SECRET June 20. 1840 PROCEEDINGS AND DEBATES OF THE CONVENTION mat canvention 1787 ASSEMBLED AT PHILADELPHIA, IN THE YEAR 1787, FOR THE PURPOSE OF FORMING THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. FROM NOTES TAKEN BY THE LATE ROBERT YATES, ESQUIRE, CHIEF ESQUIRE, LATE CHANCELLOR OF THAT STATE, MEMBERS OF THAT CONVENTION. INCLUDING "THE GENUINE INFORMATION," LAID BEFORE THE LEGISLATURE OF MARYLAND, BY LUTHER MARTIN, ESQUIRE, THEN ATTORNEY-GENERAL OF THAT STATE, AND MEMBER OF THE SAME CONVENTION. ALSO. OTHER HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS, RELATIVE TO THE FEDERAL COMPACT OF THE NORTH AMERICAN UNION. RICHMOND, VA. PUBLISHED BY WILBUR CURTISS. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1838, by WARNER W. GUY, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia. CAMBRIDGE: STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY 1880 P R E F AСЕ. THE historians of kings, with a religious care, collect the first words, the first sentiments, and the first acts of their infancy; in the age of innocence, those great personages have not yet acquired the art of disguise; and philosophy, more than once, has prognosticated, what they would be on the throne, by what they have been in the nursery. The historians of free nations ought not to be less attentive to collect whatever may throw light on the origin of their government, on the principles which have guided their legislators, and on the seeds of disease from which human prudence has never been able to guard entirely human institutions. The exhibition of such facts impresses the mind with clear and achromatic ideas of the nature, action, and power of those political bodies, much better than the most elaborate dissertations. It is to increase that source of public instruction, that a friend of American history, who long ago a * had secured in his portfolio the original notes of Mr. Yates of the secret proceedings of the convention that framed the present Constitution of the United States, has thought that it would be useful to give publicity to those authentic documents; especially at a period when improvements and alterations in the local constitution of one of the main pillars of the North American union, are about to be undertaken. These documents may serve to show the constitutional lines drawn by the true spirit of 1776, and patriotically defended by the old republicans of 1787; and account, in many respects, for a succession of events which are the natural, if not the necessary results of a preexisting order of things. Congress has lately caused to be published the journal of the formal proceedings of the federal convention; but, if we are allowed to repeat what has previously been observed on that subject, in the proposals circulated for publishing the present collection, that official journal has left history in the dark as to the views of the legislators and the principles upon which they acted; and it is in reality nothing but a diplomatic skeleton, deprived of its vital parts. Messrs. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, in the numbers so well known under the title of the Federalist, which made their appearance previous to the interpolation of the ten declaratory |