statesmen was impeded by the clause which forbade any man to sit in congress more than three years out of six; nor could the same member of congress be appointed its president more than one year in any term of three years. No executive distinct from the general congress could be detected in the system. Judicial power over questions arising between the states was provided for; and courts might be established to exercise primary jurisdiction over crimes committed on the high seas, with appellate jurisdiction over captures, but there was scarcely the rudiment of a judiciary from which a court for executing the ordinances of congress could be developed. Congress was incapable of effectual supervision over officers of its own appointment and in its own service. The report of Dickinson provided for a council; but this was narrowed down to "a committee of states," to be composed of one delegate from each state, with no power whatever respecting important business, and no power of any kind except that with which congress, "by the consent of nine states," might invest them from time to time.

Each state retained its sovereignty, and all power not expressly delegated. Under the king of England, the use of the veto in colonial legislation had been complained of. There was not even a thought of vesting congress with a veto on the legislation of states, or subjecting such legislation to the revision of a judicial tribunal. Each state, being esteemed independent and sovereign, had exclusive, full, and final powers in every matter relating to domestic police and government, to slavery and manumission, to the conditions of the elective franchise; and the restraints required to secure loyalty to the central government were left to be self-imposed. Incidental powers to carry into effect the powers granted to the United States were withheld.

To complete the security against central authority, the articles of confederation were not to be adopted except by the assent of every one of the legislatures of the thirteen separate states; and no amendment might be made without an equal unanimity. A government which had not power to levy a tax, or raise a soldier, or deal directly with an individual, or keep its engagements with foreign powers, or amend its

constitution without the unanimous consent of its members, had not enough of vital force to keep itself alive. But a higher spirit moved over the darkness of that formless void. Notwithstanding the defects of the confederation, the congress of the United States, inspired by the highest wisdom of the eighteenth century, and seemingly without debate, imbodied in their work four capital results, which Providence in its love for the human race could not let die.

The republics of Greece and Rome had been essentially no more than governments of cities. When Rome exchanged the narrowness of the ancient municipality for cosmopolitan expansion, the republic, from the false principle on which it was organized, became an empire. The middle ages had free towns and cantons, but no national republic. Congress had faith that one republican government could comprehend a continental territory, even though it should extend from the Gulf of Mexico to the uttermost limit of Canada and the eastern limit of Newfoundland.

Having thus proclaimed that a republic may equal the widest empire in its bounds, the relation of the United States to the natural rights of their inhabitants was settled with superior wisdom. Some of the states had, each according to its prevailing superstition or prejudice, narrowed the rights of classes of men. One state disfranchised Jews, another Catholics, another deniers of the Trinity, another men of a complexion different from white. The United States in congress assembled, suffering the errors in one state to eliminate the errors in another, rejected every disfranchisement and superadded none. The declaration of independence said, all men are created equal; by the articles of confederation and perpetual union, free inhabitants were free citizens.

That which gave reality to the union was the article which secured to "the free inhabitants" of each of the states "all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states." Congress appeared to shun the term "people of the United States." It is nowhere found in their articles of confederation, and rarely and only accidentally in their votes; yet by this act they constituted the free inhabitants of the different states one people. When the articles of confederation reached South

Carolina for confirmation, it was perceived that they secured equal rights of inter-citizenship in the several states to the free black inhabitant of any state. This concession was opposed in the legislature of South Carolina, and, after an elaborate speech by William Henry Drayton, the articles were returned to congress with a recommendation that inter-citizenship should be confined to the white man; but congress, by a vote of eight states against South Carolina and Georgia, one state being divided, refused to recede from the universal system on which American institutions were to be founded. The decision was not due to impassioned philanthropy: slavery at that day existed in every one of the thirteen states; and, notwithstanding many men South as well as North revolted at the thought of continuing the institution, custom scarcely recognised the black man as an equal; yet congress, with a fixedness of purpose resting on a principle, would not swerve from its position. For, when it resolved upon independence and had to decide on whom a demand could be made to maintain that independence, it defined as members of a colony all persons abiding within it and deriving protection from its laws. Now, therefore, when inter-state rights were to be confided to the members of each state, it looked upon every freeman who owed primary allegiance to the state as a citizen of the state. The free black inhabitant owed allegiance, and was entitled to equal civil rights, and so was a citizen. Congress, while it left the regulation of the elective franchise to the judgment of each state, in the articles of confederation, in its votes and its treaties with other powers, reckoned all the free inhabitants, without distinction of ancestry, creed, or color, as subjects or citizens. But America, though the best representative of the social and political acquisitions of the eighteenth century, was not the parent of the idea in modern civilization that man is a constituent member of the state of his birth, irrespective of his ancestry. It was already the public law of Christendom. Had America done less, she would have been a laggard among the nations.

One other life-giving excellence distinguished the articles of confederation. The instrument was suffused with the idea of securing the largest liberty to individual man. In the ancient Greek republic, the state existed before the individual

and absorbed the individual. Thought, religious opinion, worship, conscience, amusements, joys, sorrows, all activities were regulated by the state; the individual lived only as an integral part of the state. A declaration of rights is a declaration of those liberties of the individual which the state cannot justly control. The Greek system of law knew nothing of such liberties; the Greek citizen never spoke of the rights of man; the individual was merged in the body politic. At last a government founded on consent could be perfected; for the acknowledgment that conscience has its rights had broken up the unity of despotic power, and confirmed the freedom of the individual. Because there was life in all the parts, there was the sure promise of a well-organized life in the whole.

Yet the young republic failed in its first effort at forming a general union. The smoke in the flame overpowered the light. "The articles of confederation endeavored to reconcile a partial sovereignty in the union with complete sovereignty in the states, to subvert a mathematical axiom by taking away a part and letting the whole remain." The polity then formed could hardly be called an organization, so little did the parts mutually correspond and concur to the same final actions. The system was imperfect, and was acknowledged to be imperfect. A better one could not then have been accepted; but with all its faults it contained the elements for the evolution of a more perfect union. The sentiment of nationality was forming. The framers of the confederacy would not admit into that instrument the name of the people of the United States, and described the states as so many sovereign and independent communities; yet already in the circular letter of November 1777 to the states, asking their several subscriptions to the plan of confederacy, they avowed the purpose to secure to the inhabitants of all the states an "existence as a free people." The child that was then born was cradled between opposing powers of evil; if it will live, its infant strength must strangle the twin serpents of separatism and central despotism.

CHAPTER XV.

THE WINTER AT VALLEY FORGE.

BRITAIN IN WANT OF TROOPS.

NOVEMBER 1777-APRIL 1778.

WHEN at last Washington was joined by troops from the northern army, a clamor arose for the capture of Philadelphia. Protected by the Schuylkill and the Delaware, the city could be approached only from the north, and on that side a chain of fourteen redoubts extended from river to river. Moreover, the army by which it was occupied, having been reinforced from New York by more than three thousand men, exceeded nineteen thousand. Four American officers voted in council for an assault upon the lines of this greatly superior force; but the general, sustained by eleven, disregarded the murmurs of congress and rejected "the mad enterprise."

With quickness of eye he selected in the woods of Whitemarsh strong ground for an encampment, and there, within fourteen miles of Philadelphia, awaited the enemy, of whose movements he received exact and timely intelligence. On the severely cold night of the fourth of December the British, fourteen thousand strong, marched out to attack the American lines. Before daybreak on the fifth their advance party halted on a ridge beyond Chestnut Hill, eleven miles from Philadelphia, and at seven their main body formed in one line, with a few regiments as reserves. The Americans occupied thickly wooded hills, with a morass and a brook in their front. Opposite the British left wing a breastwork defended the only point where the brook could be easily forded. At night the British force rested on their arms. Washington passed the hours in strengthening his position; and though, according

VOL. V.-14