without at any time aspiring to her fidelity to the Federal compact—on the suggestion of one of the most distinguished and most patriotic, but most maligned, of her citizens, New York had been the first to propose measures for a complete revision of the Federal Constitution.
In this hazardous undertaking, however, while she had steadily sought the extension of sufficient authority to the Federal Congress to render the existing government entirely efficient for the purposes for which it had been organized, New York had never lost sight of her own dignity, nor ceased to guard, in the most careful manner, all her rights as a free, sovereign, and independent commonwealth. Accordingly, while she had steadily sought the delegation , by the several constituent states of the Confederacy, of sufficient authority to the Federal Congress to maintain the credit of the United States, to pay their obligations, and, generally, to execute its duties with more efficiency and despatch, she had as steadily opposed every movement which might be construed to imply a surrender of the prerogatives of her sovereignty, or which, in the future, might be considered as her approval of a centralization of “the right to command”; and every proposition which possibly might serve at any time to obliterate the lines of the several states, or to consolidate the thirteen distinct peoples and sovereignties which then existed within the Union, into one people, one nation, one sovereignty, was vigorously opposed both by her members and her Government.
Governed by these well-known sentiments, and sustained by so jealous a constituency, it need not be wondered at, that the delegation from New York in the Federal Convention—a body which had originated in the action of the Legislature of that state, several months before—had firmly disapproved the pretensions, and resolutely opposed the designs, of several of the states, in the formation of a new constitution; or that, when the simple result which she had proposed had been found unattainable, two of the three gentlemen who composed her delegation in that Convention had considered it their duty to withdraw from its