n the capacity of secretary to the
Congress for foreign affairs. The incompetency of the articles of
confederation for the management of the affairs of the Union at home
and abroad was demonstrated to them by the painful and mortifying
experience of every day. Washington, though in retirement, was
brooding over the cruel injustice suffered by his associates in
arms, the warriors of the Revolution; over the prostration of the
public credit and the faith of the nation, in the neglect to provide
for the payment even of the interest upon the public debt; over the
disappointed hopes of the friends of freedom; in the language of the
address from Congress to the States of the eighteenth of April, 1783
--"the pride and boast of America, that the rights for which she
contended were the rights of human nature."

At his residence at Mount Vernon, in March 1785, the first idea was
started of a revisal of the articles of confederation, by an
organization, of means differing from that of a compact between the
State legislatures and their own delegates in Congress. A
convention of delegates from the State legislatures, independent of
the Congress itself, was the expedient which presented itself for
effecting the purpose, and an augmentation of the powers of Congress
for the regulation of commerce, as the object for which this
assembly was to be convened. In January 1786 the proposal was made
and adopted in the legislature of Virginia, and communicated to the
other State legislatures.

The convention was held at Annapolis, in September of that year. It
was attended by delegates from only five of the central States, who,
on comparing their restricted powers with the glaring and
universally acknowledged defects of the confederation reported only
a recommendation for the assemblage of another convention of
delegates to meet at Philadelphia, in May 1787, from all the States,
and with enlarged powers.

The Constitution of the United States was the work of this
convention. But in its construction the convention immediately
perceived that they must retrace their steps, and fall back from a
league of friendship between sovereign States to the constituent
sovereignty of the people; from power to right--from the
irresponsible despotism of State sovereignty to the self-evident
truths of the Declaration of Independence. In that instrument, the
right to institute and to alter governments among men was ascribed
exclusively to the people-