James Madison. Gay Sydney Howard

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СКАЧАТЬ at his own order, let it cost what it might. It was a shiftless and ruinous system; but the average Virginia planter was not over-quick at figures, nor even at reading and writing. He was proud of being lord of a thousand or two acres, and one or two hundred negroes, and fancied that this was to rule over, as Mr. Rives called it, "a mimic commonwealth, with its foreign and domestic relations, and its regular administrative hierarchy." He did not comprehend that the isolated life of a slave plantation was ordinarily only a kind of perpetual barbecue, with its rough sports and vacuous leisure, where the roasted ox was largely wasted and not always pleasant to look at. There was a rude hospitality, where food, provided by unpaid labor, was cheap and abundant, and where the host was always glad to welcome any guest who would relieve him of his own tediousness; but there was little luxury and no refinement where there was almost no culture. Of course there were a few homes and families of another order, where the women were refined and the men educated; but these were the exceptions. Society generally, with its bluff, loud, self-confident but ignorant planters, its numerous poor whites destitute of lands and of slaves, and its mass of slaves whose aim in life was to avoid work and escape the whip, was necessarily only one remove from semi-civilization.

      It was not easy to indoctrinate such a people, more arrogant than intelligent, with new ideas. By the same token it might be possible to lead them into new ways before they would find out whither they were going. Mr. Madison hoped to change the wretched system of plantation commerce by a port bill, which he brought into the Assembly. Imposts require custom-houses, and obviously there could not be custom-houses nor even custom-officers on every plantation in the State. The bill proposed to leave open two ports of entry for all foreign ships. It would greatly simplify matters if all the foreign trade of the State could be limited to these two ports only. It would then be easy enough to enforce imposts, and the State would have something to surrender to the federal government to help it to a revenue, if, happily, the time should ever come when all the States should assent to that measure of salvation for the Union. Not that this was the primary object of those who favored this port law; but the question of commerce was the question on which everything hinged, and its regulation in each State must needs have an influence, one way or the other, upon the possibility of strengthening, even of preserving, the Union. Everything depended upon reconciling these state interests by mutual concessions. The South was jealous of the North, because trade flourished at the North and did not flourish at the South. It seemed as if this was at the expense of the South, and so, in a certain sense, it was. The problem was to find where the difficulty lay, and to apply the remedy.

      If commerce flourished at the North, where each of the States had one or two ports of entry only, why should it not flourish in Virginia if regulated in the same way? If those centres of trade bred a race of merchants, who built their own ships, bought and sold, did their own carrying, competed with and stimulated each other, and encroached upon the trade of the South, why should not similar results follow in Virginia if she should confine her trade to two or three ports? If the buyer and the seller, the importer and the consumer, went to a common place of exchange in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and prosperity followed as a consequence, why should they not do the same thing at Norfolk? This was what Madison aimed to bring about by the port bill. But it was impossible to get it through the legislature till three more ports were added to the two which the bill at first proposed. When the planters came to understand that such a law would take away their cherished privilege of trade along the banks of the rivers, wherever anybody chose to run out a little jetty, the opposition was persistent. At every succeeding session, till the new federal Constitution was adopted, an attempt was made to repeal the act; and though that was not successful, each year new ports of entry were added. It did not, indeed, matter much whether the open ports of Virginia were two or whether they were twenty. There was a factor in the problem which neither Mr. Madison nor anybody else would take into the account. It was possible, of course, if force enough were used, to break up the traffic with English ships on the banks of the rivers; but when that was done, commerce would follow its own laws, in spite of the acts of the legislature, and flow into channels of its own choosing. It was not possible to transmute a planting State, where labor was enslaved, into a commercial State, where labor must be free.

      However desirous Mr. Madison might be to transfer the power over commerce to the federal government, he was compelled, as a member of the Virginia legislature, to care first for the trade of his own State. No State could afford to neglect its own commercial interests so long as the thirteen States remained thirteen commercial rivals. It was becoming plainer and plainer every day that, while that relation continued, the less chance there was that thirteen petty, independent States could unite into one great nation. No foreign power would make a treaty with a government which could not enforce that treaty among its own people. Neither could any separate portion of that people make a treaty, as any other portion, the other side of an imaginary line, need not hold it in respect. What good was there in revenue laws, or, indeed, in any other laws in Massachusetts which Connecticut and Rhode Island disregarded? or in New York, if New Jersey and Pennsylvania laughed at them? or in Virginia, if Maryland held them in contempt?

      But Mr. Madison felt that, if he could bring about a healthful state of things in the trade of his own State, there was at least so much done towards bringing about a healthful state of things in the commerce of the whole country. There came up a practical, local question which, when the time came, he was quick to see had a logical bearing upon the general question. The Potomac was the boundary line between Virginia and Maryland; but Lord Baltimore's charter gave to Maryland jurisdiction over the river to the Virginia bank; and this right Virginia had recognized, claiming only for herself the free navigation of the Potomac and the Pocomoke. Of course the laws of neither State were regarded when it was worth while to evade them; and nothing was easier than to evade them, since to the average human mind there is no privilege so precious as a facility for smuggling. Nobody, at any rate, seems to have thought anything about the matter till it came under Madison's observation after his return home from Congress. To him it meant something more than mere evasion of state laws and frauds on the state revenue. The subject fell into line with his reflections upon the looseness of the bonds that held the States together, and how unlikely it was that they would ever grow into a respectable or prosperous nation while their present relations continued. Virtually there was no maritime law on the Potomac, and hardly even the pretense of any. What could be more absurd than to provide ports of entry on one bank of a river, while on the other bank, from the source to the sea, the whole country was free to all comers? If the laws of either State were to be regarded on the opposite bank, a treaty was as necessary between them as between any two contiguous states in Europe.

      Madison wrote to Jefferson, who was now a delegate in Congress, pointing out this anomalous condition of things on the Potomac, and suggesting that he should confer with the Maryland delegates upon the subject. The proposal met with Jefferson's approbation; he sought an interview with Mr. Stone, a delegate from Maryland, and, as he wrote to Madison, "finding him of the same opinion, [I] have told him I would, by letters, bring the subject forward on our part. They will consider it, therefore, as originated by this conversation." Why "they" should not have been permitted to "consider it as originated" from Madison's suggestion that Jefferson should have such a conversation is not quite plain; for it was Madison, not Jefferson, who had discovered that here was a wrong that ought to be righted, and who had proposed that each State should appoint commissioners to look into the matter and apply a remedy. So, also, so far as subsequent negotiation on this subject had any influence in bringing about the Constitutional Convention of 1787, it was only because Mr. Madison, having suggested the first practical step in the one case, seized an opportune moment in that negotiation to suggest a similar practical step in the other case. As it is so often said that the Annapolis Convention of 1786 was the direct result of the discussion of the Potomac question, it is worth while to explain what they really had to do with each other.

      The Virginia commissioners were appointed early in the session on Mr. Madison's motion. Maryland moved more slowly, and it was not till the spring of 1785 that the commissioners met. They soon found that any efficient jurisdiction over the Potomac involved more interests than they, or those who appointed them, had considered. Existing difficulties might be disposed of by agreeing upon uniform duties in the two States, and this the commissioners recommended. But СКАЧАТЬ