I live to return
to America, I will use all my endeavours to have them altered.(*) I also
declare myself opposed to almost the whole of your administration; for
I know it to have been deceitful, if not perfidious, as I shall shew
in the course of this letter. But as to the point of consolidating the
States into a Federal Government, it so happens, that the proposition
for that purpose came originally from myself. I proposed it in a letter
to Chancellor Livingston in the spring of 1782, while that gentleman
was Minister for Foreign Affairs. The five per cent, duty recommended
by Congress had then fallen through, having been adopted by some of the
States, altered by others, rejected by Rhode Island, and repealed by
Virginia after it had been consented to. The proposal in the letter I
allude to, was to get over the whole difficulty at once, by annexing a
continental legislative body to Congress; for in order to have any law
of the Union uniform, the case could only be, that either Congress, as
it then stood, must frame the law, and the States severally adopt it
without alteration, or the States must erect a Continental Legislature
for the purpose. Chancellor Livingston, Robert Morris, Gouverneur
Morris, and myself, had a meeting at the house of Robert Morris on
the subject of that letter. There was no diversity of opinion on the
proposition for a Continental Legislature: the only difficulty was on
the manner of bringing the proposition forward. For my own part, as I
considered it as a remedy in reserve, that could be applied at any time
_when the States saw themselves wrong enough to be put right_, (which
did not appear to be the case at that time) I did not see the propriety
of urging it precipitately, and declined being the publisher of it
myself. After this account of a fact, the leaders of your party will
scarcely have the hardiness to apply to me the term of Antifederalist.
But I can go to a date and to a fact beyond this; for the proposition
for electing a continental convention to form the Continental Government
is one of the subjects treated of in the pamphlet _Common Sense_.(1)

* I have always been opposed to the mode of refining
Government up to an individual, or what is called a single
Executive. Such a man will always be the chief of a party. A
plurality is far better: It combines the mass of a nation
better together: And besides this, it is necessary to the
manly mind of a republ