le 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