onds connecting the
States. Congress had powers which were only recommendatory, and its
recommendations were ignored by the local legislatures. The army, unpaid
and frequently in actual distress, was so rapidly losing its morale that
it might easily become a prey to demagogues. The treaties of the
new nation were flouted by every State in the Union. Tariff wars and
conflicting land grants embittered the relations of sister States. The
foreign trade of the country, it was asserted, "was regulated, taxed,
monopolized, and crippled at the pleasure of the maritime powers
of Europe." Burdened with debts which were the legacy of an era of
speculation, a considerable part of the population, especially of the
farmer class, was demanding measures of relief which threatened the
security of contracts. "Laws suspending the collection of debts,
insolvent laws, instalment laws, tender laws, and other expedients of a
like nature, were familiarly adopted or openly and boldly vindicated. *

* This review of conditions under the later Confederation is
taken from Story's "Discourse," which is in turn based, at this point,
on Marshall's "Life of Washington" and certain letters of his to Story.

From the outset Marshall ranged himself on the side of that party
in the Virginia Legislature which, under the leadership of Madison,
demanded with growing insistence a general and radical constitutional
reform designed at once to strengthen the national power and to curtail
state legislative power. His attitude was determined not only by his
sympathy for the sufferings of his former comrades in arms and by his
veneration for his father and for Washington, who were of the same
party, but also by his military experience, which had rendered
the pretensions of state sovereignty ridiculous in his eyes. Local
discontent came to a head in the autumn of 1786 with the outbreak of
Shays's Rebellion in western Massachusetts. Marshall, along with the
great body of public men of the day, conceived for the movement the
gravest alarm, and the more so since he considered it as the natural
culmination of prevailing tendencies. In a letter to James Wilkinson
early in 1787, he wrote: "These violent... dissensions in a State I had
thought inferior in wisdom and virtue to no one in our Union, added to
the strong tendency which the politics of many eminent characters among
ourselves have to promote private and public dishonesty, cast a deep
shade over that bright