Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. I.djvu/52

32 It was but the other day that we were shedding our blood to obtain the constitutions under which we now live–constitutions of our own choice and making–and now we are unsheathing the sword to overturn them." He was thus in full sympathy with the efforts of his friends to confer new and greater powers on the Federal Government, and he yielded to their earnest solicitations in consenting to be named at the head of the Virginia delegates to the convention in Philadelphia on May 14, 1787. Of that ever-memorable convention he was unanimously elected president, and on the following 17th of September he had the supreme satisfaction of addressing a letter to congress announcing the adoption of the constitution of the United States, which had been signed on that day. "In all our deliberations on this subject," he said in that letter, "we kept steadily in our view that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American–the consolidation of our Union–in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, and perhaps our national existence."

This constitution having passed the ordeal of congress and been ratified and adopted by the people, through the conventions of the states, nothing remained but to organize the government in conformity with its provisions. As early as July 2, 1788, congress had been notified that the necessary approval of nine states had been obtained, but