Ing body of mediocre men. After the first years the ability that might
have given it dignity was largely employed in the army, on diplomatic
missions, or in the establishment and administration of the new State
Governments. The particularism of the time is revealed in the belief
that a man's first allegiance was to his State; to construct a
constitution for Massachusetts was thought to be a greater service than
to draft the Articles of Confederation; to be Governor of Virginia a
higher honor than to be President of Congress. The political wisdom of
the decade is therefore chiefly embodied in the first state
constitutions and the legislation of the new State Governments. The
constitutions gave formal expression to the philosophy of the
Revolution, but in their detailed arrangements followed closely the
practices and traditions inherited from the colonial period; popular
sovereignty was everywhere declared, but everywhere limited by basing
the suffrage upon property, and often half defeated by adopting an
administrative mechanism in harmony with the prevailing belief that good
government springs from "power balanced and cancelled and dispersed."
The new regime was not altogether such as Patrick Henry or Jefferson
would have made it, but it marked a safe and conservative advance toward
the "establishment of a more equal liberty" than had hitherto prevailed.
The erecti
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