New Jersey had ratified; and Georgia, Connecticut and Massachusetts followed during the first two months of 1788. Thus far Federalists and Anti-Federalists. the only strong opposition had been in Massachusetts, a “large state.” In it the struggle began between the friends and the opponents of the Constitution, with its introduction of a strong Federal power; and it raged in the conventions, legislatures, newspapers and pamphlets. In a classic series of papers, the Federalist, Alexander Hamilton, with the assistance of James Madison and John Jay, explained the new Constitution and defended it. As it was written before the Constitution went into force, it speaks much for the ability of its writers that it has passed into a standard textbook of American constitutional law.
99. The seventh and eighth states—Maryland and South Carolina—ratified in April and May 1788; and, while the Ratification. conventions of Virginia and New York were still wrangling over the great question, the ninth state, New Hampshire, ratified, and the Constitution passed out of theory into fact. The Anti-Federalists of the Virginia and New York conventions offered conditional ratifications of all sorts; but the Federalists stubbornly refused to consider them, and at last, by very slender majorities, these two states ratified. North Carolina refused to ratify the Constitution, and in Rhode Island it was referred to the several towns instead of to a convention and was rejected by an overwhelming majority, the Federalists, who advocated the calling of a convention, refraining from voting (§112). Congress named the first Wednesday of January 1789 as the day for the choice of electors, the first Wednesday in February for the choice of president and Inauguration. vice-president, and the first Wednesday in March for the inauguration of the new government, at New York City. The last date fell on the 4th of March, which has been the limit of each president's term since that time.
100. When the votes of the electors were counted before Congress, it was found that Washington had been unanimously Fall of the Confederation. elected president, and that John Adams, standing next on the list, was vice-president. Long before the inauguration the Congress of the Confederation had expired of mere inanition; its attendance simply ran down until (Oct. 21, 1788) its record ceased, and the United States got on without any national government for nearly six months. The struggle for nationality had been successful, and the old order faded out of existence.
101. The first census (1790) followed so closely upon the inauguration of the Constitution that the country may fairly be said to have had a population of nearly four millions in 1789. Slavery in the United States. Something over half a million of these were slaves, of African birth or blood. Slavery of this sort had taken root in almost all the colonies, its original establishment being everywhere by custom. When the custom had been sufficiently established statutes came in to regulate a relation already existing. But it is not true, as the Dred Scott decision held long afterwards (§215), that the belief that slaves were chattels simply, things, not persons, held good at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. Times had changed somewhat. The peculiar language of the Constitution itself, describing a slave as a “person held to service or labour,” under the laws of any state, puts the general feeling exactly: slaves were persons from whom the laws of some of the states withheld personal rights for the time. In accordance with this feeling most of the Northern states were on the high road towards abolition of Abolition in the North. slavery. Vermont had never allowed it. In Massachusetts it was swept out by a summary court decision that it was irreconcilable with the new state constitution. Other states soon began systems of gradual abolition, which finally extinguished slavery north of Maryland, but so gradually that there were still 18 apprentices for life in New Jersey in 1860, the last remnants of the former slave system. In the new states north of the Ohio slavery was prohibited by the ordinance of 1787 (§81), and the prohibition was maintained in spite of many attempts to get rid of it and introduce slavery.
102. The sentiment of thinking men in the South was exactly the same, or in some cases more bitter from their personal Feeling in the South. entanglement with the system. Jefferson's language as to slavery is irreconcilable with the chattel notion; no abolitionist agitator ever used warmer language than he as to the evils of slavery; and the expression, “our brethren,” used by him of the slaves, is conclusive. Washington, George Mason and other Southern men were almost as warm against slavery as Jefferson, and there were societies for the abolition of slavery in the South. In the Constitutional convention of 1787 the strongest opposition to an extension of the period of non-interference with the slave trade from 1800 to 1808 came from Virginia, whereas every one of the New England states, in which the trade was an important source of profit, voted for this extension. No thinking man could face with equanimity the future problem of holding a separate race of millions in slavery. Like most slave laws, the laws of the Southern states were harsh: rights were almost absolutely withheld from the slave, and punishments of the severest kind were legal; but the execution of the system was milder than its legal possibilities might lead one to imagine. The country was as yet so completely agricultural that Southern slavery kept all the patriarchal features possible to such a system.
103. Indeed, the whole country was almost exclusively agricultural, and, in spite of every effort to encourage manufactures Agriculture, Commerce and Manufactures. by state bounties, they formed the meagrest element in the national production. Connecticut, which now teems with manufactures, was just beginning the production of tinware and clocks; Rhode Island and Massachusetts were just beginning to work in cotton from models of jennies and Arkwright machinery surreptitiously obtained from England; and other states, beyond local manufactures of paper, glass and iron, were almost entirely agricultural, or were engaged in industries directly dependent on agriculture. Commerce was dependent on agriculture for export and manufactured imports were enough to drown out every other form.
104. There were but five cities in the United States having a population of more than 10,000—New York (33,000), Philadelphia Changes since 1790. (28,500), Boston (18,000), Charleston (16,000) and Baltimore (13,000). The population of the city of New York is now greater than that of the original thirteen states in 1790; the state of New York has now about twice as many inhabitants as the thirteen had in 1790; and the new states of Ohio and Illinois, which had hardly any white inhabitants in 1789, have each a larger population than the whole thirteen then had. Imports have swollen from $23,000,000 to $1,475,612,580 (1909); exports from $20,000,000 to $1,728,203,271 (1909), since 1790. The revenues of the new government in 1790 were $4,000,000; the expenditures, excluding interest on the public debt, but $1,000,000; now both the revenues and the expenditures are about $1,000,000,000. It is not easy for the modern American to realize the poverty and weakness of his country at the inauguration of the new system of government, however he may realize the simplicity of the daily life of its people.
105. Outside the cities communication was slow. One stage a week was enough for the connexion between the great cities; The West. and communication elsewhere depended on private conveyance. The western(settlements were just beginning to make the question more serious. Enterprising land companies were the moving force which had impelled the passage of the Ordinance of 1787; and the first column of their settlers was pouring into Ohio and forming connexion with their predecessors in Kentucky and Tennessee. Marietta and Cincinnati had been founded. But the intending settlers were obliged to make the journey down the Ohio river from Pittsburg in bullet-proof flat-boats, for protection against the Indians, and the return trip depended on the use of oars. For more than twenty years these flat-boats were the chief means of river commerce in the West; and in the longer trips, as to New Orleans, the boats were generally broken up at the end and sold for lumber,
