vision of the ascendancy which the judiciary
was to obtain in the development of the American constitutional system.
The debates were almost wholly about the possibilities of conflict between
the state and the federal courts. Although Maclay's diary gives a
one-sided and distorted account of the proceedings in the Senate, the
course of the debate is clear. Ellsworth of Connecticut had principal
charge of the bill. At the outset Lee and Grayson of Virginia made an
ineffectual effort to confine the original jurisdiction of the federal
courts to cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, and argued that
jurisdiction over other cases involving federal law might be conferred
upon state courts. This was a point on which there had been some
difference of opinion between Hamilton and Madison. The former held that
it was within the competency of Congress, when instituting tribunals
inferior to the Supreme Court, to adopt the state courts for that purpose.
Madison held that nothing less than a system of federal courts quite
distinct from the state courts would satisfy the requirements of the
Constitution. When the bill was taken up in the House, there was a long
debate over this matter. The costly duplication of judicial establishments
that has ever since existed in the United States is certainly not
necessary to a federal system, but is an American peculiarity. The
advocates of a unified system were hampered by the fact that this view was
pressed by some in a spirit of hostility to the Constitution. The decisive
argument was the untrustworthiness of the state courts. Madison urged this
fact with great force and pointed out that in some of the States the
courts "are so dependent on the state legislatures, that to make the
federal laws dependent on them, would throw us back into all the
embarrassments which characterized our former situation." Such was the low
repute of the state legislatures that the only way in which this argument
could be met was to argue that "Congress shall have power, in its fullest
extent, to correct, reverse, or affirm, any decree of a state court." This
high assertion of federal authority was made by Jackson of Georgia in the
course of a long legal argument. The debate did not follow sectional
lines, and in general it was not unfairly described by Maclay as a
lawyer's wrangle. The bill was put into shape by the Senate, and reached
the House toward the close of the session when the struggle over the site