er infinitely--and I am sure most of this
convention are of the same opinion--have a king, lords, and
commons, than a government so replete with such
insupportable evils. If we make a king, we may prescribe the
rules by which he shall rule his people, and interpose such
checks as shall prevent him from infringing them; but the
president, in the field, at the head of his army, can
prescribe the terms on which he shall reign master, so far
that it will puzzle any American ever to get his neck from
under the galling yoke.... Will not the recollection of his
crimes teach him to make one bold push for the American
throne? Will not the immense difference between being master
of everything, and being ignominiously tried and punished,
powerfully excite him to make this bold push? But, sir,
where is the existing force to punish him? Can he not, at
the head of his army, beat down every opposition? Away with
your president! we shall have a king. The army will salute
him monarch. Your militia will leave you, and assist in
making him king, and fight against you. And what have you to
oppose this force? What will then become of you and your
rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue?"[383]

Without reproducing here, in further detail, Patrick Henry's
objections to the new Constitution, it may now be stated that they all
sprang from a single idea, and all revolved about that idea, namely,
that the new plan of government, as it then stood, seriously
endangered the rights and liberties of the people of the several
States. And in holding this opinion he was not at all peculiar. Very
many of the ablest and noblest statesmen of the time shared it with
him. Not to name again his chief associates in Virginia, nor to cite
the language of such men as Burke and Rawlins Lowndes, of South
Carolina; as Timothy Bloodworth, of North Carolina; as Samuel Chase
and Luther Martin, of Maryland; as George Clinton, of New York; as
Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts; as
Joshua Atherton, of New Hampshire, it may sufficiently put us into the
tone of contemporary opinion upon the subject, to recall certain grave
words of Jefferson, who, watching the whole scene from the calm
distance of Paris, thus wrote on the 2d of February, 1788, to an
American friend:--

"I own it astonishes me to find such a change wrought in the
op