CHAPTER XV. THE CONSTITUTIONS OF THE SEVERAL STATES OF 1776-1783. HAD the decision of the war hung on armies alone, America might not have gained the victory; but the con1776. test involved the introduction into political life of ideas which had long been hovering in the atmosphere of humanity, and which the civilized world assisted to call into action. The spirit of the age moved the young nation to own justice as older and higher than the state, and to found the rights of the citizen on the rights of man. And yet, in regenerating its institutions, it was not guided by any speculative theory or metaphysical distinctions. Its form of government grew naturally out of its traditions by the simple rejection of all personal hereditary authority, which in America had never had much more than a representative existence. Its people were industrious and frugal; accustomed to the cry of liberty and property, they harbored no dream of a community of goods; and their love of equality never degenerated into envy of the rich. No successors of the fifth-monarchy men proposed to substitute an unwritten higher law, interpreted by individual conscience, for the law of the land and the decrees of human tribunals. The people proceeded with self-possession and moderation, after the manner of their ancestors. Their large inheritance of English liberties saved them from the necessity and from the wish to uproot their old political institutions; and, as happily the scaffold was not wet with the blood of their statesmen, there arose no desperate hatred of England, such as the Netherlands kept up for centuries against Spain. The wrongs inflicted or attempted by the British king were felt to have been avenged by independence; respect and affection remained behind for the parent land, from which the United States had derived trial by jury, the writ for personal liberty, the practice of representative government, and the separation of the three great co-ordinate powers in the state. From an essentially aristocratic model America took just what suited her condition, and rejected the rest. Thus the transition of the colonies into self-existent commonwealths was free from vindictive bitterness, and attended by no violent or wide departure from the past. In all the states it was held that sovereignty resides in the people; that the majesty of supreme command belongs of right to its collective intelligence; that government is to be originated by its impulse, organized by its consent, and conducted by its imbodied will; that it alone possesses the living energy out of which all powers flow 1776. forth, and to which they all return; that it is the sole legitimate master to name, directly or indirectly, every one of the officers in the state, and bind them as its servants to toil only for its good. The American people went to their great work of building up the home of humanity without misgiving. They were confident that the judgment of the sum of the individual members of the community was the safest criterion of truth in public affairs. They harbored no fear that the voice even of a wayward majority would be more capricious or more fallible than the good pleasure of an hereditary monarch; and, unappalled by the skepticism of European kings, they proceeded to extend self-government over regions which, in all previous ages, had been esteemed too vast for republican rule. They were conscious of long and varied experience in representative forms; and of all the nations on earth they were foremost in the principles and exercise of popular power. The giant forms of monarchies on their way to ruin cast over the world their fearful shadows; it was time to construct states in the light of truth and freedom, on the basis of inherent, inalienable right. England was "a land of liberty;" this is her glory among the nations. It is because she nurtured her colonies in freedom, that, even in the midst of civil war, they cherished her name with affection; it is because her example proved that the imperishable principles of mental and civil freedom can form the life of government that she has endeared herself for ever to the human race. Of the American statesmen who assisted to frame the new government, not one had been originally a republican. They had been as it were seized by the godlike spirit of freedom, and compelled to advance its banner. But, if the necessity of constructing purely popular institutions came upon them unexpectedly, the ages had prepared for them their plans and the materials with which they were to build. The recommendations to form governments proceeded from the general congress; the work was done by the sev eral states, in the full enjoyment of self-direction. South Carolina and Massachusetts each claimed to be of right a free, sovereign, and independent state; each bound its officers by oath to bear to it true allegiance, and to maintain its freedom and independence. Massachusetts, which was the first state to conduct a government independent of the king, following the resolution of congress, deviated as little as possible from the letter of its charter; and, assuming that the place of governor was vacant from the nineteenth of July, 1775, it recognised the council as the legal successor to executive power. On the first day of May, 1776, in all commissions and legal pro 1777. cesses, it substituted the name of its "government and people" for that of the king. In June, 1777, its legislature thought itself warranted by instructions to prepare a constitution; but, on a reference to the people, the act was disavowed. In September, 1779, a convention which the people had authorized framed a constitution. It was in a good measure the compilation of John Adams, who was guided by the English constitu 1779. tion, by the bill of rights of Virginia, and by the experience of Massachusetts herself; and this constitution, having been approved by the people, went into effect in 1780. 1780. 1776. On the fifth of January, 1776, New Hampshire formed a government with the fewest possible changes from its colonial forms, like Massachusetts merging the executive power in the council. Not till June, 1783, did its convention form a more perfect instrument, which was approved by the people, and established on the thirty-first of the following October. The provisional constitution of South Carolina dates from the twenty-sixth of March, 1776. In March, 1778, a permanent constitution was introduced by a simple act of the legislature, without any consultation of the people. 1783. 1776. 1778. 1776, Rhode Island enjoyed under its charter a form of government so thoroughly republican that independence of monarchy in May, 1776, required no change beyond a renunciation of the king's name in the style of its public acts. A disfranchisement of Catholics had stolen into its book of laws; but, so soon as it was noticed, the clause was expunged. In like manner, Connecticut had only to substitute the people of the colony for the name of the king; this was done provisionally on the fourteenth of June, 1776, and made perpetual on the tenth of the following October. In this state and in Rhode Island the assembly was chosen annually. Before the end of June of the same year, Virginia, sixth in the series, first in the completeness of her work, came forth with her bill of rights, her declaration of independence, and her constitution, adopted at once by her legislative convention without any further consultation of the people. On the second of July, 1776, New Jersey perfected its new, self-created charter. Delaware next proclaimed its bill of rights, and on the twentieth of September, 1776, finished its constitution, the representatives in convention having been chosen by the freemen of the state for that very purpose. The Pennsylvania convention adopted its constitution on the twenty-eighth of September, 1776; but the opposition which it received, alike from the Quakers, whom it indirectly disfranchised, and from a large body of patriots, delayed its thorough organization for more than five months. The delegates of Maryland, meeting on the fourteenth of August, 1776, framed its constitution with great deliberation; and it was established on the ninth of the following November. On the eighteenth of December, 1776, the constitution of North Carolina was openly ratified in the congress by which it had been framed. 1777. On the fifth of February, 1777, Georgia, the twelfth state, perfected its organic law by the unanimous agreement of its convention. Last of the thirteen came New York, whose empowered convention, on the twentieth of April, 1777, established a constitution that, in the largeness of its humane liberality, excelled them all. 1783. 1776- In elective governments which sprung from the recognition of the freedom of the individual, every man might consistently claim the right of contributing by his own reason his proportionate share of influence in forming the collective reason which was to rule the state. Such was the theory; in practice, no jealous inquiry was raised respecting those who should actually participate in this sovereignty. The privilege of the suffrage had been far more widely extended in the colonies than in England; in most of the thirteen states, no discontent broke out at existing restrictions, and no disposition was manifested to depart from them abruptly by an immediate equalization of the primary political functions. The principle of the revolution involved an indefinite enlargement of the number of the electors, which could have no other term than universal suffrage; but, by general consent, the consideration of the subject was postponed. The age of twenty-one was universally required as a qualification. So, too, was residence, except that in Virginia and |