several other features, he believed would prove a failure, and this view time fully vindicated. The main principle of the confederation was wrong, and that wrong he had aided in disseminating. It was that of centering the great effective forces, the sovereignty, in the individual States, instead of in the Congress, the national head. The unavoidable and natural result of this bond of union was the absence of all sense of responsibility in the States, the powerlessness of the Congress for enforcing the common needs of the army and administration of public affairs, and the utter ruin which finally threatened the existence of the Republic, and led, as an absolute necessity, to the formation of the Constitution in 1787, and the speedy organization of the new government with national legislative, judicial, and executive establishments, having barely strength enough to maintain a respectable attitude among nations. But the old "Articles of Confederation of the United States" subserved the purpose of a useful experiment, while poorly answering the objects of their origin for ten years.

CHAPTER XIV.

MR. ADAMS IN THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS-HIS SERVICES AS THE FIRST AMERICAN MINISTER OF WARTHE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION.

URING the last year of Mr. Adams's services in

DUR

the Congress that body was compelled, by the movements of the British army, to change its place of sitting quite frequently. It may not be amiss to insert here the following statement, showing the peripatetic character of the old Continental Congress, which was, to Ethan Allen, only second in authority to the Great Jehovah. It first convened on the 5th of September, 1774, at Philadelphia; next at the same place, May 10, 1775; in Baltimore, December 20, 1776; Philadelphia, March 4, 1777; Lancaster, Pa., September 27, 1777; York, Pa., September 30, 1777; Philadelphia, July 2, 1778; Princeton, N. J., June 30, 1783; Annapolis, November 26, 1783; Trenton, N. J., November 1, 1784; New York, January 11, 1785.

The Articles of Confederation were adopted while Congress sat at York, Pennsylvania. During the last years of its existence the Congress met annually on the first Monday of November.

While it will, perhaps, and should always remain the opinion of Americans that, without General Washington, the Revolutionary War would have been unsuccessful, it would be difficult to establish the belief, how

ever well founded it really might be, that John Adams, in his place, was equally essential to the success of the American cause, and the establishment of this Republic. It would be useless to institute a comparison between General Washington and Mr. Adams or any other man. Washington really stood by himself, and was not comparable with anybody else. In almost every feature and trait, both mentally and physically, there was some contemporary character with Washington, who excelled him or was his equal; but he still stood alone, and in a combination of traits suited to the time and its necessities, no single individual, and no body of individuals, could have filled his place.

It may be safe, in the ordinary way of speaking, to say that the result would have been the same if Mr. Adams had never argued against the "Stamp Act," and in favor of the assumption or principle of no taxation without representation; if he had never written "Canon and Feudal Law," or "Essays on the British Constitution;" if he had never answered "Philanthropos," the Tory; or his letters had not been written against General Brattle on the "Independence of the Judiciary;" if he had not been "Novanglus," in his elaborate defense of the American cause in opposition to "Massachusettensis," the loyalist and Tory (Daniel Leonard); if he had never written "Thoughts on Government," on which the present State systems were modeled, and hundreds of times, in all circumstances, illustrated and defended his plan of government; if he had not stood more firmly than any other man in the Congress against useless methods of conciliation and worthless appeals to Great Britain, and labored at every available and salient point to strengthen the

American cause with the timid and the strong; if he had not, day after day, and night after night, insinuated and developed his views of the propriety and necessity of independence, and defended the Declaration when at last it was reached, item by item, before the Congress, and member by member, with a wisdom. and burning eloquence which were then, and ever since have been, the admiration of his countrymen; if he had not been the "Colossus of the Declaration;" or, indeed, if he had not discovered and put forward Washington as the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army.

Who

Still, if the American Union was so much and certainly a matter of manifest destiny, did not Mr. Adams fill his own niche in the Providential scheme? could have taken his place? General Washington could not have done so. Nor Samuel Adams, John Hancock, John Rutledge, Richard Henry Lee, nor Thomas Jefferson, nor any other man. Yet even this fact does not, perhaps, forbid the theory that the work of others or the aggregate of efforts, however dilatory or different in mode would, in time, have led to the same end. Mr. Adams thought, or at times certainly did think, that much would have been gained to the cause if all the great measures which he advocated had been adopted and put in operation without delay, when first announced. But this was, no doubt, an incorrect view of the case. Time was necessary to form and temper public sentiment. Even, as it was, when the Declaration of Independence was carried, many men of prominence were ready to throw up their hands and cry that their skirts were free from responsibility for the evils likely to follow the rash act.

The Americans, having now declared themselves an independent people, were in a better condition to expect foreign nations to recognize them as such; and to this end Mr. Adams had long directed his attention. The entire interests of the country divided themselves with him into three grand subjects; viz., a wellorganized system of government for the States separately and as a whole, a well-founded foreign system, and a thorough and vigorous plan for prosecuting the war.

Having thoroughly studied the ancient and modern forms of government, he was not long in concluding that the British constitution was not only the best in the world, but was the most readily adaptable to America, which, to a great extent, had always been republican under it. His views were exceedingly lucid

on this subject, and, without a moment's notice, he was ready in all places to formulate them. He made it his constant business on entering the Congress from the outset until he withdrew from that body in the fall of 1777, to study the peculiar social conditions of the various Colonies, and this knowledge he never lost sight of in his letters to the South or the North, in his plans for officering and supplying the army, or in his plans for political establishments. For the States the uniform general system embraced three departments, an executive, a legislative (with two branches), and a judicial; and this plan, so constantly and persistently advocated by Mr. Adams, became the political establishment of the country. It does not appear, however, that even Mr. Adams was then able to apply the same principles to the organization of a national Union, although Dr. Franklin had substantially projected the present form of government in the convention at Albany, in 1754.