5.Who were some of the leading men in the convention?What had been their previous training?
6.State the great problems before the convention.
7.In what respects were the planting and commercial states opposed?What compromises were reached?
8.Show how the "check and balance"system is embodied in our form of government.
9.How did the powers conferred upon the federal government help cure the defects of the Articles of Confederation?
10.In what way did the provisions for ratifying and amending the Constitution depart from the old system?
11.What was the nature of the conflict over ratification?
THE CLASH OF POLITICAL PARTIES
The Men and Measures of the New GovernmentFriends of the Constitution in Power.-In the first Congress that assembled after the adoption of the Constitution,there were eleven Senators,led by Rob-ert Morris,the financier,who had been delegates to the national convention.Several members of the House of Representatives,headed by James Madison,had also been at Philadelphia in 1787.In making his appointments,Washing-ton strengthened the new system of government still further by a judicious selection of officials.He chose as Secretary of the Treasury,Alexander Hamil-ton,who had been the most zealous for its success;General Knox,head of the War Department,and Edmund Randolph,the Attorney-General,were likewise conspicuous friends of the experiment.
Every member of the federal judiciary whom Washington appointed,from the Chief Justice,John Jay,down to the jus-tices of the district courts,had favored the ratification of the Constitution;and a majority of them had served as mem-bers of the national convention that framed the document or of the state rat-ifying conventions.Only one man of in-fluence in the new government,Thomas Jefferson,the Secretary of State,was reckoned as a doubter in the house of the faithful.He had expressed opinions both for and against the Constitution;but he had been out of the country act-ing as the minister at Paris when the Constitution was drafted and ratified.
An Opposition to Conciliate.-The inauguration of Washington amid the plaudits of his countrymen did not set The Inauguration of Washingtonat rest all the political turmoil which had been aroused by the angry contest over ratification."The interesting nature of the question,"wrote John Marshall,"the equality of the parties,the animation produced inevitably by ardent debate had a necessary tendency to embitter the dispositions of the vanquished and to fix more deeply in many bosoms their prejudices against a plan of government in opposition to which all their passions were enlisted."The leaders gathered around Washington were well aware of the excited state of the country.They saw Rhode Island and North Carolina still outside of the union.They knew by what small margins the Constitution had been approved in the great states of Massachusetts,Virginia,and New York.They were equally aware that a major-ity of the state conventions,in yielding reluctant approval to the Constitution,had drawn a number of amendments for immediate submission to the states.
The First Amendments-a Bill of Rights.-To meet the opposition,Madi-son proposed,and the first Congress adopted,a series of amendments to the Constitution.Ten of them were soon ratified and became in 1791a part of the law of the land.These amendments provided,among other things,that Con-gress could make no law respecting the establishment of religion,abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances.They also guaranteed indictment by grand jury and trial by jury for all persons charged by federal officers with serious crimes.To reassure those who still feared that local rights might be invaded by the federal government,the tenth amendment expressly provided that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,nor prohibited by it to the states,are reserved to the states respec-tively or to the people.Seven years later,the eleventh amendment was written in the same spirit as the first ten,after a heated debate over the action of the Supreme Court in permitting a citizen to bring a suit against "the sovereign state"of Georgia.The new amendment was designed to protect states against the federal judiciary by forbidding it to hear any case in which a state was sued by a citizen.
Funding the National Debt.-Paper declarations of rights,however,paid no bills.To this task Hamilton turned all his splendid genius.At the very outset he addressed himself to the problem of the huge public debt,daily mounting as the unpaid interest accumulated.In a Report on Public Credit under date of Janu-ary 9,1790,one of the first and greatest of American state papers,he laid before Congress the outlines of his plan.He proposed that the federal government should call in all the old bonds,certificates of indebtedness,and other promises to pay which had been issued by the Congress since the beginning of the Revo-lution.These national obligations,he urged,should be put into one consoli-dated debt resting on the credit of the United States;to the holders of the old paper should be issued new bonds drawing interest at fixed rates.This process was called "funding the debt."Such a provision for the support of public credit,Hamilton insisted,would satisfy creditors,restore landed property to its former value,and furnish new resources to agriculture and commerce in the form of credit and capital.
