Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Mercy Otis Warren Writing Against the Constitution:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_01_18-2009_01_24.shtml#1232565241
Here's the opening paragraph of her [1]1788 pamphlet urging rejection
of the Constitution, signed Columbian Patriot:
Mankind may amuse themselves with theoretick systems of liberty,
and trace its social and moral effects on sciences, virtue,
industry and every improvement of which the human mind is capable;
but we can only discern its true value by the practical and
wretched effects of slavery; and thus dreadfully will they be
realized, when the inhabitants of the Eastern States are dragging
out a miserable existence, only on the gleanings of their fields;
and the Southern, blessed with a softer and more fertile climate,
are languishing in hopeless poverty; and when asked, what is become
of the flower of their crop, and the rich produce of their
farms�they may answer in the hapless stile of the Man of La
Mancha,� �- The �steward of my Lord has seized and sent it to
Madrid.� �- Or, in the more literal language of truth, The
exigencies of government require that the collectors of the revenue
should transmit it to the Federal City.
I don't share Mrs. Warren's preference for the then-existing Articles
of Confederation system over the Constitution, and I think that even
at the time those arguments were rightly seen as unsound; but they
struck me as worth remembering. The first two clauses strike me as
particularly apt.
The pamphlet is often credited to Elbridge Gerry, but as best I can
tell it has now been pretty definitively assigned to Mercy Warren. For
the many who don't know of her (as I didn't until recently), I should
mention that Warren was a leading American playwright of the
immediately pre- and post-Revolutionary era, and the author of History
of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution
(1805), which was at the time one of the leading histories of the
subject.
References
1.
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1670&chapter=1955&layout=html&Itemid=27
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