XXVI. Nov. CHAP. appeared anxiously to shun the term "people of the United States;" it is nowhere found in the 1777. 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 the excitement of impassioned philanthropy: slavery at that day existed in every one of the thirteen states; and all over the country, 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, and charged the guilt of treason on all members of the united colonies who XXVI. should adhere to the king of Great Britain. Now, CHAP. therefore, when inter-state rights were to be con- 1777. fided to the members of each state, it looked upon Nov. 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. Universal suffrage as the right of man was not as yet asserted in the constitution of any one of the states. 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 gains 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 become the public law of Christendom. Had America done less, she would have been, not the leader of nations, but a laggard. One other life-giving excellence distinguished the articles of confederation. The instrument was suf fused 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 subordinate to the state. A declaration of rights is a declaration of those liberties of the individual which the state cannot justly control. The CHAP. Greek system of law knew nothing of such liber XXVI. ties; the Greek citizen never spoke of the rights 1777. Nov. of man; 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 executive power vested in the independent will of thirteen separate sovereign states was like many pairs of ganglia in one of the inferior articulata, of which part may press to go one way and part another. Yet through this chaotic mass the rudiment of a spinal cord may be traced. The system was imperfect, and was acknowledged to be imperfect. 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. America in her progress carried along with her the urn which held the ashes of the dead past, but she also had hope and creative power. The sentiment A XXVI. 1777. of nationality was forming. The framers of the CHAP. confederacy would not admit into that instrument the name of the people of the United States, and Nov. 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. XXVII. CHAPTER XXVII. WINTER-QUARTERS AT VALLEY FORGE. NOVEMBER, 1777 APRIL, 1778. CHAP. WHEN at last Washington was joined by troops from the northern army, a clamor arose for the 1777. capture of Philadelphia. Protected by the Schuyl kill 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 reënforced from New York by more than three thousand men, now exceeded nineteen thousand. Yet 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." Ashamed of inaction, Sir William Howe announced to his government his intention to make a forward movement. Washington, with a quickness of eye that had been developed by his forest-life as a sur |