and distrusting the compliance of the others. Whilst the paper emissions of Congs. continued to circulate they were employed as a sinew of war, like gold & silver. When that ceased to be the case, the fatal defect of the political System was felt in its alarming force. The war was merely kept alive and brought to a successful conclusion by such foreign aids and temporary expedients as could be applied; a hope prevailing with many, and a wish with all, that a state of peace, and the sources of prosperity opened by it, would give to the Confederacy in practice, the efficiency which had been inferred from its theory.
The close of the war however brought no-cure for the public embarrasments. The States relieved from the pressure of foreign danger, and flushed with the enjoyment of independent and sovereign power; (instead of a diminished disposition to part with it,) persevered in omissions and in measures incompatible with their relations to the Federal Govt. and with those among themselves;[1]
Having served as a member of Congs. through the period between Mar. 1780 & the arrival of peice in 1783, I had become intimately acquainted with the public distresses and the causes of them. I had observed the successful—opposition to every attempt to procure a remedy by new grants of power to Congs. I had found moreover that despair of success hung over the compromising provision for the public necessities of April 1783 which had been so elaborately planned and so impressively recommended to the States.[2] Sympathizing, under this aspect of affairs, in the alarm of the friends of free Govt, at the threatened danger of an abortive result to the great & perhaps last experiment in its favour, I could not be insensible to the obligation to co-operate as far as I could in averting the calamity. With this view I acceded to the desire of my fellow Citizens of the County that I should be one of its representatives in the Legislature, hoping that I might there best contribute to inculcate the critical posture to which the Revolutionary cause was reduced, and the merit of a leading agency of the State in bringing about a rescue of the Union and the blessings of liberty staked on it, from an impending catastrophe.
It required but little time after taking my seat in the House of Delegates in May 1784. to discover that however favorable the general disposition of the State might be towards the Confederacy the Legislature retained the aversion of its predecessors to transfers
