end for which the federal government
was instituted, and an alarming innovation in the system of
the Union."[355]

One day after the passage of those resolutions, Patrick Henry ceased
to be the governor of Virginia; and five days afterward he was chosen
by Virginia as one of its seven delegates to a convention to be held
at Philadelphia in the following May for the purpose of revising the
federal Constitution. But amid the widespread excitement, amid the
anger and the suspicion then prevailing as to the liability of the
Southern States, even under a weak confederation, to be slaughtered,
in all their most important concerns, by the superior weight and
number of the Northern States, it is easy to see how little inclined
many Southern statesmen would be to increase that liability by making
this weak confederation a strong one. In the list of such Southern
statesmen Patrick Henry must henceforth be reckoned; and, as it was
never his nature to do anything tepidly or by halves, his hostility
to the project for strengthening the Confederation soon became as hot
as it was comprehensive. On the 7th of December, only three days after
he was chosen as a delegate to the Philadelphia convention, Madison,
then at Richmond, wrote concerning him thus anxiously to Washington:--

"I am entirely convinced from what I observe here, that
unless the project of Congress can be reversed, the hopes of
carrying this State into a proper federal system will be
demolished. Many of our most federal leading men are
extremely soured with what has already passed. Mr. Henry,
who has been hitherto the champion of the federal cause, has
become a cold advocate, and, in the event of an actual
sacrifice of the Mississippi by Congress, will
unquestionably go over to the opposite side."[356]

But in spite of this change in his attitude toward the federal cause,
perhaps he would still go to the great convention. On that subject he
appears to have kept his own counsel for several weeks; but by the 1st
of March, 1787, Edmund Randolph, at Richmond, was able to send this
word to Madison, who was back in his place in Congress: "Mr. Henry
peremptorily refuses to go;" and Randolph mentions as Henry's reasons
for this refusal, not only his urgent professional duties, but his
repugnance to the proceedings of Congress in the matter of the
Mississippi.[357] Five days later, from the same city, John Marshall
wrot