CHAPTER ONE
THE FIRST COURT AND THE CIRCUITS
1789-1798
"It is perhaps not difficult to say which is the most arduous task, that of the Convention who framed the Constitution, or of the first Legislatures to whom it will appertain to mature and perfect so compound a system, to liquidate the meaning of all the parts, and adjust them to each other in a harmonious and consistent whole," said a Federalist pamphleteer in 1792;[1] and these words quaintly and accurately portrayed the task which was imposed upon the first Supreme Court, as well as upon the first Congress. That President Washington had a full comprehension of the responsibility which lay upon him in making the appointments to this first Court, and of the potent influence which the Court was to exercise upon the history of the country, was shown by his letter to his future Attorney-General, Edmund Randolph. "Impressed with a conviction that the true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government," he wrote, "I have considered the first arrangement of the judicial department as essential to the happiness of our country and the stability of its political system. Hence the selection of the fittest characters to expound the laws and dispense justice has been an invariable sub-
- ↑ An Enquiry as to the Constitutional Authority of the Supreme Federal Court over the Several States in Their Political Character (1792), by a citizen of South Carolina (David Ramsay).
