James Madison. Gay Sydney Howard
similar acts from other States, and will not, I suppose, publish the secret till he either obtains or despairs of them."
This intelligence was evidently not unheeded by Jefferson. In writing, some months after he received it, to a friend on the application of steam-power to grist-mills, then lately introduced in England, he adds: "I hear you are applying the same agent in America to navigate boats, and I have little doubt but that it will be applied generally to machines, so as to supersede the use of water-ponds, and of course to lay open all the streams for navigation." Nor does Madison seem to have been one of those who doubted if anything was to come of Rumsey's invention. All this was less than a hundred years ago, and now there is a steam-ferry between New York and Europe running about twice a day.
In a similar letter, a year later, he is careful, among grave political matters, to remember and report to the same friend that in the sinking of a well in Richmond, on the declivity of a hill, there had been found, "about seventy feet below the surface, several large bones, apparently belonging to a fish not less than the shark; and, what is more singular, several fragments of potter's ware in the style of the Indians. Before he [the digger] reached these curiosities he passed through about fifty feet of soft blue clay." Mr. Madison had only just heard of this discovery, and he had not seen the unearthed fragments. But he evidently accepts the story as true in coming from "unexceptionable witnesses." He adds, as a corroboration, that he is told by a friend from Washington County of the finding there, in the sinking of a salt-well, "of the hip-bone of the incognitum, the socket of which was about eight inches in diameter." Such things were peculiarly interesting to Jefferson, and Madison was too devoted a friend to him to leave them unnoticed. But they were hardly less interesting to himself, though he had not much of Jefferson's habit of scientific investigation. That "the potter's ware in the style of the Indians" should be found so deeply buried only seems to him "singular;" nor, indeed, is there any record, so far as we know, that this particular fact was any more suggestive to Jefferson, though apparently so likely to arouse his inquiring mind to seek for some satisfactory explanation. But his geological notions were too positive to admit even of a doubt as to the age of man. Supposing a Creator, he assumed that "he created the earth at once, nearly in the state in which we see it, fit for the preservation of the beings he placed on it." Theorist as he was himself, he had little patience with the other theorists who were already beginning to discover in the structure of the earth the evidence of successive geological eras. The different strata of rocks and their inclination gave him no trouble. He explained them all by the assumption that "rock grows, and it seems that it grows in layers in every direction, as the branches of trees grow in all directions." That evidences of the existence of man should be found with a superimposed weight of earth seventy feet in thickness would present to him no difficulty. If the fact had specially aroused his attention he would have explained it in some ingenious way as the result of accident.
CHAPTER VI
PUBLIC DISTURBANCES AND ANXIETIES
In February, 1787, Madison again took a seat in Congress. It was an anxious period. Shays's rebellion in Massachusetts had assumed rather formidable possibilities, and seemed not unlikely to spread to other States. Till this storm should blow over, the important business of Congress was to raise money and troops; in reality, to go to the help of Massachusetts, if need should be, though the object ostensibly was to protect a handful of people on the frontier against the Indians. It was a striking instance of the imbecility of the government under the Articles of Confederation, that it could only undertake to suppress rebellion in a State under the pretense of doing something else which came within the law. Massachusetts, it is true, was quite able to deal with her insurgents; but when Congress convened it was not known in New York that Lincoln had dispersed the main body of them at Petersham. Nevertheless, a like difficulty might arise at any moment in any other of the States, where the strength to meet it might be quite inadequate.
Madison's ideal still was, the Union before the States, and for the sake of the States; the whole before the parts, to save the parts; the binding the fagot together that the sticks might not be lost. "Our situation," he wrote to Edmund Randolph in February, "is becoming every day more and more critical. No money comes into the federal treasury; no respect is paid to the federal authority; and people of reflection unanimously agree that the existing Confederacy is tottering to its foundation. Many individuals of weight, particularly in the eastern district, are suspected of leaning toward monarchy. Other individuals predict a partition of the States into two or more confederacies. It is pretty certain that if some radical amendment of the single one cannot be devised and introduced, one or the other of these revolutions, the latter no doubt, will take place."
It is not impossible that Madison himself may have had some faith in this suspicion that "individuals of weight in the eastern district" were inclined to a monarchy. For such suspicion, however there could be little real foundation. There were, doubtless, men of weight who thought and said that monarchy was better than anarchy. There were, doubtless, impatient men then who thought and said, as there are impatient men now who think and say, that the rule of a king is better than the rule of the people. But there was no disloyalty to government by the people among those who only maintained that the English in America must draw from the common heritage of English institutions and English law the material wherewith to build up the foundations of a new nation. No intelligent and candid man doubts now that they were wise; nor would it have been long doubted then, had it not so speedily become manifest that, if the stigma of "British" was once affixed to a political party, any appeal from popular prejudice to reason and common sense was hopeless.
There were a few persons who would have done away with the divisions of States and establish in their place a central government. Those most earnest in maintaining the autonomy of States declared that such a government was, as Luther Martin of Maryland called it, of "a monarchical nature." What else could that be but a monarchy? An insinuation took on the form of a logical deduction and became a popular fallacy. Yet those most earnest for a central government only sought to establish a stable rule in place of no rule at all; or, worse still, of the tyranny of an ignorant and vicious mob under the outraged name of democracy, into which there was danger of drifting. Whether their plan was wise or foolish, it did not mean a monarchy. Even of Shays's misguided followers Jefferson said: "I believe you may be assured that an idea or desire of returning to anything like their ancient government never entered into their heads." As Madison knew and said, the real danger was that the States would divide into two confederacies, and only by a new and wiser and stronger union could that calamity be averted.
To gain the assent of most of the States to a convention was surmounting only the least of the difficulties. Three weeks before the time of meeting Madison wrote: "The nearer the crisis approaches, the more I tremble for the issue. The necessity of gaining the concurrence of the convention in some system that will answer the purpose, the subsequent approbation of Congress, and the final sanction of the States, present a series of chances which would inspire despair in any case where the alternative was less formidable." He said, in the first month of the session of that body, that "the States were divided into different interests, not by their difference of size, but by other circumstances; the most material of which resulted partly from climate, but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These two causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the United States. It did not lie between the large and small States. It lay between the Northern and Southern."
During the earlier weeks of this session of Congress, and, indeed, for some months before, events had made so manifest this difference of interest, coincident with the difference in latitude, that there seemed little ground for hope that any good would come out of a constitutional convention. The old question of the navigation of the Mississippi was again agitated. The South held her right to that river to be of much more value than anything she could gain by a closer union with the North, and she was quite ready to go to war with Spain in defense of it. On the other hand, the Northern States were quite indifferent to the navigation of the Mississippi, and not disposed apparently to make any exertion or sacrifice to secure it. Just now they were anxious to secure a commercial treaty with Spain; but Spain insisted, as a preliminary condition, that the United States should relinquish all claim to navigation upon a river whose mouths were within Spanish territory. In the Northern mind there was no doubt of the value of trade with Spain; and there was a good deal of doubt whether there