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CHAP. from the state of subjection into that of independent republics, the great events which were rapidly ad1776. vancing elevated him above the weaknesses of human May. passions, and filled his mind with awe. Many of those who were to take part in framing constitutions for future millions, turned to him for advice. He recalled the first principles of political morals, the lessons inculcated by American experience, and the example of England. Familiar with the wise and eloquent writings of those of her sons who had treated of liberty, and combining with them the results of his own reflections, he did not shrink from offering his advice. He declared the only moral foundation of government to be the consent of the people; yet he counselled respect for existing rules, and to avoid opening a fruitful source of controversy, he refused to promote for the present any alteration, at least in Massachusetts, in the qualifications of voters. "There is no good government," he said, "but what is republican; for a republic is an empire of laws and not of men; and to constitute the best of republics, he enforced the necessity of separating the executive, legislative, and judicial powers. The ill use which the royal governors had made of the veto power did not confuse his judgment; he upheld the principle that the chief executive magistrate ought to be invested with a negative upon the legislature. To the judges he wished to assign commissions during good behavior; and to establish their salaries by law; but to make them liable to impeachment and removal by the grand inquest of the colony.

The republics of the ancient world had grown out of cities, so that their governments were originally

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municipalities; to make a republic possible in the CHAP. large territories embraced in the several American colonies, where the whole society could never be as- 1776. May. sembled, power was to be deputed by the many to a few, who were to be elected by suffrage, and were in theory to be a faithful miniature portrait of the people. Nor yet should all power be intrusted to one representative assembly. The advocates of a perfect unity in government favored the concentration of power in one body, for the sake of an unobstructed exercise of the popular will; but John Adams taught, what an analysis of the human mind and the examples of history through thousands of years unite to confirm, that a single assembly is liable to the frailties of a single individual; to passionate caprices, and to a selfish eagerness for the increase of its own importance. "If the legislative power," such were his words just as the American constitutions were forming, "if the legislative power is wholly in one assembly, and the executive in another, or in a single person, these two powers will oppose and encroach upon each other, until the contest shall end in war, and the whole power, legislative and executive, be usurped by the strongest."

These are words to be inscribed on the memory and hearts of every convention that would constitute a republic; yet at that time there was not one member of the continental congress who applied the principle to the continental congress itself. Hawley of Northampton had advised an American parliament with two houses of legislature; but John Adams saw no occasion for any continental constitution except a congress which should contain a fair representation of the colonies, and confine its authority sacredly to war,

CHAP. trade, disputes between colony and colony, the postoffice, and the unappropriated public lands.

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1776.

May.

In the separate colonies, he urged that all the youth should be liberally educated, and all men be required to keep arms and to be trained to their use. A country having a constitution founded on these principles, diffusing knowledge among the people, and inspiring them with the conscious dignity becoming freemen, would, "when compared with the regions of monarchical or aristocratical domination, seem an Arcadia or an Elysium."

During these discussions, James Mugford, a Marblehead sea-captain, in a continental cruiser of but fifty tons and four guns, captured, and brought into Boston harbor, the British ship "Hope," which had on board fifteen hundred barrels of powder. This cargo made her the most valuable prize that had been taken. Two days later, on the nineteenth of May, the gal lant officer prepared to go out again. At Nantasket he was attacked by thirteen boats from a British manof-war; they were beaten off with great loss, while none of the Americans was hurt except Mugford, who fought heroically, and was mortally wounded.

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May.

On the sixth day of May, forty-five members of CHAP the house of burgesses of Virginia met at the capitol in Williamsburg pursuant to their adjournment; but 1776. as they were of the opinion that the ancient constitution had been subverted by the king and parliament of Great Britain, they dissolved themselves unanimously, and thus the last vestige of the king's authority passed away.

The delegates of Virginia, who on the same morning assembled in convention, were a constituent and an executive assembly. They represented the oldest and the largest colony, whose institutions had been fashioned on the model recommended by Bacon, and whose inhabitants for nearly a hundred and seventy years had been eminently loyal, and had sustained the church of England as the establishment of the land.

Its people, having in their origin a perceptible but never an exclusive influence of the cavaliers, had sprung

May.

CHAP. mainly from adventurers, who were not fugitives for LXIV. conscience' sake, or sufferers from persecution, or pas1776 sionate partisans of monarchy. The population had been recruited by successive infusions of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians; Huguenots, and the descendants of Huguenots; men who had been so attached to Cromwell or to the republic, that they preferred to emigrate on the return of Charles the Second; Baptists, and other dissenters; and in the valley of Virginia there was already a very large German population. Beside all these, there was the great body of the backwoodsmen, rovers from Maryland and Pennsylvania, not caring much for the record of their lineage.

The territory for which the convention was to act was not a limited one like that of Sparta or Attica: beginning at the ocean, it comprised the great bay of the Chesapeake, with its central and southern tributaries; the beautiful valleys on the head springs of the Roanoke and along the whole course of the Shenandoah; the country beyond the mountains, including the sources of the Monongahela and the Cumberland rivers, and extending indefinitely to the Tennessee and beyond it. Nor that only: Virginia insisted that its jurisdiction stretched without bounds over all the country west and northwest of a line two hundred miles north of Old Point Comfort, not granted to others by royal charters; and there was no one to dispute a large part of this claim except the province of Quebec under an act of parliament which the continental congress had annulled. For all this wide region, rich in soil, precious minerals, healing springs, forests, convenient marts for foreign commerce, the great pathways to the west, more fertile, more spa