the leader of the armies of the 
 revolution, the President of the Convention which had 
 prepared the Constitution for the acceptance of the 
 People — first in War, first in Peace, and first in the 
 hearts of his Countrymen, was by their unanimous 
 voice called to the first Presidency of the United 
 States. For his assistance in the performance of the 
 functions of the Executive power, after the Institution 
 by Congress of the chief Departments, he selected 
 Alexander Hamilton for the office of Secretary of the 
 Treasury, and Thomas Jefferson for that of Secretary 
 of State. Mr. Madison was elected one of the mem- 
 bers of the House of Representatives in the first Con- 
 gress of the United States under the Constitution. 
 
 The Treasury itself was to be organized. Public 
 credit, prostrated by the impotence of the Confedera- 
 tion was to be restored, provision was to be made for 
 the punctual payment of the public debt — taxes were 
 to be levied — the manufactures, commerce and nav- 
 igation of the Country were to be fostered and en- 
 couraged ; and a system of conduct towards foreign 
 powers was to be adopted and maintained. A Judi- 
 ciary system was also to be instituted, accommodated 
 to the new and extraordinary character of the general 
 Government. A permanent seat of Government was 
 to be selected and subjected to the exclusive jurisdic- 
 
39 
 
 tion of Congress ; and the definite action of each of 
 the Departments of the Government was to be settled 
 and adjusted. In the councils of President Washing- 
 ton, divisions of opinion between Mr. Jefferson and 
 Mr. Hamilton soon widened into collisions of principle 
 and produced mutual personal estrangement and irri- 
 tation. In the formation of a general s\stem of poli- 
 cy for the conduct of the Administration in National 
 concerns at home and abroad, different views were 
 taken by Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Hamilton, winch 
 Washington labored much but with little success to 
 conciliate. Hamilton, charged by successive calls from 
 the House of Representatives, for reports of Plans for 
 the restoration of public credit ; upon the protection 
 and encouragement of Manufactures, and upon a Na- 
 tional Mint and a Bank, transmitted upon each of those 
 subjects reports of consummate ability and proposed 
 plans most of which were adopted by Congress almost 
 without alteration. The Secretary of State during the 
 same period made reports to Congress, not less celebra- 
 ted, on the Fisheries, on the system of commercial reg- 
 ulations most proper to be established, and upon weights 
 and measures. Negotiations with foreign powers, 
 which the inefficiency of the confederation had left in 
 a lamentable and languishing condition, humiliating to 
 the national honor and reputation, were resumed and 
 reinstituted, and by long and complicated correspon- 
 dencies with the Governments of Great Britain, Spain 
 and France, the National character was in the first 
 term of the administration of Washington redeemed 
 and exhibited to the w r orld with a splendor never sur- 
 passed and which gave to the tone of our national in- 
 tercourse with the Sovereigns of the earth a dignity, 
 a firmness, a candor and moderation, which shamed 
 
40 
 
 the blustering and trickish diplomacy of Europe at that 
 day and shed a beam of unfading glory upon the name 
 of republican America. But the National Constitu- 
 tion had not only operated as if by enchantment a most 
 auspicious revolution in the character and reputation 
 of the newly independent American People ; it had 
 opened new avenues to honor and power and fame, 
 and new prospects to individual ambition. 
 
 No sooner was the new Government organized than 
 the eyes, the expectations and the interests and pas- 
 sions of men turned to the designation of the succes- 
 sion to the Presidency, when the official term of Wash- 
 ington should be completed. His own intention was 
 to retire at the expiration of the first four years allot- 
 ted to the service. The candidates of the North and 
 the South supported by the geographical sympathies 
 of their respective friends were already giving rise to 
 the agency of political combinations. The Northern 
 candidate was not yet distinctly designated, but be- 
 fore the expiration of the first Congress, Mr. Jefferson 
 was the only intended candidate of the South. 
 
 The Protection of Manufactures, the restoration of 
 public credit, the recovery of the securities of the 
 public debt from a state of depreciation little short of 
 total debasement, and the facilities of exchange and of 
 circulation furnished by the establishment of a Nation- 
 al Bank were of far deeper interest to the commercial 
 and Atlantic than to the plantation States. Mr. Jef- 
 ferson's distrust and jealousy of the powers granted by 
 the Constitution followed him into office and were 
 perhaps sharpened by the successful exercise of them, 
 under the auspices of a rival statesman ; he insisted 
 upon a rigid construction of all the grants of power — 
 he denied the Constitutional power of Congress to es- 
 
41 
 
 tablish Corporations and especially a National Bank. 
 The question was discussed in the Cabinet Council of 
 Washington and written opinions of Mr. Jefferson and 
 of Edmund Randolph, then Attorney General against 
 the Constitutional power of Congress to establish a 
 Bank were given. With these opinions Mr. Madi- 
 son then concurred. Other questions of justice and 
 expediency connected with the funding system of Mr. 
 Hamilton gave rise to warm and acrimonious debates 
 in Congress, and mingling with the sectional divisions 
 of the Union, and with individual attachments to men, 
 gave an impulse and direction to party spirit which 
 has continued to this day, and however modified by 
 changes of times, of circumstances and of men can 
 never be wholly extinguished. Too happy should I 
 be, if with a voice speaking from the last to the com- 
 ing generation of my country, I could effectively urge 
 them to seek in the temper and moderation of James 
 Madison that healing balm which assuages the ma- 
 lignity of the deepest seated political disease, redeems 
 to life the rational mind and restores to health the in- 
 corporated union of our country, even from the brain 
 fever of party spirit. 
 
 To the sources of dissensions and the conflicts of 
 opinion transmitted from the confederation or genera- 
 ted by the organization of the new Government were 
 soon added the confluent streams of the French revo- 
 lution and its complication of European Wars. There 
 were features in the French revolution closely resemb- 
 ling our own ; there were points of national interest in 
 both Countries well adapted to harmonize their rela- 
 tions with each other, and a sentiment of gratitude 
 rooted in the hearts of the American People by the 
 recent remembrance of the benefits derived from the 
 
42 
 
 alliance with Fiance and community of cause against 
 Britain engaged all our sympathies in favor of the Peo- 
 ple of France, subverting their own Monarchy ; and 
 when her War, first kindled with Austria and Prussia 
 spread its flames to Great Britain, the partialities of 
 resentment and hatred, deepening the tide and stimu- 
 lating the current of more kindly and benevolent affec- 
 tions, became so ardent and impetuous that there was 
 imminent danger of the country's being immediately 
 involved in the War on the side of France — a danger 
 greatly aggravated by the guaranty to France of her 
 Islands in the West Indies. The subject immediately 
 became a cause of deliberation in the Executive Cab- 
 inet and discordant opinions again disclosed themselves 
 between the Secretary of State and the Secretary of 
 the Treasury. 
 
 On the 18th of April, 1793, President Washington 
 submitted to his Cabinet thirteen questions with re- 
 gard to the measures to be taken by him in conse- 
 quence of the revolution which had overthrown the 
 French monarchy ; of the new organization of a repub- 
 lic in that country ; of the appointment of a minis- 
 ter from that republic to the United States, and of the 
 war, declared by the National Convention of France 
 against Great Britain. The first of these questions 
 was whether a proclamation should issue to prevent 
 interferences of the citizens of the United States in 
 the War ? Whether the proclamation should or should 
 not contain a declaration of neutrality ? The second 
 was whether a minister from the republic of France 
 should be received. Upon these two questions the 
 opinion of the Cabinet was unanimous in the affirma- 
 tive — that a Proclamation of neutrality should issue — 
 and that the minister from the French Republic should 
 
43 
 
 be received. But upon all the other questions, the 
 opinions of the four heads of the Departments were 
 equally divided. They were indeed questions of .dif- 
 ficulty and delicacy equal to their importance. No less 
 than whether altera revolution in France annihilating 
 the Government with which the treaties of alliance 
 and of commerce had been contracted, the Treaties 
 themselves were to be considered binding as between 
 the nations ; and particularly whether the stipulation 
 of guaranty to France of her possessions in the West 
 Indies was binding upon the United States to the ex- 
 tent of imposing upon them the obligation of taking 
 side with France in the War. As the members of the 
 Cabinet disagreed in their opinions upon these ques- 
 tions, and as there was no immediate necessity for de- 
 ciding them, the further consideration of them was 
 postponed and they were never afterwards resumed. 
 While these discussions of the Cabinet of Washing- 
 ton were held, the Minister Plenipotentiary from the 
 French republic arrived in this country. He had been 
 appointed by the National Convention of France which 
 had dethroned, and tried, and sentenced to death, and 
 executed Louis the XVI th, abolished the Monarchy 
 and proclaimed a republic one and indivisible under 
 the auspices of Liberty, equality and fraternity as 
 thenceforth the Government of France. By all the 
 rest of Europe they were then considered as revolted 
 subjects in rebellion against their Sovereign ; and were 
 not recognized as constituting an independent Gov- 
 ernment: 
 
 General Hamilton and General Knox were of opin- 
 ion that the Minister from France should be condi- 
 tionally received, with the reservation of the question, 
 whether the United Suites were still bound to fulfil 
 6 
 
44 
 
 the stipulations of the Treaties. They inclined to the 
 opinion that the Treaties themselves were annulled 
 by the revolution of the Government in France — an 
 opinion to which the example of the revolutionary 
 Government had given plausibility by declaring some 
 of the Treaties made by the abolished Monarchy no 
 longer binding upon the nation. Mr. Hamilton thought 
 also that France had no just claim to the fulfilment of 
 the stipulation of guaranty, because that stipulation and 
 the whole treaty of Alliance in which it was contain- 
 ed were professedly and on the face of them only de- 
 fensive, while the War which the French Convention 
 had declared against Great Britain was on the part of 
 France offensive, the first declaration having been is- 
 sued by her — that the United States were at all events 
 absolved from the obligation of the guaranty by their 
 inability to perform it, and that under the Constitu- 
 tion of the United States the interpretation of Trea- 
 ties and the obligations resulting from them, were with- 
 in the competency of the Executive Department, at 
 least concurrently with the Legislature. It does not 
 appear that these opinions were debated or contested 
 in the Cabinet. By their unanimous advice the Proc- 
 lamation was issued and Edmund Charles Genet was 
 received as Minister Plenipotentiary of the French 
 Republic. Thus the Executive administration did 
 assume and exercise the power of recognising a revo- 
 lutionary foreign Government as a legitimate Sove- 
 reign with whom the ordinary diplomatic relations 
 were to be entertained. But the Proclamation con- 
 tained no allusion whatever to the Treaties between 
 the United States and France, nor of course to the 
 Article of Guaranty or its obligations. 
 
 Whatever doubts may have been entertained by a 
 
45 
 
 large portion of the people, of the right of the Ex- 
 ecutive to acknowledge a new and revolutionary 
 government, not recognized by any other Sovereign 
 State, or of the sound policy of receiving without wait- 
 ing for the sanction of Congress, a minister from a 
 republic which had commenced her career by putting 
 to death the king whom she had dethroned, and which 
 had rushed into war with almost all the rest of Eu- 
 rope, no manifestation of such doubts was publicly 
 made. A current of popular favor sustained the 
 French Revolution, at that stage of its progress, 
 which nothing could resist, and far from indulging 
 any question of the right of the President to recog- 
 nise a new revolutionary government, by receiving 
 from it the credentials which none but Sovereigns 
 can grant, the American People would, at that mo- 
 ment, have scarcely endured an instant of hesitation 
 on the part of the President, which should have delay- 
 ed for an hour the reception of the minister from the 
 Republic of France. But the Proclamation enjoining 
 neutrality upon the people of the United States, in- 
 directly counteracted the torrent of partiality in favor 
 of France, and was immediately assailed with intem- 
 perate violence in many of the public journals. The 
 right of the Executive to issue any Proclamation of 
 neutrality was fiercely and pertinaciously denied, as a 
 usurpation of Legislative authority, and in that par 
 ticular case it was charged with forestalling and pre- 
 maturely deciding the question whether the United 
 States were bound by the guaranty to France of her 
 West India possessions, in the treaty of alliance to 
 take side in the war with her against Great Britain — 
 and with deciding it against France. 
 
 Mr. Jefferson had advised the Proclamation ; but 
 
46 
 
 he had not considered it as deciding the question of 
 the guaranty. The government of the French Re- 
 public had not claimed and never did claim the per- 
 formance of the guaranty. But so strenuously was 
 the right of the President to issue the Proclamation 
 contested, that Mr. Hamilton the first adviser of the 
 measure deemed it necessary to defend it inofficially 
 before the public. This he did in seven successive 
 papers under the signature of Pacificus. But in de- 
 fending the Proclamation, he appears to consider it as 
 necessarily involving the decision against the obliga- 
 tion of the guaranty and maintains the right of the 
 Executive so to decide. Mr. Madison perhaps in 
 some degree influenced by the opinions and feelings 
 of his long cherished and venerated friend, Jefferson, 
 was already harboring suspicions of a formal design 
 on the part of Hamilton, and of the federal party 
 generally to convert the government of the United 
 States into a monarchy like that of Great Britain, and 
 thought he perceived in these papers of Pacificus the 
 assertion of a prerogative in the President of the 
 United States to engage the nation in war. He 
 therefore entered the lists against Mr. Hamilton in 
 the public journals and in five papers under the sig- 
 nature of Helvidius, scrutinized the doctrines of Pa- 
 cificus with an acuteness of intellect never perhaps 
 surpassed and with a severity scarcely congenial to 
 his natural disposition and never on any other occa- 
 sion indulged. Mr. Hamilton did not reply ; nor in 
 any of his papers did he notice the animadversions of 
 Helvidius. But all the Presidents of the United 
 States have from that time exercised the right of 
 yielding and withholding the recognition of govern- 
 ments consequent upon revolutions, 1 hough the exam- 
 
47 
 
 pie of issuing a Proclamation of neutrality has never 
 been repeated. The respective powers of the Presi- 
 dent and Congress of the United States, in the case 
 of war with foreign powers are yet undetermined. 
 Perhaps they can never be defined. The Constitu- 
 tion expressly gives to Congress the power of declar- 
 ing war and that act can of course never be perform- 
 ed by the President alone. But war is often made 
 without being declared. War is a state in which 
 nations are placed not alone by their own acts, but by 
 the acts of other nations. The declaration of war is 
 in its nature a legislative act, but the conduct of war 
 is and must be executive. However startled we may 
 be at the idea that the Executive Chief Magistrate 
 has the power of involving the nation in war, even 
 without consulting Congress, an experience of fifty 
 years has proved that in numberless cases he has and 
 must have exercised the power. In the case which 
 gave rise to this controversy the recognition of the 
 French Republic and the reception of her minister 
 might have been regarded by the allied powers as acts 
 of hostility to them, and they did actually interdict 
 all neutral commerce with France. Defensive war 
 must necessarily be among the duties of the Executive 
 Chief Magistrate. The papers of Pacificus and Hel- 
 vidius are among the most ingenious and profound 
 Commentaries on that most important part of the 
 Constitution, the distribution of the Legislative and 
 Executive powers incident to war, and when consid- 
 ered as supplementary to the joint labors of Hamilton 
 and Madison in the Federalist, they possess a deep 
 and monitory interest to the American philosophical 
 Statesman. The Federalist exhibits the joint efforts 
 of two powerful minds in promoting one great common 
 
48 
 
 object, the adoption of the Constitution of the United 
 States. The papers of Pacificus and Helvidius pre- 
 sent the same minds, in collision with each other, exert- 
 ing all their energies in conflict, upon the construction 
 of the same instrument which they had so arduously 
 labored to establish ; and it is remarkable that upon 
 the points in the papers of Pacificus most keenly 
 contested by his adversary, the most forcible of his 
 arguments are pointed with quotations from the papers 
 of the Federalist written by Mr. Hamilton. 
 
 But whether in conjunction with or in opposition to 
 each other, the co-operation or the encounter of in- 
 tellects thus exalted and refined, controled by that 
 moderation and humanity, which have hitherto char- 
 acterised the history of our Union, cannot but ulti- 
 mately terminate in spreading light and promoting 
 peace among men. Happy, thrice happy the people, 
 whose political oppositions and conflicts have no ulti- 
 mate appeal but to their own reason ; of whose party 
 feuds the only conquests are of argument, and whose 
 only triumphs are of the mind. In other ages and in 
 other regions of our own, the question of the respective 
 powers of the Legislature and of the Execuive with 
 reference to war, might itself have been debated in 
 blood and sent numberless victims to their account on 
 the battle-field or the scaffold. So it was in the san- 
 guinary annals of the French Revolution. So it has 
 been and yet is in the successive revolutions of our 
 South American neighbors. May that merciful Being 
 who has hitherto overruled all our diversities of opin- 
 ion, tempered our antagonizing passions, and con- 
 ciliated our conflicting interests, still preside in all our 
 councils and in the tempests of our civil commotions, 
 still ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm. 
 
49 
 
 It was indeed at one of the most turbulent and tem- 
 pestuous periods of human history that the Constitu- 
 tion of the United States first went into operation. 
 It was convulsed not only by the convulsions of the 
 old world but by tumultuary agitations of the most 
 alarming character and tendency from within. Such 
 were the dangers and the difficulties with which the 
 Government of the United States from the first mo- 
 ment of its organization under Washington was beset 
 and surrounded, that they undoubtedly led him to the 
 determination to withdraw from the charge and res- 
 ponsibility of presiding over it, at as early a period as 
 possible. It was with difficulty that he was prevail- 
 ed upon to postpone the execution of this design till 
 the expiration of a second term of service ; but so 
 radically different were the opinions and the systems 
 ot policy of Washington's two principal advisers, espe- 
 cially with reference to the external relations of the 
 United States, that he was unable to retain beyond 
 the limits of the first term their united assistance in 
 his Cabinet. In the struggle to maintain the neutral- 
 ity which he had proclaimed, and in the festering in- 
 flammation of interests and passions, gathering with 
 the progress of the French revolution, he coincided 
 more in judgment with the Secretary of the Treasury 
 than with the Secretary of State, and they success- 
 ively retired from their offices, in which each of them 
 had rendered the most important services and contrib- 
 uted to raise the Country and its Government high in 
 the estimation of the world, but unfortunately without 
 being able to harmonise, and finally, even to co-ope- 
 rate with each other. 
 
 Mr. Jefferson's retirement was first in order — it 
 was voluntary but under circumstances of dissatisfac- 
 
50 
 
 tion at the prevalence of the Councils of his rival in 
 the Cabinet — and under irritated prepossessions of a 
 deliberate design, in Hamilton, and of all the leading 
 supporters of Washington's administration, to shape 
 the Government of the United States into a Mon- 
 archy like that of Great Britain. This exasperated 
 feeling, nourished by the political controversy then 
 blazing in all its fury in the War between France and 
 the monarchies of Europe, gradually became the main 
 spring of the opposition to Washington's administra- 
 tion ; an opposition which from that time looked to 
 Jefferson as their leader, and head. This opposition, 
 fomented by the unprincipled injustice of both the bel- 
 ligerent European powers, and especially by the aban- 
 doned profligacy of the directorial Government of 
 France, continued and increased until in the last year 
 of Washington's administration, a majority if not of 
 the People of the United States, at least of their rep- 
 resentatives in Congress, were associated with it. Of 
 that opposition, Mr. Jefferson was the favored candi- 
 date for the succession to the Presidency, and by the 
 result of a severely contested election, was placed in 
 the chair of the Senate as Vice President of the Uni- 
 ted States. This was the effect of a provision in the 
 Constitution, which has since been altered by an 
 Amendment. It was one of the new experiments in 
 Government, attempted by the Constitution, and had 
 then been received with an unusual degree of favor, 
 l>\ an anticipated expectation that its operation would 
 be to mitigate and conciliate party spirit, by causing 
 two persons to be voted for, to fill the same office, of 
 President, and by consoling the unsuccessful candidate 
 ;iik1 his friends with the second office in the Govern- 
 ment of the Union. The test of experience soon dis- 
 
51 
 
 abused the fallacious foresight of a benevolent theory, 
 and disclosed springs of human action adverse to the 
 device of placing either a political antagonist or co- 
 adjutor of the Chief Magistrate at the head of the 
 Senate, and as contingently his successor. 
 
 The principles of the administration of Washington 
 were pursued by his immediate successor. The op- 
 position to them was encouraged and fortified by the 
 position of their leader in the second seat of power ; 
 and the Directory of France wallowing in corruption 
 and venality, was preparing the way, for their own 
 destruction at home, and setting up to sale the Peace 
 of their Country with other nations and especially 
 with the United States. By their violence and fraud 
 they compelled the Congress to annul the existing 
 Treaties between the 4 United States and France ; and 
 without an absolute declaration of War to authorize 
 defensive hostilities. 
 
 In the controversy with France during this period, 
 the executive administration was sustained by a vast 
 majority of the People of the Union and the elections 
 both of the People and of the State Legislatures re- 
 turned decided majorities in both houses of Congress 
 of corresponding opinions and policy. A powerful and 
 inveterate opposition to all the measures both of Con- 
 gress and of the administration was however con- 
 stantly maintained with the countenance and co-op- 
 eration of Mr. Jefferson, whose partialities in favor of 
 France and the French revolution, though not extend- 
 ing to the justification of the secret intrigues and 
 open hostilities of the Directory still counteracted the 
 operations of the American Government to resist and 
 defeat them. 
 
 The violence and pertinacity of the opposition pro- 
 7 
 
52 
 
 voked the ruling majority in Congress to the adoption 
 of two measures which neither the exasperated spirit 
 of the times, nor the deliberate judgment of after days 
 could reconcile to the temper of the people. I allude 
 to the two acts of Congress since generally known by 
 the names of the Alien and Sedition Laws. Of their 
 merits or demerits this is not the time or the place to 
 speak. They passed in Congress without vehement 
 opposition ; for Mr. Jefferson then holding the office 
 of Vice President of the United States, took no acting 
 part against them as the presiding officer of the Sen- 
 ate, and Mr. Madison at the close of the administra- 
 tion of Washington, had relinquished his seat in the 
 House of Representatives of the Union. Devoted in 
 friendship to the person and in policy to the views 
 of Mr. Jefferson, he participated with deference in 
 his opinions to an extent which the deliberate convic- 
 tions of his own judgment sometimes failed to con- 
 firm. The alien and sedition acts were intended to 
 suppress the intrigues of foreign emissaries, employed 
 by the profligate Government of the French Directory, 
 and who abused the freedom of the press by traducing 
 the characters of the administration and its friends, 
 and by instigating the resistance of the people against 
 the Government and the laws of the Union. 
 
 Among the eminent qualities of Mr. Jefferson, was 
 a keen, constant, and profound faculty of observation 
 with regard to the action and re-action of the popu- 
 lar opinion upon the measures of government. He 
 perceived immediately the operation of the alien and 
 sedition Acts, and he availed himself of them with 
 equal sagacity and ardor for the furtherance of his 
 own views of public policy and of personal advance- 
 ment. In opposition to the alien and sedition Acts, 
 
53 
 
 he deemed it advisable to bring into action so far as 
 was practicable, the power of the State Legislatures 
 against the government of the Union. In the pur- 
 suit of this system it was his good fortune to obtain 
 the aid and co-operation of Mr. Madison and of 
 other friends equally devoted personally to him, and 
 concurring more fully in his sentiments, then members 
 of the Legislature of Kentucky. Assuming as first 
 principles that by the Constitution of the United 
 States, Congress possessed no authority to restrain 
 in any manner the freedom of the press, not even in 
 self-defence against the most incendiary defamation, 
 and that the principles of the English Common Law 
 were of no force under the Government of the United 
 States, he drafted, with his own hand, resolutions 
 which were adopted by the Legislature of Kentucky 
 declaring that each State had the right to judge for 
 itself as well of infractions of the common Constitu- 
 tion by the general government, as of the mode and 
 measure of redress — that the alien and sedition Laws 
 were, in their opinion, manifest and palpable viola- 
 tions of the Constitution and therefore null and void ; 
 and that a nullification by the State Sovereignties of 
 all unauthorized acts done under color of the Consti- 
 tution is the rightful remedy for such infractions. 
 
 The principles thus assumed, and particularly that 
 of remedial nullification by State authority, have been 
 more than once re-asserted by parties predominating 
 in one or more of the confederated States, dissatisfied 
 with particular acts of the general government. 
 They have twice brought the Union itself to the 
 verge of dissolution. To that result it must come, 
 should it ever be the misfortune of the American 
 People that they should obtain the support of a suf- 
 
54 
 
 ficient portion of them to make them effective by 
 force. They never have yet been so supported. 
 The alien and sedition Acts were temporary Statutes 
 and expired by their own limitations. No attempt 
 has been made to revive them, but in our most recent 
 times, restrictions far more rigorous upon the freedom 
 of the press, of speech and of personal liberty, than 
 the alien and sedition Laws, have not only been 
 deemed within the constitutional power of Congress, 
 but even recommended by the Chief Magistrate of 
 the Union, to encounter the dangers and evils of in- 
 cendiary publications. 
 
 The influence of Mr. Jefferson over the mind of 
 Mr. Madison, was composed of all that genius, talent, 
 experience, splendid public services, exalted reputa- 
 tion, added to congenial tempers, undivided friend- 
 ship and habitual sympathies of interest and of feeling 
 could inspire. Among the numerous blessings which 
 it was the rare good fortune of Mr. Jefferson's life to 
 enjoy, was that of the uninterrupted, disinterested, 
 and efficient friendship of Madison. But it was the 
 friendship of a mind not inferior in capacity and tem- 
 pered with a calmer sensibility and a cooler judgment 
 than his own. With regard to the measures of 
 Washington's administration, from the time when the 
 Councils of Hamilton acquired the ascendancy over 
 those of Jefferson, the opinions of Mr. Madison gen- 
 erally coincided with those of his friend. He had 
 resisted, on Constitutional grounds, the establishment 
 of a National Bank — he had proposed, and with all 
 his ability had urged important modifications of the 
 funding system. He had written and published the 
 papers of Helvidius, and he had originated measures 
 of commercial regulation against Great Britain, in- 
 
55 
 
 stead of which Washington had preferred to institute 
 the pacific and friendly mission of Mr. Jay. He had 
 disapproved of the treaty concluded by that eminent, 
 profound and incorruptible statesman, a measure the 
 most rancorously contested of any 'of those of Wash- 
 ington's administration, and upon which public opin- 
 ion has remained divided to this day. Mr. Madison 
 concurred entirely with Mr. Jefferson in the policy of 
 neutrality to the European Wars, but with a strong 
 leaning of favor to France and her revolution which it 
 was then impossible to hold without a leaning ap- 
 proaching to hostility against Great Britain, her pol- 
 icy and her Government. Mr. Madison therefore at 
 the earnest solicitation of Mr. Jefferson introduced 
 into the Legislature of Virginia the resolutions adop- 
 ted on the 21st of December 1798, declaring 1, That 
 the Constitution of the United States was a compact, 
 to which the States were parties granting limited 
 powers of Government. 2. That in case of a deliber- 
 ate, palpable and dangerous exercise of other powers, 
 not granted by the compact, the States had the right 
 to and were in duty bound to interpose, for arresting 
 the progress of the evils and for maintaining within 
 their respective limits, the authorities rights and liber- 
 ties appertaining to them. 3. That the alien and sedi- 
 tion acts were palpable and alarming infractions of 
 the Constitution. 4. That the State of Virginia hav- 
 ing by its Convention which ratified the federal Con- 
 stitution expressly declared that among other essen- 
 tial rights the liberty of conscience and the press can- 
 not be cancelled, abridged, restrained, or modified by 
 any authority of the United States, and from its ex- 
 treme anxiety to guard these rights from every possi- 
 ble attack of sophistry and ambition, having with the 
 
56 
 
 other States recommended an amendment for that 
 purpose, which amendment was in due time annexed 
 to the Constitution, it would mark a reproachful 
 inconsistency and criminal degeneracy if an indiffer- 
 ence were now shown to the most palpable violation 
 of one of the rights thus declared and secured ; and 
 to the establishment of a precedent which might be 
 fatal to the other. 5. That the State of Virginia 
 declared the alien and sedition laws unconstitu- 
 tional — solemnly appealed to the like dispositions in 
 the other States, in confidence that they would con- 
 cur with her in that declaration, and that the neces- 
 sary and proper measures would be taken by each, for 
 co-operating with her, in maintaining unimpaired the 
 authorities, rights and liberties reserved to the States, 
 respectively or to the People. 6. That the Govern- 
 or should be desired to transmit a copy of these res- 
 olutions to the Executive authority of each of the 
 other States, with a request that they should be com- 
 municated to the respective State Legislatures, and 
 that a copy should be furnished to each of the Sena- 
 tors and Representatives of Virginia in Congress. 
 
 The resolutions did but in part carry into effect the 
 principles and purposes of Mr. Jefferson. His origi- 
 nal intention was that the alien and sedition acts 
 should be declared by the State Legislatures, null and 
 void — and that with the declaration that nullification 
 by them was the rightful remedy for such usurpations 
 of power by the federal Government, committees of 
 correspondence and co-operation should be appointed 
 by the Legislatures of the States concurring in the 
 resolutions, for consultation with regard to further 
 measures. Before the adoption of the Virginia reso- 
 lutions, the Legislature of Kentucky had adopted 
 
57 
 
 i 
 
 others drafted by Mr. Jefferson himself and intro- 
 duced by two of his friends in that body. In those 
 resolutions the doctrines of nullification by the State 
 Legislatures of acts of Congress, deemed by them un- 
 constitutional, was first explicitly and unequivocally 
 asserted. But even in Kentucky the Legislature was 
 not quite prepared for consultation upon further meas- 
 ures of co-operation by committees of correspondence. 
 
 The Virginia Resolutions were transmitted to the 
 other States with an address to the people in support 
 of them, written by Mr. Madison. They were 
 strongly disapproved by resolutions of all the Legisla- 
 tures of the New England States and by those of New 
 York and Delaware. They were not nor were those 
 of the Legislature of Kentucky concurred in by any 
 other State Legislature of the Union, but they con- 
 tributed greatly to increase the unpopularity of the 
 measures which they denounced and sharpened the 
 edge of every weapon, wielded against the adminis- 
 tion of the time. 
 
 At the succeeding sessions of the Legislatures of 
 Kentucky and of Virginia, they took into considera- 
 tion the answers of the Legislatures of the other States 
 to their resolutions of 1798. The reply of Kentucky 
 was in the form of a resolution re-asserting the right 
 of the separate States to judge of infractions, by the 
 Government of the union, of the Constitution of the 
 United States, and expressly affirming that a nulli- 
 fication by the State Sovereignties of all unauthor- 
 ized acts done under color of that instrument was the 
 rightful remedy ; and complaining of the doctrines 
 and principles attempted to be maintained in all the 
 answers, that of Virginia only excepted. 
 
 In the Legislature of Virginia, a long, most able and 
 
58 
 
 elaborate report was written by Mr. Madison, in re- 
 ply to the answers received from the other States, 
 and concluded with the following resolution : 
 
 " That the General Assembly, having carefully and 
 respectfully attended to the proceedings of a number 
 of the States, in answer to the resolutions of Decem- 
 ber 21, 1798, and having accurately and fully re-ex- 
 amined and re-considered the latter, find it to be their 
 indispensable duty to adhere to the same as founded in 
 truth, as consonant with the Constitution and as con- 
 ducive to its preservation ; and more especially to be 
 their duty to renew as they do hereby renew their 
 protest against the alien and sedition acts, as palpable 
 and alarming infractions of the Constitution." 
 
 The report and resolution were adopted by the 
 Legislature in February, 1 800. The alien law expired 
 by its own limitation on the 25th of June of that year, 
 and the sedition act on the 4th of March, 1801. 
 
 The proceedings of the Legislatures of Kentucky 
 and Virginia relating to the alien and sedition acts, 
 gave to them an importance far beyond that which 
 naturally belonged to them. The acts themselves and 
 the resolutions of the Legislatures concerning them 
 may now be considered merely as adversary party 
 measures. 
 
 The agency of Mr. Jefferson in originating the 
 measures of both the State Legislatures was at the 
 time profoundly secret. It has been made known 
 only since his decease, but in estimating the weight 
 of the objections against the two laws on sound prin- 
 ciples as well of morals as of politics, the fact as well 
 as the manner of that agency are observable. The 
 situation which he then held, and that to which he 
 ascended by its operation, are considerations not to be 
 
59 
 
 overlooked in fixing the deliberate judgment of pos- 
 terity upon the whole transaction. Mr. Madison's 
 motives lor the part which he acted in the drama, are 
 not liable to the same scrutiny ; nor did his public 
 station at the time, nor the principles which he assert- 
 ed in the management of the controversy, nor the 
 measures which he proposed, recommended and 
 accomplished subject his posthumous reputation and 
 character to the same animadversions. Standing here 
 as the sincere and faithful organ of the sentiments of 
 my fellow citizens to honor a great and illustrious 
 benefactor of his Country it would be as foreign from 
 the honest and deliberate judgment of my soul as from 
 the sense of my duties on this occasion to profess my 
 assent to the reasoning of his report, or my acquies- 
 cence in the application of its unquestionable princi- 
 ples to the two acts of Congressional legislation which 
 it arraigns. That because the States of this Union as 
 well as their people, are parties to the Constitutional 
 compact of the federal Government, therefore the 
 State Legislatures have the right to judge of 
 infractions of the Constitution by the organized Gov- 
 ernment of the whole and to declare acts of Congress 
 unconstitutional is as abhorrent to the conclusions of 
 my judgment as to the feelings of my heart — but 
 holding the converse of those propositions with a con- 
 viction as firm as an article of religious faith, I too 
 clearly see to admit of denial, that minds of the 
 highest order of intellect, and hearts of the purest 
 integrity of purpose have been brought to different 
 conclusions. If Jefferson and Madison deemed the 
 alien and sedition acts, plain and palpable infractions 
 of the Constitution, Washington and Patrick Henry 
 held them to be good and wholesome laws. These 
 8 
 
60 
 
 opinions were perhaps all formed under excitements 
 and prepossessions which detract from the weight of 
 the highest authority. The alien act was passed un- 
 der feelings of honest indignation at the audacity with 
 which foreign emissaries were practising within the 
 bosom of the country upon the passions of the people 
 against their own Government. The sedition act was 
 intended as a curb upon the publication of malicious 
 and incendiary slander, upon the President or the two 
 Houses of Congress or either of them. But they 
 were restrictive upon the personal liberty of foreign 
 emissaries and upon the political licentiousness of the 
 press. The alien act produced its effect by its mere 
 enactment, in the departure from the country of the 
 most obnoxious foreigners and the power conferred 
 by it upon the President was never exercised. The 
 prosecutions under the sedition act did but aggravate 
 the evil which they were intended to repress. Without 
 believing that either of those laws was an infraction of 
 the Constitution, it may be admitted without dispar- 
 agement to the authority of Washington and Henry, 
 or of the Congress which passed the acts, that they 
 were not good and wholesome laws, inasmuch as they 
 were not suited to the temper of the people. 
 
 Emergencies may arise in which the authority of 
 Congress will be invoked by the portion of the peo- 
 ple most aggrieved by the alien and sedition acts, for 
 arbitrary expulsion of foreign incendiaries, and for the 
 suppression of incendiary publications at home, by 
 measures far more rigorous and more palpably viola- 
 tive of the Constitution than those laws, and if the tem- 
 per of that portion of the people which approved them, 
 shall be, as it has recently been and perhaps still is, 
 attuned to endure the experiment, the Constitutional 
 
61 
 
 authority of Congress will be found amply sufficient 
 for the enactment of statutes far more sharp and 
 biting than they were. The question with regard to 
 the Constitutionality of those laws is however far dif- 
 ferent from that of the manner in which they were 
 resisted. In that originated the doctrine of nullifica- 
 tion. 
 
 In this respect there appears to have been a very 
 material difference between the opinions and purposes 
 of Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison. Concurring in 
 the doctrine that the separate States have the right 
 to interpose, in case of palpable infractions of the Con- 
 stitution by the Government of the United States, 
 and that the alien and sedition acts presented a case 
 of such infraction, Mr. Jefferson considered them as 
 absolutely null and void ; and thought the State 
 Legislatures competent not only to declare but to 
 make them so ; to resist their execution within their 
 respective borders by physical force ; and to secede 
 and separate from the Union, rather than submit to 
 them, if attempted to be carried into execution by 
 force. To these doctrines Mr. MadisOxN did not sub- 
 scribe. He disclaimed them in the most explicit man- 
 ner, at a very late period of his life, and in his last and 
 most matured sentiments with regard to those laws, he 
 considered them rather as unadvised Acts, passed in 
 contravention to the opinions and feelings of the com- 
 munity than as more unconstitutional than many other 
 acts of Congress which have generally accorded with 
 the views of a majority of the States and of the peo- 
 ple. 
 
 Upon the change of the administration by the elec- 
 tion of Mr. Jefferson as President of the United States 
 in 1 801 , a new career was opened to the talents and 
 
62 
 
 wisdom of his friend, who thenceforth became his first 
 assistant and his most confidential adviser in the 
 administration of the Government. 
 
 That administration was destined to pass through 
 ordeals scarcely less severe than those which had test- 
 ed the efficiency of the Constitution of the United 
 States under the Presidency of his predecessors. 
 
 By a singular concurrence of good fortune, Mr. Jef- 
 ferson was immediately after his accession relieved 
 from the pressure of all the important difficulties and 
 menacing dangers which had so heavily weighed upon 
 the administration of both his predecessors. The 
 differences between them both and the United States, 
 which had during the twelve years of those adminis- 
 trations kept the nation without intermission in the 
 most imminent dangers of War, first with Great 
 Britain, and afterwards with France, had all been 
 adjusted by Treaties with both those nations. The 
 revolutionary violence of Republican France had 
 already subsided into a military Government. Still 
 retaining the name of a republic ; but rapidly ripening 
 into a hereditary monarchy. The wars in Europe 
 themselves were about to cease, for a short period in- 
 deed, and soon to blaze out with renewed and aggra- 
 vated fury, but upon questions of mere conquest and 
 aggrandizement between the belligerent powers. In 
 the same year with the inauguration of Mr. Jefferson, 
 the Peace of Amiens, had replaced France at the head 
 of continental Europe, leaving Great Britain in the 
 uncontested if not undisputed dominion of the sea. 
 
 The expenditures for the army and navy, already 
 much reduced by the reduction of the former to a 
 small Peace establishment, admitted of further re- 
 trenchments, and the very questionable policy of 
 
63 
 
 reducing also the latter, allowed a corresponding re- 
 duction of taxation, which gave the new administra- 
 tion the popular attraction of professed retrenchment 
 and reform. For the naval armaments which the 
 sharp collisions with both the belligerent nations had 
 rendered necessary, although they had nobly sustain- 
 ed the glory of valor and skill upon the ocean acquired 
 during the revolutionary Mar, and were destined to 
 deeds of yet more exalted fame in the administration 
 of his successor, had necessarily occasioned heavy 
 expense — had been among the measures most severely 
 censured by Mr. Jefferson, and were among his most 
 favorite objects of reform. Reformed they accor- 
 dinglv were, and dry docks and gunboats, became 
 for a time the cheap defences of the nation. The 
 gallant spirit of tbe navy was itself discountenanced 
 and discouraged, till a Tripolitan Cruiser captured 
 after a desperate battle was not even taken into pos- 
 session, upon a scruple of the victor's instructions 
 whether self-defence could give a right to the fruits 
 of victory, without a declaration of War by Congress. 
 The reduction of the navy, while it lasted, deeply 
 injurious both to the honor and the interest of the 
 nation, gave however to the incipient administration 
 the credit of reduced expenditures, retrenchment and 
 reform : such was its first effect at home. Abroad its 
 first fruit was the contempt of the Barbary powers — 
 insult, outrage and war — a new armament, and new 
 taxation under the denomination of a mediterranean 
 fund, took the place of retrenchment ; and when the 
 smothered flames of war burst forth anew between 
 France and Britain, the impressment of our seamen, 
 Orders in Council, Paper Blockades, Decrees of Ber- 
 lin, of Milan, of Rambouillet, and finally the murder 
 
64 
 
 of our mariners within our own waters, and the wan- 
 ton and savage attack upon the frigate Chesapeake, 
 proved in the degradation of our national reputation, 
 and in the cowering of that undaunted spirit which 
 rides upon the mountain wave, the short sightedness 
 of that policy, which trusted to gunboats and dry 
 docks for the defence of the country upon the world 
 of waters, and which had crippled the naval arm, and 
 tamed the gallant spirit of the Union, for the glory of 
 retrenchment and reform. 
 
 On the other hand the renewal of the European 
 war, and the partialities of Mr. Jefferson in favor 
 of France enabled him to accomplish an object 
 which greatly enlarged the territories of the Union — 
 which removed a most formidable source of future 
 dissensions with France ; which exceedingly strength- 
 ened the relative influence and power of the State 
 and section of the Union, to which he himself belong- 
 ed, and which in its consequences changed the char- 
 acter of the Confederacy itself. This operation, by 
 far the greatest that has been accomplished by any 
 administration under the Constitution, was consum- 
 mated at the price of fifteen millions of dollars in 
 money, and of a direct, unqualified, admitted violation 
 of the Constitution of the United States. According 
 to the theory of Mr. Jefferson, as applied by him to 
 the alien and sedition Acts, it was absolutely null and 
 void. It might have been nullified by the Legislature of 
 any one State in the Union, and if persisted in would 
 have warranted and justified a combination of States, 
 and their secession from the confederacy in resistance 
 against it. 
 
 That an amendment to the Constitution was neces- 
 sary to legalize the annexation of Louisiana to the 
 
65 
 
 Union, was the opinion both of Mr. Jefferson and of 
 Mr. Madison. They finally acquiesced however in 
 the latitudinous construction of that instrument, which 
 holds the treaty making powers together with an act 
 of Congress sufficient for this operation. It was ac- 
 cordingly thus consummated by Mr. Jefferson, and 
 has been sanctioned by the acquiescence of the people. 
 Upwards of thirty years have passed away since this 
 great change was effected. By a subsequent Treaty 
 with Spain by virtue of the same powers and author- 
 ity, the Floridas have been annexed also to the Union, 
 and the boundaries of the United States have been 
 extended from the Mississippi, to the Pacific ocean. 
 There is now nothing in the Constitution of the United 
 States to inhibit their extension to the two polar cir- 
 cles from the Straits of Hudson to the Straits of Ma- 
 gellan. Whether this very capacity of enlargement 
 of territory and multiplication of States by the con- 
 structive power of Congress, without check or control 
 either by the States or by their people, will not finally 
 terminate in the dissolution of the Union itself, time 
 alone can determine. The credit of the acquisition 
 of Louisiana whether to be considered as a source of 
 good or of evil, is perhaps due to Robert R. Living- 
 ston more than to any other man, but the merit of its 
 accomplishment must ever remain as the great and 
 imperishable memorial of the administration of Jeffer- 
 son. 
 
 In the interval between the Peace of Amiens, and 
 the renewal of the wars of France witli the rest of 
 Europe, the grasping spirit and gigantic genius of 
 Napoleon had been revolving projects of personal 
 aggrandizement and of national ambition of which 
 this western hemisphere was to be the scene. He 
 
66 
 
 had extorted from the languishing and nerveless 
 dynasty of the Bourbons in Spain the retrocession of 
 the Province of Louisiana, with a description of boun- 
 dary sufficiently indefinite, to raise questions of limits 
 whenever it might suit his purpose to settle them by 
 the intimation of his will. Here, it had been his pur- 
 pose to establish a military Colony, with the Mexican 
 dominions of Spain on one side, and the United 
 States of America, and the continental colonies of 
 Great Britain on the other, in the centre of the wes- 
 tern Hemisphere, the stand, for a lever to wield at 
 his pleasure the destinies of the world. This plan 
 was discomposed by a petty squabble with Great Bri- 
 tain about the Island of Malta; and a project wilder 
 if possible than his military Colony of Louisiana — 
 namely the Caesarian operation of conquering the Brit- 
 ish Islands themselves by direct invasion. The trans- 
 fer of Louisiana had been stipulated by a secret 
 Treaty ; but possession had not been taken. Mr. 
 Livingston was then the minister of the United States 
 in France. He had been made acquainted with the 
 existence of the Treaty of retrocession of Louisiana, 
 and by a memorial of great ability, had expostulated 
 against it, urging as scarcely less essential to the inter- 
 ests of France than of the United States, that the 
 Province should be ceded to them. This memorial 
 when presented had met with little attention from 
 Napoleon. His military Colony, of twenty thousand 
 men was on the point of embarkation, under the com- 
 mand of one of his Lieutenants, destined himself in 
 after time to wear the crown of Gustavus-Adolphus, 
 when the Iron Crown of Lombardy and the Imperial 
 Crown of France after encircling the brows of Napo- 
 leon should have melted before the leaden sceptre of 
 
67 
 
 the restored Bourbons. Napoleon was to rise to the 
 summit of human greatness, and to fall from it over 
 another precipice, than that to which he was ap- 
 proaching with his military colony of Louisiana. 
 When he determined to renew the war with Eng- 
 land, still mistress of the seas, he could no longer risk 
 the fortunes of his soldiers in a passage across the 
 Atlantic, and unable as he was to cope with the thun- 
 ders of Britain upon the Ocean, he saw that Louisiana 
 itself if he should take possession of the Province 
 must inevitably fall an easy prey to the enemy with 
 whom he was to contend. He therefore abandoned 
 his project of conquests in America, and determined 
 at once to sell his Colony of Louisiana to the United 
 States. 
 
 Never in the fortunes of mankind was there a more 
 sudden, complete and propitious turn in the tide of 
 events than this change in the purposes of Napoleon 
 proved to the administration of Mr. Jefferson. The 
 wrangling altercation with Spain for the navigation of 
 the Mississippi, had been adjusted during the admin- 
 istration of Washington, by a treaty, which had con- 
 ceded to them the right, and stipulated to make its 
 enjoyment effective a right of deposit at New Orleans. 
 In repurchasing from Spain the Colony of Louisiana, 
 Napoleon, to disincumber himself from the burden of 
 this stipulation, and to hold in his hand a rod over the 
 western section of this Union, had compelled the das- 
 tardly and imbecile monarch of Spain to commit an 
 act of perfidy, by withdrawing from the people of the 
 United States, this stipulated right of deposit before 
 delivering the possession of the Colony to France. 
 The great artery of the commerce of the Union was 
 thus choaked in its circulation. The sentiment of 
 9 
 
68 
 
 surprise, of alarm, of indignation, was instantaneous 
 and universal among the people. The hardy and en- 
 terprising settlers of the western country could hardly 
 be restrained from pouring down the swelling floods of 
 their population, to take possession of New Orleans 
 itself, by the immediate exercise of the rights of war. 
 A war with Spain must have been immediately fol- 
 lowed by a war with France ; which, however just 
 the cause of the United States would have been, 
 must necessarily give a direction to public affairs ad- 
 verse to the whole system of Mr. Jefferson's policy, 
 and in all probability prove fatal to the success of his 
 administration. Instigations to immediate war, were 
 at once attempted in Congress, and were strongly 
 countenanced by the excited temper of the people. 
 Mr. Jefferson instituted an extraordinary mission both 
 to France and Spain to remonstrate against the with- 
 drawal of the right of deposit, and to propose anew 
 the purchase of the Island of New Orleans. By one 
 of those coincidences in the course of human events, 
 too rare to be numbered among the ordinary dispen- 
 sations of Providence ; too common to be accountable 
 upon the doctrine of unregulated chance, when Mr. 
 Jefferson's minister arrived at the seat of his first des- 
 tination, his charge and much more than his charge 
 was already performed. Napoleon had resolved to 
 sell to the United States the whole of Louisiana, and 
 Great Britain, under the influence of fears and jeal- 
 ousies of him, even deeper than those with which she 
 pined at every prosperity of her alienated child, had 
 declared her acquiescence in the transfer. The Amer- 
 ican negociators without hesitation transcended their 
 powers, to obtain all Louisiana instead of Florida. 
 Claims of indemnity to the citizens of the United 
 
69 
 
 States, for wrongs suffered from the preceding revo- 
 lutionary Governments of France were provided for 
 by a separate Convention, and paid for with part of 
 the purchase money for the Province, and the whole 
 remnant of the fifteen millions, was in the midst of a 
 raging war, with the know ledge and assent of the 
 British Government, furnished h\ Knglish Bankers to 
 be expended in preparations for the conquest of Eng- 
 land by invasion. 
 
 It will be no detraction from the merits or services 
 of Mr. Jefferson or of his Secretary of State to ac- 
 knowledge that in all this transaction Fortune claims 
 to herself the lion's share. To seize, and turn to 
 profit the precise instant of the turning tide is itself 
 among the eminent properties of a Statesman, and 
 if requiring less elevated virtue than the firmness and 
 prudence that withstand adversity, or the moderation 
 which adorns and dignifies prosperity, it is not less 
 essential to the character of an accomplished ruler of 
 men. 
 
 But Napoleon had transferred the acquisition which 
 he had wrenched from the nerveless hand of Spain 
 with its indefinite and equivocal boundary. He had 
 also violated his faith, pledged to Spain, when he took 
 back the Province, once the Colony of France ; that 
 he would never cede it to the United States. Spain 
 immediately complained, remonstrated, protested 
 against the cession, the just reward of her own per- 
 fidy, in withdrawing the stipulated right of deposit 
 at New Orleans ; and although Napoleon soon silenc- 
 ed her complaints and constrained her to withdraw 
 her protest against the cession, yet on the question of 
 boundary, he had contracted his province of Louisi- 
 ana, almost within the dimensions of the Island of New 
 
70 
 
 Orleans. Negotiations with Spain and France, soon 
 complicated with the sharper collisions of neutral and 
 belligerent rights, and with the war of extermination 
 between France and Britain, called for all the tal- 
 ents and all the energies of the President, and of his 
 friend and Minister in the Department of State. The 
 discussions respecting the boundaries of Louisiana 
 were soon brought to a close. Spain contested the 
 claims of the United States, both east and west of the 
 Mississippi. The United States after an ineffectual 
 attempt to obtain the Floridas from Spain, agreed to 
 leave both the questions of boundary to the decision 
 of France, and Napoleon instantly decided it on both 
 sides of the Mississippi against them. 
 
 In the first wars of the French revolution Great 
 Britain had begun by straining the claim of belliger- 
 ent as against neutral rights, beyond all the theories 
 of international jurisprudence and even beyond her 
 own ordinary practice. There is in all war a conflict 
 between the belligerent and the neutral right, which 
 can in its nature be settled only by convention. 
 And in addition to all the ordinary asperities of dis- 
 sension between the nation at war and the nation at 
 peace, she had asserted a right of man-stealing from 
 the vessels of the United States. The claim of right 
 was to take by force all sea-faring men, her own sub- 
 jects, wherever they were found by her naval officers, 
 to serve their king in his wars. And under color of 
 this tyrant's right, her naval officers, down to the 
 most beardless Midshipman actually took from the 
 American merchant vessels which they visited any 
 seaman whom they chose to take for a British sub- 
 ject. After the Treaty of November 1794, she had 
 relaxed all her pretensions against the neutral rights, 
 
71 
 
 and had gradually abandoned the practice of impress- 
 ment till she was on the point of renouncing it by a 
 formal Treaty stipulation. At the renewal of the 
 war, after the Peace of Amiens, it was at first urged 
 with much respect lor the rights of neutrality, but the 
 practice of impressment was soon renewed with 
 aggravated severity and the commerce of neutral na- 
 tions with the Colonies of the adverse belligerent was 
 wholly interdicted on the pretence of justification 
 because it had been forbidden by the enemy herself 
 in time of peace. This pretension had been first 
 raised by Great Britain in the seven year's war, 
 but she had been overawed by the armed neutrality 
 from maintaining it in the war of the American revo- 
 lution. In the midst of this war with Napoleon she 
 suddenly reasserted the principle and by a secret 
 order in Council, swept the ocean of nearly the whole 
 mass of neutral commerce. Her war with France 
 spread itelf all over Europe, successively involving 
 Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Prussia, Austria, Rus- 
 sia, Denmark and Sweden. Not a single neutral 
 power remained in Europe — and Great Britain, after 
 annihilating at Trafalgar the united naval power of 
 France and Spain, ruling thenceforth with undisputed 
 dominion upon the ocean, conceived the project of 
 engrossing even the commerce with her enemy by 
 intercepting all neutral navigation. These measures 
 were met by corresponding acts of violence, and 
 sophistical principles of National Law promulgated by 
 Napoleon, rising to the summit of his greatness and 
 preparing his downfall by the abuse of his elevation. 
 Through this fiery ordeal the administration of Mr. 
 Jefferson was to pass and the severest of its tests were 
 to be applied to Mr. Madison. His correspondence 
 
72 
 
 with the ministers of Great Britain, France and Spain, 
 and with the ministers of the United States to those 
 nations during the remainder of Mr. Jefferson's admin- 
 istration constitute the most important and most valu- 
 able materials of its history. His examination of the 
 British doctrines relating to neutral trade, will hereaf- 
 ter be considered a standard Treatise on the law of 
 Nations ; not inferior to the works of any writer upon 
 those subjects since the days of Grotius and every 
 way worthy of the author of Publius and of Helvidius. 
 There is indeed in all the diplomatic papers of Ameri- 
 can Statesmen justly celebrated as they have been, 
 nothing superior to this Dissertation, which was not 
 strictly official. It was composed amidst the du- 
 ties of the Department of State, never more arduous 
 than at that time — in the summer of 1 806. It was 
 published inomcially and a copy of it was laid on the 
 table of each member of Congress at the commence- 
 ment of the session in December 1 806. 
 
 The controversies of conflicting neutral and bellig- 
 erent rights continued through the whole of Mr. Jef- 
 ferson's administration, during the latter part of which 
 they were verging rapidly to war. He had carried 
 the policy of peace, perhaps to an extreme. His sys- 
 tem of defence by commercial restrictions, dry docks, 
 gun-boats and embargoes was stretched to its last 
 hair's breadth of endurance. Far be it from me my 
 fellow citizens, to speak of this system or of its mo- 
 tives with disrespect. If there be a duty, binding in 
 chains more adamantine than all the rest the con- 
 science of a Chief Magistrate of this Union, it is that 
 of preserving peace with all mankind — peace with the 
 other nations of the earth — peace among the several 
 States of this Union — peace in the hearts and temper 
 
13 
 
 of our own people. Yet must a President of the 
 United States never cease to feel that his charge is to 
 maintain the rights, the interests and the honor no less 
 than the peace of his countn — nor will he be permit- 
 ted to forget that peace must be the offspring of two 
 concurring wills. That to seek peace is not always 
 to ensue it. He must remember too, that a reliance 
 upon the operation of measures, from their effect on 
 the interests however clear and unequivocal of nations, 
 cannot be safe, against a counter-current of their pas- 
 sions. That nations, like individuals, sacrifice their 
 peace to their pride, to their hatred, to their envy, to 
 their jealousy, and even to the craft, which the cun- 
 ning of hackneyed politicians not (infrequently mis- 
 takes for policy. That nations, like individuals have 
 sometimes the misfortune of losing their senses, and 
 that lunatic communities, which cannot be confined 
 in hospitals, must be resisted in arms, as a single ma- 
 niac is sometimes restored to reason by the scourge. 
 That national madness is infectious, and that a par- 
 oxysm of it in one people, especially when generated 
 by the Furies, that preside over war, produces a coun- 
 ter paroxysm in their adverse party. Such is the 
 melancholy condition as yet of associated man. And 
 while in the wise but mysterious dispensations of an 
 overruling Providence, man shall so continue, the 
 peace of every nation must depend not alone upon its 
 own will, but upon that concurrently with the will 
 of all others. 
 
 And such was the condition of the two mightiest 
 nations of the earth during the administration of Mr. 
 Jefferson. Frantic, in fits of mutual hatred, envy and 
 jealousy against each other ; meditating mutual inva- 
 sion and conquest, and forcing the other nations of 
 
74 
 
 the four quarters of the globe to the alternative of 
 joining them as allies or encountering them as foes. 
 Mr. Jefferson met them with moral philosophy, and 
 commercial restrictions, with dry docks and gun-boats 
 — with non-intercourses and embargoes, till the 
 American nation were told that they could not be 
 kicked into a war, and till they were taunted by a 
 British Statesman in the Imperial Parliament of Eng- 
 land, with their five fir frigates and their striped 
 bunting. 
 
 Mr. Jefferson pursued his policy of peace till it 
 brought the nation to the borders of internal war. An 
 embargo of fourteen months duration was at last reluc- 
 tantly abandoned by him, when it had ceased to be 
 obeyed by the people, and State Courts were ready to 
 pronounce it unconstitutional. A non-intercourse was 
 then substituted in its place and the helm of State 
 passed from the hands of Mr. Jefferson to those of Mr. 
 Madison, precisely at the moment of this perturba- 
 tion of earth and sea, threatened with war from abroad 
 and at home, but with the principle definitively set- 
 tled that in our intercourse with foreign nations, rea- 
 son, justice and commercial restrictions require live 
 oak hearts and iron or brazen mouths to speak, that 
 they may be distinctly heard, or attentively listened 
 to, by the distant ear of foreigners, whether French or 
 British, monarchical or republican. 
 
 The administration of Mr. Madison, was with re- 
 gard to its most essential principles a continuation of 
 that of Mr. Jefferson. He too was the friend of 
 peace, and earnestly desirous of maintaining it. As a 
 last resource for the preservation of it, an act of Con- 
 gress prohibited all commercial intercourse with both 
 belligerents, the prohibition to be withdrawn from 
 
75 
 
 either or both in the event of a repeal by either of the 
 orders and decrees in violation of neutral rights. 
 France ungraciously and equivocally withdrew her's. 
 Britain refused, hesitated and at last conditionally 
 withdrew her's when it was too late — after a formal 
 declaration of war had beeD issued by Congress at 
 the recommendation of President Madison himself. 
 
 Of the necessity, the policy or even the justice of 
 this war, there are conflicting opinions not yet, per- 
 haps never to be harmonized. This is not the time 
 or the place to discuss them. The passions, the prej- 
 udices and the partialities of that day have passed 
 away. That it was emphatically a popular war, hav- 
 ing reference to the whole people of the United 
 States, will, I think, not be denied. That it was in 
 a high degree unpopular in our own section of the 
 Union is no doubt equally true ; and that it was so, 
 constituted the greatest difficulties and prepared the 
 most mortifying disasters in its prosecution. 
 
 The war itself was an ordeal through which the 
 Constitution of the United States, as the Government 
 of a great nation was to pass. Its trial in that res- 
 pect was short but severe. In the intention of its 
 founders and particularly of Mr. Madison, it was a 
 Constitution essentially pacific in its character, and 
 for a nation above all others, the lover of peace — yet 
 its great and most vigorous energies and all its most 
 formidable powers are reserved for the state of war — 
 and war is the condition in which the functions allot- 
 ted to the separate States sink into impotence com- 
 pared with those of the general Government. 
 
 The war was brought to a close without any defini- 
 tive adjustment of the controverted principles in which 
 it had originated. It left the questions of neutral 
 10 
 
76 
 
 commerce with an enemy and his colonies, of bottom 
 and cargo, of blockade and contraband of war and 
 even of impressment, precisely as they had been before 
 the war. With the European war all the conflicts 
 between belligerent and neutral rights had ceased. 
 Great Britain, triumphant as she was after a strug- 
 gle of more than twenty years duration — against rev- 
 olutionary, republican and Imperial France, was in 
 no temper to yield the principles for which in the heat 
 of her contest she had defied the power of Neu- 
 trality and the voice of Justice. As little were the 
 Government or people of the United States disposed 
 to yield principles, upon which, if there had been any 
 error in their previous intercourse with the belligerent 
 powers, it was that of faltering for the preservation 
 of peace, in the defence of the rights of neutrality, and 
 of conceding too much to the lawless pretensions of 
 naval war. 
 
 The extreme solicitude of the American Govern- 
 ment for the perpetuity of peace, especially with 
 Great Britain, induced Mr. Madison to institute with 
 her negotiations after the peace of Ghent, for the ad- 
 justment of all these questions of maritime collisions 
 between the warlike and the pacific nation. The 
 claims of neutral right are all founded upon the pre- 
 cepts of Christianity and the natural rights of man. 
 The warring party's claim is founded upon the imme- 
 morial usages of war, untempercd and unmitigated 
 by the chastening spirit of Christianity. They all 
 rest upon the right of force — or upon what has been 
 termed the ultimate argument of kings. But since 
 the whole Island of Albion has been united under 
 one Government, her foreign wars have necessarily 
 all been upon or beyond the seas. Her consolida- 
 
77 
 
 tion and her freedom have made her the first of mar- 
 itime States, and the first of humane, learned, intelli- 
 gent, but warlike nations of modern days. At home, 
 she is generous, beneficent, tender hearted and above 
 all proud of her liberty and loyalty united as in one. 
 Free as the air upon her mountains, she tyrannizes 
 over one elass of her people and that, the very elass 
 upon which she depends for the support of her free- 
 dom. She proclaims that tin 1 foot, be it of a slave, by 
 alHitimr on her soil emancipates the man ; and as if 
 it were the exclusive right of her soil, the loot of lun- 
 own mariner by passing from it upon the deck ol a 
 ship, slips into the fetters of a slave. There is no 
 writ of Habeas Corpus for a British sailor. The 
 stimulant to his love of his king and country is the 
 Press Gang. 
 
 This glaring inconsistency with the first principles 
 of the British Constitution is justified on the plea of 
 necessity, which being above all law, claims equal 
 exemption from responsibility to the tribunal of rea- 
 son. The efforts of Mr. Madison and of his succes- 
 sors to obtain an amicable adjustment of this great 
 source of hostility between the kindred nations have 
 hitherto proved equally unavailing. One short inter- 
 val has occurred since the peace, during which a war 
 broke out between France and Spain to which Britain 
 was neutral, and the views of her ruling Statesmen 
 were then favorable to the rights of neutrality. Had 
 that war been of longer continuance the prospects of 
 a mitigation of the customs of maritime warfare might 
 have been more propitious ; but we can now only 
 indulge the hope that the glory of extinguishing the 
 flame of war by land and sea is reserved for the future 
 destinies of our confederated land. 
 
78 
 
 The peace with Great Britain was succeeded by a 
 short war with Algiers in which the first example was 
 set of a peace with that piratical Power purchased by 
 chastisement substituted for tribute — and which set 
 the last seal to the policy of maintaining the rights 
 and interests of the United States by a permanent 
 naval force. 
 
 The revolutions in Spain, and in her Colonies of 
 this hemisphere, complicated with questions of dis- 
 puted boundaries, and with claims of indemnity for 
 depredations upon our commerce, formed subjects for 
 important negotiations, during the war with Great 
 Britain, and after its close. Never, since the institu- 
 tion of civil society, have there been within so short 
 a time so many assumptions of sovereign powers. 
 The crown of Spain was abdicated by Charles the 
 Fourth, and then by his son Ferdinand, while a pris- 
 oner to Napoleon, at Bayonne, transferred to the 
 house of Bonaparte, as the kingdom of Naples had 
 been by conquest before. In Germany, the dissolu- 
 tion of the German Empire had generated a kingdom 
 of Westphalia, and converted into kingdoms the elec- 
 torates of Saxony, of Bavaria, of Wirtemberg and of 
 Hanover. The kingdom of Portugal had been over- 
 shadowed by an empire of Brazil, and every petty 
 Province of Spain in this hemisphere down to the 
 Floridas and Amelia Island constituted themselves 
 into sovereign States, unfurled their flags and claimed 
 their seats among the potentates of the earth. Un- 
 der these circumstances, it became often a question of 
 great delicacy, who should be recognized as such, and 
 with whom an exchange of diplomatic functionaries 
 should be made. There was during Mr. Madison's 
 administration a period during which war was waged 
 
79 
 
 in Spain for the restoration of a Prince who had him- 
 self renounced his throne. A regency acting in his 
 name was recognized by Great Britain, under whose 
 auspices he was finally restored. Napoleon had giv- 
 en the crown of Spain, wrested by fraud and violence 
 from the Bourbons, to his brother, who was recog- 
 nized as king of Spain by all the continental powers 
 of Europe, and it was in the conflict between these 
 two usurpers, that the transatlantic Colonies of Spain 
 in this hemisphere, disclaiming allegiance to either of 
 the contending parties, asserted their own rights as 
 independent communities. Mr. Madison, believed 
 it to be the duty and the policy of the United States, 
 while the fact remained to be decided by the issue of 
 war, to withhold the acknowledgment of sovereign 
 power alike from them all. The reception of a min- 
 ister appointed by the regency of Spain was therefore 
 delayed, until he was commissioned by Ferdinand 
 himself after his restoration, and the total expulsion 
 of his rival Joseph Buonaparte. But most of the 
 American Colonies of Spain, released from their bonds 
 of subjection to a European king, by the first de- 
 thronement and abdication of Charles the Fourth, 
 refused ever after all submission to the monarchs of 
 Spain, and those on the American Continents which 
 submitted for a time shortly after declared and have 
 maintained their Independence, yet however unac- 
 knowledged by Spain. No general union of the sev- 
 eral Colonies of Spain, analogous to that of the Brit- 
 ish Colonies in these United States, has been or is 
 ever likely to be established. The several Vice Roy- 
 alties have in their dissolution, melted into masses of 
 confederated or consolidated Governments. They 
 have been ravaged by incessant internal dissensions 
 
80 
 
 and civil war. As they attempt to unite in one, or as 
 they separate into parts, new States present them- 
 selves, claiming the prerogatives of sovereignty, and 
 the powers of Independent nations. The European 
 kingdoms of France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands 
 and Greece, have been in the same convulsionary 
 state, with contending claims of sovereign power, so 
 that the question of recognition, in almost numberless 
 cases, and under a multitude of forms, has been before 
 the Government of the United States for decision. 
 
 The act of recognition, being an execution of the 
 laws of nations, is an attribute of executive power, and 
 has therefore been invariably performed under the 
 present Constitution of the United States by their 
 President. Mr. Madison withheld this recognition 
 from the minister of the Spanish Regency, but yield- 
 ed it to the same person, when commissioned by Fer- 
 dinand. Pie left to his successors the obligation, of 
 withholding and of conceding the acknowledgment, 
 as the duties of this nation might from time to time 
 forbid or enjoin ; and a question of the deepest inter- 
 est, under circumstances pregnant with unparalleled 
 consequences, is while I speak under the consideration 
 and subject to the decision of the President of the 
 United States. 
 
 The severest trials of our country induced by the 
 war with Great Britain were endured by the disorder 
 of the national finances. The revenues of the Union 
 until then had consisted almost exclusively in the pro- 
 ceeds of taxation by impost on imported merchandize. 
 Excises, land taxes and taxes upon stamps were 
 resorted to during the war, but were always found 
 more burdensome and less acceptable to the people. 
 It is however a disadvantage, perhaps counterbalan- 
 
81 
 
 ced by consequences more permanently beneficial in 
 our political system, that the revenue from impost, 
 more easily collected and more productive than any 
 other in time of peace, must necessarily fail, almost 
 entirely, in war with a nation of superior maritime 
 force. Our admirable system of settlement and dis- 
 posal of the public lands had beeu long established 
 but was at that time and for many years since little 
 known by its fruits. It is doubtful whether until the 
 last year the proceeds of the sales have been sufficient 
 to defray the cost of the purchase and the expenses 
 of management. The prices at which they are sold 
 have been reduced, while the wages of labor have 
 risen, till the purchaser for settlement receives them 
 upon terms nearly gratuitous. They are now an ines- 
 timable source of a copious revenue, and if honestly 
 and carefully managed for the people to whom they 
 belong, may hereafter alleviate the burden of taxation 
 in all its forms. But when the war with Great Brit- 
 ain was declared in 1812, the population of this Union 
 was less than one half its numbers at the present day. 
 It increases now at the average rate of half a million 
 of souls every year. For this state of unexampled 
 prosperity a tribute of gratitude and applause is due 
 to the administration of Madison, for the wise and 
 conciliatory policy upon which it was conducted from 
 the close of the war, until the end of his second Pres- 
 idential term in March 1817, when he voluntarily 
 retired from public life. 
 
 From that day, for a period advancing upon its 
 twentieth year, he lived in a happy retirement ; in 
 the bosom of a family and with a partner for life alike 
 adapted to the repose and comfort of domestic pri- 
 vacy, as she had been to adorn and dignify the high- 
 
82 
 
 est of public stations. Between the occupations of 
 agriculture, the amusements of literature and the 
 exercise of beneficence, the cultivation of the soil, of 
 the mind and of the heart, the leisure of his latter 
 days was divided. In 1829 a Convention was held 
 in Virginia for the revisal of the Constitution of the 
 Commonwealth, in which transaction the people of 
 the State again enjoyed the benefit of his long expe- 
 rience and his calm and conciliatory counsels. The 
 unanimous sense of that body would have deferred to 
 him the honor of presiding over their deliberations, 
 but the infirmities of age had already so far encroach- 
 ed upon the vigor of his constitution, that he declined 
 in the most delicate manner the nomination by pro- 
 posing himself the election of his friend and succes- 
 sor to the Chief Magistracy of the Union, James Mon- 
 roe. He was accordingly chosen without any other 
 nomination, but was afterwards himself so severely 
 indisposed that he was compelled to resign both the 
 Presidency and his seat in the Convention before they 
 had concluded their labors. 
 
 On one occasion of deep interest to the people of 
 the State, on the question of the ratio of representa- 
 tion in the two branches of the Legislature, Mr. Mad- 
 ison took an active part and made a speech the sub- 
 stance of which has been preserved. 
 
 " Such in those moments as in all the past," 
 
 This speech is so perfectly characteristic of the man 
 that it might itself be considered as an epitome of his 
 life. Though delivered upon a question, which in a 
 discussion upon a Constitution of this Commonwealth 
 could not even be raised, it was upon a subject which 
 probed to the deepest foundations the institution of 
 
83 
 
 civil society. It was upon the condition of the color- 
 ed population of the Commonwealth and upon their 
 relations as persons and as property to the State. 
 Every part of the speech is fill! of the spirit which 
 animated him through life. Nor can I resist the 
 temptation to repeat a few short passages from it, 
 which may serve as samples of the whole. 
 
 " It is sufficiently obvious said Mr. Madison, that 
 persons and property are the two great objects on 
 which Governments are to act ; that the rights of 
 persons and the rights of property are the objects for 
 the protection of which Government was instituted. 
 These rights cannot well be separated. The person- 
 al right to acquire property which is a natural right, 
 gives to property when acquired, a right to protection, 
 as a social right." 
 
 "his due to justice ; due to humanity; due to 
 truth ; to the sympathies of our nature in fine, to our 
 character as a people, both abroad and at home ; that 
 the colored part of our population should be consider- 
 ed, as much as possible, in the light of human beings, 
 and not as mere property. As such, they are acted 
 upon by our laws, and have an interest in our laws." 
 " In framing a Constitution, great difficulties are 
 necessarily to be overcome ; and nothing can ever 
 overcome them but a spirit of compromise. Other 
 nations are surprised at nothing so much as our hav- 
 ing been able to form constitutions in the manner 
 which has been exemplified in this country. Even 
 the union of so many States, is, in the eyes of the 
 world, a wonder ; the harmonious establishment ot a 
 common Government over them all, a miracle. I can- 
 not but flatter myself that without a miracle, we shall 
 be able to arrange all difficulties. I never have des- 
 11 
 
84 
 
 paired, notwithstanding all the threatening appearan- 
 ces we have passed through. I have now more than 
 a hope — a consoling confidence — that we shall at 
 last find that our labors have not been in vain." 
 
 Mr. Madison was associated with his friend Jeffer- 
 son in the institution of the University of Virginia, 
 and after his decease was placed at its head under 
 the modest and unassuming title of Rector. He was 
 also the President of an Agricultural Society in the 
 county of his residence, and in that capacity delivered 
 an address which the practical farmer and the classical 
 scholar may read with equal profit and delight. 
 
 In the midst of these occupations the declining days 
 of the Philosopher, the Statesman and the Patriot 
 were past, until the 21st day of June last, the anni- 
 versary of tin; day on which the ratification of the 
 Convention of Virginia in 1788 had affixed the seal 
 of James Madison as the father of the Constitution 
 of the United States, when his earthly part sunk 
 without a struggle into the grave, and a spirit bright 
 as the seraphim that surround the throne of omnipo- 
 tence, ascended to the bosom of his God. 
 
 This Constitution, my countrymen, is the great 
 result of the North American revolution. This is the 
 giant stride in the improvement of the condition of 
 the human race, consummated in a period of less than 
 one hundred years. Of the signers of the address to 
 George the Third in the Congress of 1774 — of the 
 signers of the Declaration of Independence in 177G — 
 of the signers of the Articles of Confederation in 
 1781, and of the signers of the federal and national 
 Constitution of Government under which we live, 
 with enjoyments never before allotted to man, not 
 one remains in the land of the living. The last survi- 
 
85 
 
 ver of them all was he to honor w hose memorj \\ e are 
 hero assembled at oner with mourning and with joy. 
 We reverse the order of sentiment and reflection of 
 
 the ancient Persian king — w e look back on the centu- 
 ry gone by — we look around with anxious and eager 
 eye for one of that illustrious host of Patriots and he- 
 roes under whose guidance the revolution of Amer- 
 ican Independence was begun and continued and 
 completed. We look around in vain. To them this 
 crowded theatre, full of human life, in all its stages of 
 existence, full of the glowing exultation of youth, of 
 the steady maturity of manhood, the sparkling eyes 
 of beaut) and the grey hairs of reverend age — all this 
 to them is as the solitude of the sepulchre. We think 
 of this and say, how short is human life ! But then, 
 then, we turn back our thoughts again, to the scene 
 over which the falling curtain has but now closed 
 upon the drama of the day. From the saddening 
 thought that they are no more, we call for comfort 
 upon the memory of what they were, and our hearts 
 leap for joy, that they were our lathers. We see 
 them, true and faithful subjects of their sovereign, 
 first meeting with firm but respectful remonstrance 
 the approach of usurpation upon their rights. We 
 see them, fearless in their fortitude, and confident in 
 the righteousness of their cause, bid defiance to the 
 arm of power, and declare themselves Independent 
 States. We see them, waging for seven years a war of 
 desolation and of glory, in most unequal contest with 
 their own unnatural stepmother, the mistress of the 
 seas, till under the sign manual of their king their 
 Independence was acknowledged — and last and best 
 of all, we see them, toiling in war and in peace to 
 form and perpetuate an union, under forms of Gov- 
 
86 
 
 eminent intricately but skilfully adjusted so as to 
 secure to themselves and their posterity the priceless 
 blessings of inseparable Liberty and Law. 
 
 Their days on earth are ended, and yet their cen- 
 tury has not passed away. Their portion of the bles- 
 sings which they thus labored to secure, they have 
 enjoyed — and transmitted to us their posterity. We 
 enjoy them as an inheritance — won, not by our toils — 
 watered, not with our tears — saddened, not by the 
 shedding of any blood of ours. The gift of heaven 
 through their sufferings and their achievements — but 
 not without a charge of correspondent duty incum- 
 bent upon ourselves. 
 
 And what, my friends and fellow citizens, what is 
 that duty of our own ? Is it to remonstrate to the 
 adders's ear of a king beyond the Atlantic wave, and 
 claim from him the restoration of violated rights ? 
 No. Is it to sever the ties of kindred and of blood, 
 with the people from whom we sprang : To cast 
 away the precious name of Britons and be no more the 
 countrymen of Shakspeare and Milton, of Newton and 
 Locke — of Chatham and Burke ? Or more and worse, 
 is it to meet their countrymen in the deadly conflict 
 of a seven year's war ? No. Is it the last and great- 
 est of the duties fulfilled by them ? Is it to lay the 
 foundations of the fairest Government and the migh- 
 tiest nation that ever floated on the tide of time ? 
 No ! These awful and solemn duties were allotted to 
 them; and by them they were faithfully performed. 
 What then is our duty ? 
 
 Is it not to preserve, to cherish, to improve the in- 
 heritance which they have left us — won by their toils 
 — watered by their tears — saddened but fertilized by 
 their blood ? Are we the sons of worthy sires, and 
 
87 
 
 in the onward march of time have they achieved in 
 the career of human improvement so much, only that 
 our posterity and theirs may blush for the contrast 
 between their unexampled energies and our nerve- 
 less impotence ? between their more than Herculean 
 labors and our indolent repose ? No, my fellow citi- 
 zens — far be from us ; far be from you, for he who 
 now addresses you has but a few short days before he 
 shall be called to join the multitudes of ages past — far 
 be from you the reproach or the suspicion of such a 
 degrading contrast. You too have the solemn duty to 
 perform, of improving the condition of your species, by 
 improving your own. Not in the great and strong 
 wind of a revolution, which rent the mountains and 
 brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord — for the 
 Lord is not in the wind — not in the earthquake of a 
 revolutionary war, marching to the onset between the 
 battle field and the scaffold — for the Lord is not in the 
 earthquake — Not in the fire of civil dissension — In 
 war between the members and the head — In nullifi- 
 cation of the laws of the Union by the forcible resist- 
 ance of one refractory State — for the Lord is not in 
 the fire ; and that fire was never kindled by your 
 fathers ! No ! it is in the still small voice that suc- 
 ceeded the whirlwind, the earthquake and the fire. 
 The voice that stills the raging of the waves and the 
 tumults of the people — that spoke the words of 
 peace — of harmony — of union. And for that voice, 
 may you and your children's children " to the last 
 syllable of recorded time," fix your eyes upon the 
 memory, and listen with your ears to the life of 
 James Madison. 
 
ORDER OF PERFORMANCES 
 
 TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27th, 1836, 
 
 OCCASIONED BT THE DECEASE OF 
 
 FORMERLY 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 INVOLUNTARY ON THE ORGAN— By G. J. Webb. 
 
 II.. .PRAYER— By Rev. Dr. Lowell. 
 
 III. ..ODE— By the Choir of the Boston Academy of Music. 
 Poetry by Park Benjamin. Music by G. J. Webb. 
 
 How shall we mourn the glorious dead ? 
 
 What trophy rear above his grave, 
 For whom a nation's tears are shed — 
 
 A nation's funeral banners wave ! 
 
 Let Eloquence his deeds proclaim, 
 
 From sea-beat strand to mountain goal ; 
 
 Let Hist'ry write his peaceful name, 
 High on her truth-illumined scroll. 
 
 Let Poetry and Art through Earth 
 
 The page inspire, the canvass warm — 
 
 In glowing words record his worth, 
 In living marble mould his form. 
 
 A fame so bright will never fade, 
 A name so dear will deathless be ; 
 
90 
 
 For on our country's shrine he laid 
 The charter of her liberty. 
 
 Praise be to God ! His love bestowed 
 The chief, the patriot, and the sage ; 
 
 Praise God ! to Him our fathers owed 
 This fair and goodly heritage. 
 
 The sacred gift, time shall not mar, 
 But Wisdom guard what Valor won— 
 
 While beams serene her guiding star, 
 And Glory points to Madison ! 
 
 15ulofli>«13fi tlje Jfyon* Jolju (kuuug 8trams, 
 
 V.. .HYMN. 
 
 O God, our help in ages past, 
 Our hope for years to come ; 
 
 Our shelter from the stormy blast, 
 And our eternal home ; — 
 
 Beneath the shadow of Thy throne, 
 
 Our land abides secure ; 
 Sufficient is Thine arm alone, 
 
 And our defence is sure. 
 
 Thy word commands our flesh to dust, 
 
 Return ye sons of men ; 
 All nations rose from earth at first, 
 
 And turned to earth again. 
 
 O God, our help in ages past, 
 Our hope for years to come, 
 
 Be Thou our guard while troubles last, 
 And our eternal home. 
 
 VI...BENEDICTIOJV. 
 

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