Delivered at New York, April 30, 1839, before the New York Historical Society.
Fellow-Citizens and Brethren, Associates of the New York
Historical Society:
Would it be an unlicensed trespass of the imagination to
conceive that on the night preceding the day of which you now
commemorate the fiftieth anniversary--on the night preceding
that thirtieth of April, 1789, when from the balcony of your city
hall the chancellor of the State of New York administered to
George Washington the solemn oath faithfully to execute the
office of President of the United States, and to the best of his
ability to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the
United States--that in the visions of the night the guardian
angel of the Father of our Country had appeared before him, in
the venerated form of his mother, and, to cheer and encourage
him in the performance of the momentous and solemn duties
that he was about to assume, had delivered to him a suit of
celestial armor--a helmet, consisting of the principles of piety,
of justice, of honor, of benevolence, with which from his
earliest infancy he had hitherto walked through life, in the
presence of all his brethren; a spear, studded with the self-
evident truths of the Declaration of Independence; a sword, the
same with which he had led the armies of his country through
the war of freedom to the summit of the triumphal arch of
independence; a corselet and cuishes of long experience and
habitual intercourse in peace and war with the world of
mankind, his contemporaries of the human race, in all their
stages of civilization; and, last of all, the Constitution of the
United States, a shield, embossed by heavenly hands with the
future history of his country?
Yes, gentlemen, on that shield the Constitution of the United
States was sculptured (by forms unseen, and in characters then
invisible to mortal eye), the predestined and prophetic history
of the one confederated people of the North American Union.
They had been the settlers of thirteen separate and distinct
English colonies, along the margin of the shore of the North
American Continent; contiguously situated, but chartered by
adventurers of characters variously diversified, including
sectarians, religious and political, of all the classes which for
the two preceding centuries had agitated and divided the people
of the British islands--and with them were intermingled the
descendants of Hollanders, Swedes, Germans, and French
fugitives from the persecution of the revoker of the Edict of
Nantes.
In the bosoms of this people, thus heterogeneously composed,
there was burning, kindled at different furnaces, but all
furnaces of affliction, one clear, steady flame of liberty. Bold
and daring enterprise, stubborn endurance of privation,
unflinching intrepidity in facing danger, and inflexible
adherence to conscientious principle, had steeled to energetic
and unyielding hardihood the characters of the primitive
settlers of all these colonies. Since that time two or three
generations of men had passed away, but they had increased
and multiplied with unexampled rapidity; and the land itself
had been the recent theatre of a ferocious and bloody seven
years' war between the two most powerful and most civilized
nations of Europe contending for the possession of this
continent.
Of that strife the victorious combatant had been Britain. She
had conquered the provinces of France. She had expelled her
rival totally from the continent, over which, bounding herself
by the Mississippi, she was thenceforth to hold divided empire
only with Spain. She had acquired undisputed control over the
Indian tribes still tenanting the forests unexplored by the
European man. She had established an uncontested monopoly
of the commerce of all her colonies. But forgetting all the
warnings of preceding ages--forgetting the lessons written in
the blood of her own children, through centuries of departed
time--she undertook to tax the people of the colonies without
their consent.
Resistance, instantaneous, unconcerted, sympathetic,
inflexible resistance, like an electric shock, startled and roused
the people of all the English colonies on this continent.
This was the first signal of the North American Union. The
struggle was for chartered rights--for English liberties--for the
cause of Algernon Sidney and John Hampden--for trial by jury-
-the Habeas Corpus and Magna Charta.
But the English lawyers had decided that Parliament was
omnipotent--and Parliament, in its omnipotence, instead of trial
by jury and the Habeas Corpus, enacted admiralty courts in
England to try Americans for offences charged against them as
committed in America; instead of the privileges of Magna
Charta, nullified the charter itself of Massachusetts Bay; shut
up the port of Boston; sent armies and navies to keep the peace
and teach the colonies that John Hampden was a rebel and
Algernon Sidney a traitor.
English liberties had failed them. From the omnipotence of
Parliament the colonists appealed to the rights of man and the
omnipotence of the God of battles. Union! Union! was the
instinctive and simultaneous cry throughout the land. Their
Congress, assembled at Philadelphia, once--twice--had
petitioned the king; had remonstrated to Parliament; had
addressed the people of Britain, for the rights of Englishmen--
in vain. Fleets and armies, the blood of Lexington, and the
fires of Charlestown and Falmouth, had been the answer to
petition, remonstrance, and address....
The dissolution of allegiance to the British crown, the
severance of the colonies from the British Empire, and their
actual existence as independent States, were definitively
established in fact, by war and peace. The independence of
each separate State had never been declared of right. It never
existed in fact. Upon the principles of the Declaration of
Independence, the dissolution of the ties of allegiance, the
assumption of sovereign power, and the institution of civil
government, are all acts of transcendent authority, which the
people alone are competent to perform; and, accordingly, it is in
the name and by the authority of the people, that two of these
acts--the dissolution of allegiance, with the severance from the
British Empire, and the declaration of the United Colonies, as
free and independent States--were performed by that
instrument.
But there still remained the last and crowning act, which the
people of the Union alone were competent to perform--the
institution of civil government, for that compound nation, the
United States of America.
At this day it cannot but strike us as extraordinary, that it
does not appear to have occurred to any one member of that
assembly, which had laid down in terms so clear, so explicit, so
unequivocal, the foundation of all just government, in the
imprescriptible rights of man, and the transcendent sovereignty
of the people, and who in those principles had set forth their
only personal vindication from the charges of rebellion against
their king, and of treason to their country, that their last
crowning act was still to be performed upon the same
principles. That is, the institution, by the people of the United
States, of a civil government, to guard and protect and defend
them all. On the contrary, that same assembly which issued
the Declaration of Independence, instead of continuing to act in
the name and by the authority of the good people of the United
States, had, immediately after the appointment of the
committee to prepare the Declaration, appointed another
committee, of one member from each colony, to prepare and
digest the form of confederation to be entered into between the
colonies.
That committee reported on the twelfth of July, eight days
after the Declaration of Independence had been issued, a draft
of articles of confederation between the colonies. This draft
was prepared by John Dickinson, then a delegate from
Pennsylvania, who voted against the Declaration of
Independence, and never signed it, having been superseded by
a new election of delegates from that State, eight days after his
draft was reported.
There was thus no congeniality of principle between the
Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation.
The foundation of the former was a superintending Providence-
-the rights of man, and the constituent revolutionary power of
the people. That of the latter was the sovereignty of organized
power, and the independence of the separate or dis-united
States. The fabric of the Declaration and that of the
Confederation were each consistent with its own foundation,
but they could not form one consistent, symmetrical edifice.
They were the productions of different minds and of adverse
passions; one, ascending for the foundation of human
government to the laws of nature and of God, written upon the
heart of man; the other, resting upon the basis of human
institutions, and prescriptive law, and colonial charter. The
cornerstone of the one was right, that of the other was power....
Where, then, did each State get the sovereignty, freedom, and
independence, which the Articles of Confederation declare it
retains?--not from the whole people of the whole Union--not
from the Declaration of Independence--not from the people of
the State itself. It was assumed by agreement between the
Legislatures of the several States, and their delegates in
Congress, without authority from or consultation of the people
at all.
In the Declaration of Independence, the enacting and
constituent party dispensing and delegating sovereign power is
the whole people of the United Colonies. The recipient party,
invested with power, is the United Colonies, declared United
States.
In the Articles of Confederation, this order of agency is
inverted. Each State is the constituent and enacting party, and
the United States in Congress assembled the recipient of
delegated power--and that power delegated with such a
penurious and carking hand that it had more the aspect of a
revocation of the Declaration of Independence than an
instrument to carry it into effect.
None of these indispensably necessary powers were ever
conferred by the State Legislatures upon the Congress of the
federation; and well was it that they never were. The system
itself was radically defective. Its incurable disease was an
apostasy from the principles of the Declaration of
Independence. A substitution of separate State sovereignties,
in the place of the constituent sovereignty of the people, was
the basis of the Confederate Union.
In the Congress of the Confederation, the master minds of
James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were constantly
engaged through the closing years of the Revolutionary War
and those of peace which immediately succeeded. That of John
Jay was associated with them shortly after the peace, in the
capacity of Secretary to the Congress for Foreign Affairs. The
incompetency of the Articles of Confederation for the
management of the affairs of the Union at home and abroad
was demonstrated to them by the painful and mortifying
experience of every day. Washington, though in retirement,
was brooding over the cruel injustice suffered by his associates
in arms, the warriors of the Revolution; over the prostration of
the public credit and the faith of the nation, in the neglect to
provide for the payments even of the interest upon the public
debt; over the disappointed hopes of the friends of freedom; in
the language of the address from Congress to the States of the
eighteenth of April, 1788--"the pride and boast of America, that
the rights for which she contended were the rights of human
nature."
At his residence at Mount Vernon, in March, 1785, the first
idea was started of a revisal of the Articles of Confederation, by
the organization, of means differing from that of a compact
between the State Legislatures and their own delegates in
Congress. A convention of delegates from the State
Legislatures, independent of the Congress itself, was the
expedient which presented itself for effecting the purpose, and
an augmentation of the powers of Congress for the regulation
of commerce, as the object for which this assembly was to be
convened. In January, 1785, the proposal was made and
adopted in the Legislature of Virginia, and communicated to
the other State Legislatures.
The Convention was held at Annapolis, in September of that
year. It was attended by delegates from only five of the central
States, who, on comparing their restricted powers with the
glaring and universally acknowledged defects of the
Confederation, reported only a recommendation for the
assemblage of another convention of delegates to meet at
Philadelphia, in May, 1787, from all the States, and with
enlarged powers.
The Constitution of the United States was the work of this
Convention. But in its construction the Convention
immediately perceived that they must retrace their steps, and
fall back from a league of friendship between sovereign States
to the constituent sovereignty of the people; from power to
right--from the irresponsible despotism of State sovereignty to
the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. In
that instrument, the right to institute and to alter governments
among men was ascribed exclusively to the people--the ends of
government were declared to be to secure the natural rights of
man; and that when the government degenerates from the
promotion to the destruction of that end, the right and the duty
accrues to the people to dissolve this degenerate government
and to institute another. The signers of the Declaration further
averred, that the one people of the United Colonies were then
precisely in that situation--with a government degenerated into
tyranny, and called upon by the laws of nature and of nature's
God to dissolve that government and to institute another. Then,
in the name and by the authority of the good people of the
colonies, they pronounced the dissolution of their allegiance to
the king, and their eternal separation from the nation of Great
Britain--and declared the United Colonies independent States.
And here as the representatives of the one people they had
stopped. They did not require the confirmation of this act, for
the power to make the declaration had already been conferred
upon them by the people, delegating the power, indeed,
separately in the separate colonies, not by colonial authority,
but by the spontaneous revolutionary movement of the people
in them all.
From the day of that Declaration, the constituent power of the
people had never been called into action. A confederacy had
been substituted in the place of a government, and State
sovereignty had usurped the constituent sovereignty of the
people.
The Convention assembled at Philadelphia had themselves
no direct authority from the people. Their authority was all
derived from the State Legislatures. But they had the Articles
of Confederation before them, and they saw and felt the
wretched condition into which they had brought the whole
people, and that the Union itself was in the agonies of death.
They soon perceived that the indispensably needed powers
were such as no State government, no combination of them,
was by the principles of the Declaration of Independence
competent to bestow. They could emanate only from the
people. A highly respectable portion of the assembly, still
clinging to the confederacy of States, proposed, as a substitute
for the Constitution, a mere revival of the Articles of
Confederation, with a grant of additional powers to the
Congress. Their plan was respectfully and thoroughly
discussed, but the want of a government and of the sanction of
the people to the delegation of powers happily prevailed. A
constitution for the people, and the distribution of legislative,
executive, and judicial powers was prepared. It announced
itself as the work of the people themselves; and as this was
unquestionably a power assumed by the Convention, not
delegated to them by the people, they religiously confined it to
a simple power to propose, and carefully provided that it should
be no more than a proposal until sanctioned by the
Confederation Congress, by the State Legislatures, and by the
people of the several States, in conventions specially
assembled, by authority of their Legislatures, for the single
purpose of examining and passing upon it.
And thus was consummated the work commenced by the
Declaration of Independence--a work in which the people of the
North American Union, acting under the deepest sense of
responsibility to the Supreme Ruler of the universe, had
achieved the most transcendent act of power that social man in
his mortal condition can perform--even that of dissolving the
ties of allegiance by which he is bound to his country; of
renouncing that country itself; of demolishing its government;
of instituting another government; and of making for himself
another country in its stead.
And on that day, of which you now commemorate the fiftieth
anniversary--on that thirtieth day of April, 1789--was this
mighty revolution, not only in the affairs of our own country,
but in the principles of government over civilized man,
accomplished.
The Revolution itself was a work of thirteen years--and had
never been completed until that day. The Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution of the United States are
parts of one consistent whole, founded upon one and the same
theory of government, then new in practice, though not as a
theory, for it had been working itself into the mind of man for
many ages, and had been especially expounded in the writings
of Locke, though it had never before been adopted by a great
nation in practice.
There are yet, even at this day, many speculative objections to
this theory. Even in our own country there are still
philosophers who deny the principles asserted in the
Declaration, as self-evident truths--who deny the natural
equality and inalienable rights of man--who deny that the
people are the only legitimate source of power--who deny that
all just powers of government are derived from the consent of
the governed. Neither your time, nor perhaps the cheerful
nature of this occasion, permit me here to enter upon the
examination of this anti-revolutionary theory, which arrays
State sovereignty against the constituent sovereignty of the
people, and distorts the Constitution of the United States into a
league of friendship between confederate corporations. I speak
to matters of fact. There is the Declaration of Independence,
and there is the Constitution of the United States--let them
speak for themselves. The grossly immoral and dishonest
doctrine of despotic State sovereignty, the exclusive judge of its
own obligations, and responsible to no power on earth or in
heaven, for the violation of them, is not there. The Declaration
says, it is not in me. The Constitution says, it is not in me.