CHAP. which became known as the Protestant Episcopal, XV. wished to preserve its endowments, and might 1783. complain of their impairment; but it preferred 1776 ever after to take care of itself, and was glad to share in that equality which dispelled the dread of episcopal tyranny, and left it free to perfect its organization according to its own desires. The Roman Catholic eagerly accepted in America his place as an equal with Protestants, and soon found contentment and hope in his new relations. The rigid Presbyterians proved in America the supporters of religious freedom. They were true to the spirit of the great English dissenter who hated all laws that were formed To stretch the conscience, and to bind The native freedom of the mind. In Virginia, where alone there was an arduous struggle in the legislature, the presbytery of Hanover took the lead for liberty, and demanded the abolition of the establishment of the Anglican church, and the civil equality of every denomination; it was supported by the voices of Baptists and Quakers and all the sects that had sprung from the people; and after a contest of eight weeks, the measure was carried, by the activity of Jefferson, in an assembly of which the majority were Protestant Episcopalians. Nor was this demand by Presbyterians for equality confined to Virginia, where they were in a minority; it was from Witherspoon of New Jersey that Madison imbibed the lesson of perfect freedom in matters of conscience. When the constitution of that state was framed by a convention composed chiefly of Presbyterians, they estab XV. 1776 lished perfect liberty of conscience, without the CHAP. blemish of a test. Freethinkers might have been content with toleration, but real religious conviction 1783. would accept nothing less than equality. The more profound was faith, the more it scorned to admit a connection with the state; for such a connection being inherently vicious, the state might more readily form an alliance with error than with truth, with despotism over mind than with freedom. The determination to leave truth to her own strength, and religious worship to the conscience and voluntary act of the worshipper, was the natural outflow of religious feeling. The dissenters and plebeian sects who had found an asylum in the American wilderness, the inheritors from Milton, and George Fox, and Penn, and Baxter, and Bunyan, revealed to the world the secret of the eighteenth century. The constitution of Georgia declared, that "estates shall not be entailed, and when a person dies intestate, his or her estate shall be divided equally among the children." The same principle prevailed essentially in other states, in conformity to their laws and their manners, and was not open to contradiction. But it was otherwise in Virginia. There, a system of entails, enforced with a vigor unknown in the old country, had tended to make the possession of great estates, especially to the east of the Blue ridge, the privilege of the first-born. In Eng 1 Section 18 of the New Jersey constitution of 1776. The 19th section secured "to all persons professing a belief in the faith of any Protestant sect" all civil rights "en joyed by others their fellow-sub- XV. 1776 CHAP. land, the courts of law permitted entails to be docked by fine and recovery; in 1705 Virginia 1783. prohibited all such innovations, and the tenure could be changed by nothing less than a special statute. In 1727 it was further enacted, that slaves might be attached to the soil, and be entailed with it. These measures riveted an hereditary aristocracy, founded not on learning or talent or moral worth or public service, but on the pos session of land and slaves. It was to perfect the republican institutions of Virginia by breaking down this aristocracy, that Jefferson was summoned from the national congress to a seat in the assembly of his native state. On the twelfth of October, 1776, he obtained leave to bring in a bill for the abolishment of entails; and against the opposition of Edmund Pendleton, who was no friend to innovations, all donees in tail, by the act of this first republican legislature of Virginia, were vested with the absolute dominion of the property entailed. To complete the reform it was necessary to change the rules of descent, so that the lands of an intestate might be divided equally among his representatives; and this was effected through a committee, of which Jefferson, Pendleton, and Wythe were the active members, and which was charged with the revision of the common law, the British statutes still valid in the state, and the criminal statutes of Virginia. The new law of descent was the work of Jefferson; and the candid historian of Virginia approves the graceful symmetry of the act which abolished primogeniture, and directed property into "the channels which the head and heart of every sane man would be CHAP. prone to choose." XV. 1776 In the low country of Virginia, and of the states 1783. next south of it, the majority of the inhabitants were bondmen of another race and skin, except where modified by mixture. The courts of Virginia would not recognise a right of property in the future increase of slaves; the revisers of her laws, George Mason, Jefferson, Pendleton, Wythe, condemned slavery itself, especially Mason, in words that thrilled with the agony of sorrowing earnestness. It is the testimony of Jefferson that an amendatory bill was prepared, "to emancipate all slaves born after passing the act;" but the details of the bill were impossible of execution, and nothing came of it. Delaware, in her constitution, prepared her ultimate liberation from the terrible evil by declaring free every person thereafter imported into the state from Africa, and by forbidding the introduction of any slave for sale. Nowhere was slavery formally established in the constitution as a permanent social relation; the unshackled power of emancipation was left to the legislature of every state. Provision was made for reforming the constitutions which were now established. The greatest obstacles were thrown in the way of change in Pennsylvania, where the attempt could be made only once in seven years by the election of a council of censors; the fewest in South Carolina, where the majority of a legislature which was no adequate representative of the people expressly assumed to itself and its successors original, independent, and final constituent power. CHAP. 1783. The British parliament, in its bill of rights, had XV. only summed up the liberties that Englishmen in 1776- the lapse of centuries had acquired, or had wrested from their kings; the Americans opened their career of independence by a declaration of the self-evident rights of man; and this, begun by Virginia, was repeated, with variations, in every constitution formed after independence, except that of South Carolina. In that state, the amended constitution breathed not one word for universal freedom, made no assertion of human rights, and no longer affirmed that the people is the source of power. Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire proclaimed that all men are born free, and as a consequence were the first to get rid of slavery; Georgia recognised rights derived to Americans from "the laws of nature and reason; at the bar of humanity and the bar of the people, South Carolina alone remained silent. Here, then, we have the prevailing idea of political life in the United States. On the one hand, they continued the institutions received from England with as little immediate change as possible; and on the other, they desired for their constitutions a healthy, continuous growth. They accepted the actual state of society as the natural one resulting from the antecedents of the nation; at the same time, they recognised the right of man to make unceasing advances towards realizing political justice, and the public conscience yearned for a nearer approach to ideal perfection. Civil power remained, under slight modifications, with those who had held it before; but for their inviolable rule in |