History of the United States Constitution. George Ticknor Curtis
delay, applied, without waiting for the decisions, for leave to go away, which General Washington granted.95 As late as the 25th of April, 1776, there had been no trials of any of the prizes brought into Massachusetts Bay. At that date, General Washington wrote to the President of Congress, from New York, that some of the vessels which he had fitted out were laid up, the crews being dissatisfied because they could not obtain their prize-money; that he had appealed to the Congress on the subject; and that, if a summary way of proceeding were not resolved on, it would be impossible to have the continental vessels manned. At this time Captain Manly and his crew had not received their share of the valuable prize taken by them in the autumn previous.96
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Another remarkable defect in the revolutionary government was found in the mode in which it undertook to supply the means of defraying the public expenses. It was a government entirely without revenues of any kind; for, in constituting the Congress, the colonies had not clothed their delegates with power to lay taxes, or to establish imposts. At the time when hostilities were actually commenced, the commerce of the country was almost totally annihilated; so that if the Congress had possessed power to derive a revenue from commerce, little could have been obtained for a long period after the commencement of the war. But the power did not exist; money in any considerable quantity could not be borrowed at home; the expedient of foreign loans had not been suggested; and consequently the only remaining expedient to which the Congress could resort was, like other governments similarly situated, to issue paper money. The mode in which this was undertaken to be done was, in the first instance, to issue two millions of Spanish milled dollars, in the form of bills, of various denominations, from one dollar to eight dollars each, and a few of twenty dollars, designed for circulation as currency. The whole number of bills which made up the sum of $2,000,000 was 403,800.97 The next emission amounted to $1,000,000, in bills of thirty dollars each, and was ordered on the 25th of July.98 When the bills of the first emission were prepared, it would seem to have been the practice to have them signed by a committee of the members; but this was found so inconvenient, from the length of time during which it withdrew the members from the other business of Congress, that, when the second emission was ordered, a committee of twenty-eight citizens of Philadelphia was appointed for the purpose, and the bills were ordered to be signed by any two of them.99 At this time, no continental Treasurers had been appointed.100
Such a clumsy machinery was poorly adapted to the supply of a currency demanded by the pressing wants of the army and of the other branches of the public service. The signers of the bills were extremely dilatory in their work. In September, 1775, the paymaster and commissary, at Cambridge, had not a single dollar in hand, and they had strained their credit, for the subsistence of the army, to the utmost; the greater part of the troops were in a state not far from mutiny, in consequence of the deduction which had been made from their stated allowance; and there was imminent danger, if the evil were not soon remedied, and greater punctuality observed, that the army would absolutely break up. In November, General Washington deemed it highly desirable to adopt a system of advanced pay, but the unfortunate state of the military chest rendered it impossible. There was not cash sufficient to pay the troops for the months of October and November. Through the months of December and January, the signing of the bills did not keep pace with the demands of the army, notwithstanding General Washington's urgent remonstrances; and in February his wants became so pressing, that he was obliged to borrow twenty-five thousand pounds of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, in order that the recruiting service might not totally cease.101
These facts show significantly, that, before the Declaration of Independence, scarcely any progress had been made towards the formation of a national government with definite powers and appropriate departments. In matters of judicature, and in measures requiring executive functions and authority, the Congress were obliged to rely almost entirely upon the local institutions and the local civil machinery of the different colonies; while, in all military affairs, the very form of the revolutionary government was unfavorable to vigor, despatch, and consistent method. There were also causes existing in the temper and feelings of many of the members of that government, both before and after the Declaration of Independence, which, at times, prevented the majority from acting with the decision and energy demanded by the state of their affairs. Many excellent and patriotic men in the Congress of 1775-6, while they concurred fully in the necessity for resistance to the measures of the British ministry, and had decided, or were fast deciding, that a separation must take place, still entertained a great jealousy of standing armies. This jealousy began to exhibit itself very soon after the appointment of the Commander-in-chief, and was never wholly without influence in the proceedings of Congress during the entire period of the war. It led to a degree of reliance upon militia, which, in the situation of the colonies, was too often demonstrated to be a weak and fatal policy.102
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NOTE TO PAGE 51.
ON THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.
The Declaration of Independence was drawn by Thomas Jefferson; and the circumstances under which he was selected for this honorable and important task have been for more than a quarter of a century somewhat in doubt, and that doubt has been increased by the recent publication of a part of the Works of Mr. John Adams. The evidence on the subject is to be derived chiefly from statements made by both of these eminent persons in their memoirs, and in a letter written by each of them. We have seen, in a former note, that in 1822 Mr. Adams declared, that had it not been for a conversation which occurred in 1775, before the meeting of the Congress of that year, between himself and his Massachusetts colleagues and certain of the Philadelphia "sons of liberty," in which the Massachusetts members were advised to concede precedence to Virginia, from motives of policy, and but for the principles, facts, and motives suggested in that conversation, many things would not have happened which did occur, and among them, that Mr. Jefferson never would have been the author of the Declaration of Independence. In regard to the same speculation, concerning the election of Washington as Commander-in-chief, I have ventured, on Mr. Adams's own authority, to suggest doubts whether that election ought now to be considered to have turned upon motives which Mr. Adams made so prominent in 1822. In regard to the authorship of the Declaration of Independence, I shall only endeavor to state fairly and fully the conflicting evidence, in order that the reader may judge what degree of weight ought to be assigned to the cause, without which Mr. Adams supposed Mr. Jefferson would not have been selected to draft it.
Mr. Jefferson, as it appeared when his writings came to be published in 1829, wrote in 1821, when at the age of seventy-seven, a memoir of some of the public transactions in which he had been engaged. At this time, he had in his possession a few notes of the debates which took place in Congress on the subject of Independence, and which he made at the time. These notes he inserted bodily, as they stood, in his memoir, and they are so printed. (Jefferson's Works, I. 10-14.) They are easily distinguishable from the text of the memoir, but they do not appear to throw any especial light upon the fact now in controversy; although, as Mr. Jefferson, in 1823, when writing on this subject, supported his recollection by "written notes, taken at the moment and on the spot," it is proper to allow that those notes may in some way have aided his memory, although we cannot now see in what way they did so. He made this latter reference in a letter which he wrote to Mr. Madison, in reply to the statements in Mr. Adams's letter to Timothy Pickering, under date of August 6, 1822. (Jefferson's Works, IV. 375, 376.)
At or near the beginning of the present century, Mr. Adams, then about sixty-six, wrote an autobiography, which has recently been published [1850], and in which he gave an account of the authorship of the Declaration. In 1822, when about eighty-six, Mr. Adams wrote the letter to Mr. Pickering, which called forth Mr. Jefferson's contradiction in his letter to Mr. Madison, under date of August 30, 1823. (Adams's Works, II. 510-515.) Mr. Jefferson, in his memoir written in 1821, states simply that the committee for drawing the Declaration desired him to do it; that he accordingly wrote it, and that, being approved by the committee, he reported it to the Congress on Friday, the 28th of June, when it was read and ordered to lie on the table; and that on Monday, the 1st of July, the Congress, in committee of the whole, proceeded to consider it. "The pusillanimous idea," he continues,