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"Gentlemen, I feel great difficulty how to act. I am possessed of two separate powers—the one in esse and the other in posse. I am Vice President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything. But am president also of the Senate. When the President comes into the Senate, what shall he be? I cannot be [president] then. No, gentlemen, I cannot, I cannot. I wish, gentlemen, to think what I shall be."
Compared to the work before the first Congress, the work of later Congresses, even under the New Deal, was duck soup. The first Congress had to make its rules, set up the Departments of State, Treasury and War, fill the Treasury (by tariffs which remained models of log-rolling for a century), set up the Federal judiciary (its designer, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, became fourth Chief Justice), assume the national and State ,debts (by trading to Virginia the capital site on the Potomac). All this it did, and more.
A large majority of its members were from the privileged classes—wealthy planters, landowners, merchants, bankers, lawyers. Yet they heeded the demands of Virginia, New York and Massachusetts and passed the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, guaranteeing individual liberties to all men.
Last week the sesquicentennial was marked by two more events: 1) rich Bibliophile A. S. W. Rosenbach of Philadelphia revealed that he had obtained, for an undisclosed sum from an undisclosed source, the original draft of the Bill of Rights; 2) Massachusetts got around at last to ratifying it.* Explained Governor Saltonstall as he signed in the presence of uniformed cadets: his State's delay was due to the liberty-loving fathers of Massachusetts having sought to protect the people's rights by "even more inclusive definitions."
* Who had previously refused to break his six-year rule of silence even to speak at this birthday party.
* Connecticut and Georgia have not yet ratified.