=Friends of the Constitution in Power.=—­In the first Congress that assembled after the adoption of the Constitution, there were eleven Senators, led by Robert Morris, the financier, who had been delegates to the national convention.  Several members of the House of Representatives, headed by James Madison, had also been at Philadelphia in 1787.  In making his appointments, Washington strengthened the new system of government still further by a judicious selection of officials.  He chose as Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who had been the most zealous for its success; General Knox, head of the War Department, and Edmund Randolph, the Attorney-General, were likewise conspicuous friends of the experiment.  Every member of the federal judiciary whom Washington appointed, from the Chief Justice, John Jay, down to the justices of the district courts, had favored the ratification of the Constitution; and a majority of them had served as members of the national convention that framed the document or of the state ratifying conventions.  Only one man of influence in the new government, Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State, was reckoned as a doubter in the house of the faithful.  He had expressed opinions both for and against the Constitution; but he had been out of the country acting as the minister at Paris when the Constitution was drafted and ratified.

=An Opposition to Conciliate.=—­The inauguration of Washington amid the plaudits of his countrymen did not set at rest all the political turmoil which had been aroused by the angry contest over ratification.  “The interesting nature of the question,” wrote John Marshall, “the equality of the parties, the animation produced inevitably by ardent debate had a necessary tendency to embitter the dispositions of the vanquished and to fix more deeply in many bosoms their prejudices against a plan of government in opposition to which all their passions were enlisted.”  The leaders gathered around Washington were well aware of the excited state of the country.  They saw Rhode Island and North Carolina still outside of the union.[1] They knew by what small margins the Constitution had been approved in the great states of Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York.  They were equally aware that a majority of the state conventions, in yielding reluctant approval to the Constitution, had drawn a number of amendments for immediate submission to the states.

=The First Amendments—­a Bill of Rights.=—­To meet the opposition, Madison proposed, and the first Congress adopted, a series of amendments to the Constitution.  Ten of them were soon ratified and became in 1791 a part of the law of the land.  These amendments provided, among other things, that Congress could make no law respecting the establishment of religion, abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances.  They also guaranteed indictment by grand jury and