Nor were the citizens of the youngest of the colonies disposed to put the control of their persons and their purses unreservedly into the hands of any imperial central authority.
After the Constitution of 1789 (to take the date from the day, April 30, 1789, on which Washington was inaugurated at New York as the first President of the United States) had been definitely adopted by eleven States, the two States of North Carolina and Rhode Island still withholding their ratification of the instrument, remained as foreign powers outside of the Union, the former until the 21st of November 1789, and the latter until the 29th of May 1790.
Never was a great compact more opportunely framed and ratified!
Almost upon the morrow of these final adhesions to the “more perfect Union,” the storm of the French Revolution broke upon the world, bringing with it great international convulsions which affected every nerve and fibre of the social, political, and industrial life of America, and tested to the utmost every seam and joint in the fabric of the new American Republic. The excesses of Jacobinism in France strengthened the doubts and fears of many excellent persons in America who had small faith in the capacity of the people for self-government on a grand scale, and who accepted the Constitution of 1789 not as a final and trustworthy frame of polity, but because, while they thought it, to use the language of one of the ablest of their number, “frail and worthless in itself,” they hoped to see it lead up to the eventual establishment of some such “splendid central government” as in our own times Mr. Seward, the true founder of the “Republican” party which has just been defeated in the United States, used to dream of and did his best to build up.
The influence of these doubts and fears upon the politics of the new American Republic was fortunately met and countered by the genius and the faith of a group of great American statesmen, the friends and associates of Thomas Jefferson; and the fundamental divergence between the controlling ideas of the two great parties which now occupy the field of American politics goes back to this closing decade of the eighteenth century. When the existing Constitution was first submitted by the Convention of 1787 to the people and to the States, those who, with Alexander Hamilton of New York, and James Madison of Virginia, advocated its adoption were called “Federalists”, and those who, with Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry of Virginia, opposed it as threatening the rights and sovereignty of the States, were called Anti-Federalists. After its adoption the latter party took the name of “Strict Constructionists,” their object being to bind down the administration of the new system to the closest and most rigid interpretation of the powers conferred by the States upon the Federal Government; while their opponents were styled “Broad Constructionists.” Both parties happily had such confidence in the patriotism and wisdom of Washington that he came into power as first President by a unanimous vote, and selected his first cabinet from the leaders of both the great parties which had contended over the adoption and the construction of the new Constitution. At the first session of the first Congress, in 1789, ten amendments to the Constitution were adopted, embodying a Bill of Rights to secure the liberties of the citizens of the several States, and explicitly reserving to the several States “respectively” or to the people, “all the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States.” These amendments Thomas Jefferson counselled the friends of Home Rule and State Rights to accept as an adequate guarantee of both. His wise advice was taken, and the great political party which was formed under the Constitution took, at his suggestion, the name of the “Republican Party.” The name was appropriate enough to that party which held each State of the new Union to be indeed an independent “Republic,” and regarded the “Federal” Government as the agent and protector of the “Republican” independence of each State.