If it
required Washington's influence and Madison's persuasive reasoning to
bring Virginia into the new system, the repugnance of Massachusetts
was only overcome by the combined force of Hancock's social rank and
Samuel Adams's late, reluctant assent.
On this subject let us hear Samuel Adams for a moment as he wrote to a
friend in 1788:--
"I confess, as I enter the building I stumble at the
threshold. I meet with a national government instead of a
federal union of sovereign states. I am not able to conceive
why the wisdom, of the Convention led them to give the
preference to the former before the latter. If the several
States in the Union are to be one entire nation under one
Legislature, the powers of which shall extend to every
subject of legislation, and its laws be supreme and control
the whole, the idea of sovereignty in these States must be
lost. Indeed, I think, upon such a supposition, those
sovereignties ought to be eradicated from the mind, for they
would be _imperia in imperio_, justly deemed a solecism in
politics, and they would be highly dangerous and destructive
of the peace, union, arid safety of the nation.
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