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 with the United States. But that trade and commerce upon which the prosperity of this state much depends, will be preserved as free and open between this and the United States as our different situations at present can possibly admit. Earnestly desiring and proposing to adopt such commercial regulations on our part as shall not tend to defeat the collection of the revenue of the United States, but rather to act in conformity to, or corporate [co-operate] therewith, and desiring also to give the strongest assurances that we shall during our present situation use our utmost endeavors to be in preparation, from time to time, to answer our proportion of such part of the interest or principal of the foreign and domestic debt, as the United States shall judge expedient to pay and discharge.

We feel ourselves attached by the strongest ties of friendship, kindred and of interest with our sister states, and we cannot without the greatest reluctance look to any other quarter for those advantages of commercial intercourse which we conceveconceive [sic] to be more natural and recprocalreciprocal [sic] between them and us.

2. Virginia on the Assumption of State Debts.

December 23, 1790.

Virginia especially was opposed to the act for the assumption of State debts, as she had already paid off the greater portion of her revolutionary debt. Jefferson, nearly a month prior to the adoption of this memorial, wrote Morris: "The States of Virginia and North Carolina are peculiarly dissatisfied with this measure. I believe, however, that it is harped on by many to mask their disaffection to the government on other grounds. Its great foe in Virginia is an implacable one." (Patrick Henry.) Jefferson's Works, (ed. 1854), III, 198; Writings (Ford's ed.), V, 250.

In addition to this memorial, the Legislature of Virginia also passed resolutions, Dec. 21, 1790, one of which pronounced the law in question "repugnant to the Constitution of the United States, as it goes to the exercise of a power not expressly granted to the general government." Hening's Statutes. XIII, 234. As soon as this resolution had passed the House of Delegates, Hamilton wrote to Chief Justice Jay: "This is the first symptom of a spirit which must either be killed or will kill the Constitution of the United States.