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 76 Southern Historical Society Papers.

explanation of their use, which has since been given, been advanced at the time when the question arose, it is doubtful if that theory would ever have attained the acceptation which it received.

What is that explanation, so apparent and conclusive, and yet, so far as I am aware, first advanced after the war by that great pub- licist, Albert Taylor Bledsoe ? It is this : The original draft of the Constitution, instead of using in its preamble the words " We, the people of the United States," used the words "We, the people of the States of Virginia, Massachusetts," etc., specifying each State by name as parties to the compact. So matters stood until the lan- guage of the Constitution was submitted to the revision of a " com- mittee on style." That committee discovered that under the provisions relative to the mode of ratification which directed that the accession of any nine States should carry the Constitution into effect, the nam ing of all or any .of the States in the preamble was impracticable, because it might well be that all the States would not ratify, and it would be impossible to state in advance which nine of them would do so. How, then, were they to be named? It thus became abso- lutely necessary to strike out the enumeration of the States, and to substitute some general phrase which should embrace those States which should ratify and exclude those which should reject the Consti- tution. Such a phrase was discovered in the words, " the people of the United States," by which the convention surely did not intend to alter the entire nature of the instrument, but only meant the respec- tive peoples of the several States, not named only because unknown, which should thereafter become parties, and by consenting to the proposed Union, become thereby United States. Gouverneur Mor- ris, of Pennsylvania, was chairman of the committee on style which reported this alteration in the preamble, and he informs us in one of his letters, that the Constitution, in its final shape, was " written by the fingers which write this letter." He, therefore, wrote the words, " We, the people of the United States," in the preamble and should have known better than any other what was their true import. He was one of the most pronounced advocates of a strong government. The record shows that he had actually moved the reference of the Con- stitution for ratification to " one general convention chosen and authorized by the people, to consider, to amend, and establish the same," but that his motion had not even received a second. What becomes, then, of the argument based on this expression of the pre- amble, when we find that Gouverneur Morris, its author, with his well known desire to establish a National government, himself declares in