But Virginia did exactly the other thing. At the moment when
debate upon the revenue law was the most earnest, and the prospect of
carrying it the most hopeful; when a committee appointed by Congress had
already started on their journey northward to expostulate with, and if
possible conciliate, Rhode Island,--at that critical moment came news
from Virginia that she had revoked her assent of a previous session to
the impost law. This was equivalent to instructing her delegates in
Congress to oppose any such measure. The situation was an awkward one
for a representative who had put himself among the foremost of those who
were pushing this policy, and who had been making invidious reflections
upon a State which opposed it. The rule that the will of the
constituents should govern the representative, he now declared, had its
exceptions, and here was a case in point. He continued to enforce the
necessity of a general law to provide a revenue, though his arguments
were no longer pointed with the selfishness and want of patriotism shown
by the people of Rhode Island. In the end his firmness was justified by
Virginia, who again shifted her position when the new act was submitted
to her.

The operation of the law was limited to five and twenty years. This
Hamilton opposed and Madison supported; and in this difference some of
the biographers of both see the foreshadowing of future parties. But it
is more likely that neither of those statesmen thought of their
difference of opinion as difference of principle. The question was,
whether anything could be gained by a deference to that party which,
both felt at that time, threatened to throw away, in adhering to the
state-rights doctrine, all that was gained by the Revolution. They were
agreed upon the necessity of a general law, supreme in all the States,
to meet the obligation of a debt contracted for the general good.
Unless--wrote Madison in February--"unless some amicable and adequate
arrangements be speedily taken for adjusting all the subsisting accounts
and discharging the public engagements, a dissolution of the Union will
be inevitable." He was willing, therefore, to temporize, that the
necessary assent of the State to such a law might be gained. Nobody
hoped that the public debt would be paid off in twenty-five years; but
to assume to levy a federal tax in the States for a longer period, or
till the debt should be discharged, might so arouse state jealousy that
it would be