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 ALSO, OTHER HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS, RELATIVE TO THE federal COMPACT OF THE NORTH AMERICAN UNION. CINCINNATI: PUBLISHED BY ALSTON MYGATT. 63362 3 4.S.4620.7.2 Cert Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1838, by in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia PREFACE 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 |
