ct to the will of an un-English King, soon drove the
Whigs in the colonies to revolt, and by the time of the Stamp Act (1765)
a well-knit party of colonial patriots was organized through committees
of correspondence and under the stimulus of local clubs called "Sons of
Liberty." Within a few years, these patriots became the Revolutionists,
and the Tories became the Loyalists. As always happens in a successful
revolution, the party of opposition vanished, and when the peace of
1783 finally put the stamp of reality upon the Declaration of 1776, the
patriot party had won its cause and had served its day.

Immediately thereafter a new issue, and a very significant one, began to
divide the thought of the people. The Articles of Confederation, adopted
as a form of government by the States during a lull in the nationalistic
fervor, had utterly failed to perform the functions of a national
government. Financially the Confederation was a beggar at the doors of
the States; commercially it was impotent; politically it was bankrupt.
The new issue was the formation of a national government that should in
reality represent a federal nation, not a collection of touchy States.
Washington in his farewell letter to the American people at the close of
the war (1783) urged four considerations: a strong central government,
the payment of the national debt, a well-organized militia, and the
surrender by each State of certain local privileges for the good of the
whole. His "legacy," as this letter came to be called, thus bequeathed
to us Nationalism, fortified on the one hand by Honor and on the other
by Preparedness.

The Confederation floundered in the slough of inadequacy for several
years, however, before the people were sufficiently impressed with the
necessity of a federal government. When, finally, through the adroit
maneuver of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, the Constitutional
Convention was called in 1787, the people were in a somewhat chastened
mood, and delegates were sent to the Convention from all the States
except Rhode Island.

No sooner had the delegates convened and chosen George Washington as
presiding officer, than the two opposing sides of opinion were revealed,
the nationalist and the particularist, represented by the Federalists
and the Anti-Federalists, as they later termed themselves. The
Convention, however, was formed of the conservative leaders of the
States, and its completed work contained in a large meas