Why this difference?  It did not always exist.  It cost New York and Massachusetts as severe a struggle to accept the Constitution of 1787 as it did Virginia.  George Clinton, Governor of New York, had as much State pride as Patrick Henry, orator of Virginia, and parted as reluctantly with a portion of the sovereignty which he wielded.  If it required Washington’s influence and Madison’s persuasive reasoning to bring Virginia into the new system, the repugnance of Massachusetts was only overcome by the combined force of Hancock’s social rank and Samuel Adams’s late, reluctant assent.

On this subject let us hear Samuel Adams for a moment as he wrote to a friend in 1788:—­

“I confess, as I enter the building I stumble at the threshold.  I meet with a national government instead of a federal union of sovereign states.  I am not able to conceive why the wisdom, of the Convention led them to give the preference to the former before the latter.  If the several States in the Union are to be one entire nation under one Legislature, the powers of which shall extend to every subject of legislation, and its laws be supreme and control the whole, the idea of sovereignty in these States must be lost.  Indeed, I think, upon such a supposition, those sovereignties ought to be eradicated from the mind, for they would be imperia in imperio, justly deemed a solecism in politics, and they would be highly dangerous and destructive of the peace, union, arid safety of the nation.

“And can this National Legislature be competent to make laws for the free internal government of one people, living in climates so remote, and whose habits and particular interests are, and probably always will be, so different?  Is it to be expected that general laws can be adapted to the feelings of the more eastern and the more southern parts of so extensive a nation?  It appears to me difficult, if practicable.  Hence, then, may we not look for discontent, mistrust, disaffection to government, and frequent insurrections, which will require standing armies to suppress them in one place and another, where they may happen to arise.  Or, if laws could be made adapted to the local habits, feelings, views, and interests of those distant parts, would they not cause jealousies of partiality in government, which would excite envy and other malignant passions productive of wars and fighting?  But should we continue distinct sovereign States, confederated for the purpose of mutual safety and happiness, each contributing to the federal head such a part of its sovereignty as would render the government fully adequate to those purposes and no more, the people would govern themselves more easily, the laws of each State being well adapted to its own genius and circumstances, and the liberties of the United States would be more secure than they can be, as I humbly conceive, under the proposed new constitution.”—­Life of Samuel