been delegates to
the national convention. Several members of the House of
Representatives, headed by James Madison, had also been at Philadelphia
in 1787. In making his appointments, Washington strengthened the new
system of government still further by a judicious selection of
officials. He chose as Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton,
who had been the most zealous for its success; General Knox, head of the
War Department, and Edmund Randolph, the Attorney-General, were likewise
conspicuous friends of the experiment. Every member of the federal
judiciary whom Washington appointed, from the Chief Justice, John Jay,
down to the justices of the district courts, had favored the
ratification of the Constitution; and a majority of them had served as
members of the national convention that framed the document or of the
state ratifying conventions. Only one man of influence in the new
government, Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State, was reckoned as a
doubter in the house of the faithful. He had expressed opinions both for
and against the Constitution; but he had been out of the country acting
as the minister at Paris when the Constitution was drafted and ratified.

=An Opposition to Conciliate.=--The inauguration of Washington amid the
plaudits of his countrymen did not set at rest all the political turmoil
which had been aroused by the angry contest over ratification. "The
interesting nature of the question," wrote John Marshall, "the equality
of the parties, the animation produced inevitably by ardent debate had a
necessary tendency to embitter the dispositions of the vanquished and to
fix more deeply in many bosoms their prejudices against a plan of
government in opposition to which all their passions were enlisted." The
leaders gathered around Washington were well aware of the excited state
of the country. They saw Rhode Island and North Carolina still outside
of the union.[1] They knew by what small margins the Constitution had
been approved in the great states of Massachusetts, Virginia, and New
York. They were equally aware that a majority of the state conventions,
in yielding reluctant approval to the Constitution, had drawn a number
of amendments for immediate submission to the states.

=The First Amendments--a Bill of Rights.=--To meet the opposition,
Madison proposed, and the first Congress adopted, a series of amendments
to the Constitution. Ten of them were soon ratified and became in 1791 a
part o