alone was concerned, the practice is in part attributable to economy, but in part also to the plain fact that the colonies, though they had united in declaring and in striving to achieve their independence, were as yet scarcely started on the road to a real union, to nationality. The members of Congress were delegates, hardly representatives. They were responsible collectively to their several states, rather than individually to their constituents. They were, in fact, held to a regular accounting with the governments of their states. Ellsworth's letters from Philadelphia to Governor Trumbull might almost be despatches from an ambassador to a secretary of state.1 Ordinarily, he and his colleagues for the time being collaborated in joint epistles. All votes in the chamber were taken by states, and the vote of a delegation evenly divided on any question was lost.

Nevertheless, Ellsworth's work in the Continental Congress is not negligible, either from the point of view of a biographer or in a broader study of the times. It began before he went to Philadelphia. On December 11, 1777, Congress appointed him one of the five members of a committee to investigate the causes of the failure of an expedition into Rhode Island, and Van Santvoord states also that he and two of his associates took a mass of testimony and presented a report. But the report led to no action by Congress, which was doubtless far too busy with other expeditions to carry out its purpose, announced in 1777, of accounting for all the expeditions that had failed.

In the autumn of 1778, when Ellsworth went at last to Philadelphia, the first fine ardors of the Revolution were long since spent. Both sides had come to see clearly the nature of the struggle, and that it was bound to be long and difficult, whichever side might win. For the leaders of the patriot cause there had been many bitter disappointments: from the loss of battles, from the falling away of the weaker-hearted in their own party, from convincing proofs of the enemy's superior strength in wealth and discipline and numbers. But at least, on the other hand, the cause they fought and worked for was now by the Declaration of Independence, and by many other acts equally significant and irrevocable, completely blazoned to the

1 Most of these letters, probably all, are in the Trumbull collection in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The more important are printed in the society's Collections, fifth series, IX, X, seventh series, II, III. Some are also to be found in Flanders's life of Ellsworth in his Lives and Times of the Chief Justices. Through the kindness of the society's librarian, however, I have been permitted to use the originals, and my references are to these.

2 Journals of Congress, III, 545, 571-572.

George Van Santvoord, Lives and Judicial Services of the Chief-Justices, 199.

world. They were no longer fighting for a mere redress of grievances; they were trying to keep alive a new member of the family of nations. France had already recognized them, and was aiding them with money, with ships, with soldiers. Nor had success in arms been wholly wanting. Save in the desperate counter-strokes. at Trenton and Princeton, Washington's army, it is true, had never won a decided victory in a pitched battle; but Burgoyne and his army were captives, and the grand strategy of the enemy for the year 1777 had undeniably failed. Emerging the next spring from his supreme ordeal at Valley Forge, Washington had been cheered by the news of the treaty with France, and then by Sir Henry Clinton's evacuation of Philadelphia. In June he had fought at Monmouth a pitched battle which was at least indecisive, and which, but for the misconduct of Charles Lee, might well have been a victory. That he and his little armies could do no more was the fault-so far as it was a fault at all-of the states, which did not adequately recruit or arm or supply them, and of a central government which was still but little more than a government by consent. The Articles of Confederation, which would serve, so soon as they should be ratified, to give the authority of a written agreement to such concessions of power as they made to Congress, had been laid before the legislatures of the states; but these were slow to ratify. Meanwhile, through its standing committees, Congress was discharging as best it could the various functions of a proper government; by requisition on the states and borrowing abroad it was doing. what it could to procure the means to keep the armies in the field.

The Continental legislature, which had been, at its first session, the ablest group of men ever at one time gathered under one roof in America, had naturally lost to the new state governments and to foreign courts a number of its most illustrious members. Franklin and John Adams were in Europe. Jay and Henry and Jefferson and John Rutledge were occupied with high services to their several states. Washington, of course, was in the field. At the first roll-call after Ellsworth took his seat, only thirty-two delegates answered to their names. But some of the names that were answered to would have shone on any list. To that particular roll-call Samuel Adams and Gerry, Roger Sherman, Witherspoon, Richard Henry Lee, Laurens, and Drayton responded. Gouverneur Morris was a member, though not then present, and, for a little while longer, Robert Morris also. In a few weeks, John Jay took his seat from New York.

It is doubtful, however, if any of these men surpassed in wisdom,

or in experience and influence, the colleague whom Ellsworth found. awaiting him, and whose name is signed with his to several letters which were despatched to Governor Trumbull in the next few weeks. Roger Sherman was by this time a veteran in continental politics, and we know that Ellsworth profited to the full by the older statesman's counsel and friendship. He once declared that he had taken the character of Sherman for his model; and on this confession John Adams, it is said, made comment that it was praise enough for both.1 They worked together on many occasions for the interest of Connecticut and the good of the whole country, and though they frequently differed, and their names appeared on opposite sides on various questions, no jealousy or personal antagonism of any sort between them has ever come to light.

The dry and meager Journals of the Congress reveal but little of the human quality of the debates, which were always secret. To read them seems a tiresome and not a particularly profitable sort of historical delving until, dismissing the notion that our American political system was "struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man", the student comes to understand that he is groping among the roots of institutions which are now grown to a colossal power and reach. Ellsworth, for example, was soon assigned to three standing committees which may be regarded as the rudimentary forms of three great departments of our present government. One was the Marine Committee, which a little later became the Board of Admiralty; by another change, its duties were later devolved upon a sort of department of naval affairs, headed by a secretary or manager whose counterpart under the Constitution is the secretary of the navy. The second, already styled the Board of Treasury, attained, through much the same succession of changes, a like ancestral relationship to the present Department of the Treasury. The third was the Committee of Appeals; and that, it is now quite clear, was the first forerunner of the present Supreme Court of the United States; its work was the beginning of all our federal jurisprudence. Naturally, in view of what came after, Ellsworth's membership in it has been singled out as the most significant fact of his first term of service.

1 Longacre and Herring's National Portrait Gallery, IV, sketch of Ellsworth, 8 (108).

'Yet Gladstone's famous sentence is not deserving of the ridicule and the downright contradiction which it has occasionally drawn forth. It is only by contrast with the British Constitution, "the most subtile organism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history", that he attributes to the American Constitution so instantaneous a birth. North American Review, CXXVII, 185.

And the Journals, indeed, supply us with no great mass of facts to choose from. They inform us1 that he voted aye on two sets of resolutions, of a distinctly New England flavor and opposed mainly by delegates from the south, proclaiming the necessity of a very strict morality among a people fallen on such evil times, and condemning, in most pointed terms, the evil amusements of playgoing, gaming, and horse-racing. They also tell us how he voted on a few other questions, none, however, of a nature to indicate his general views. With R. H. Lee, Bartlett, and Samuel Adams, he served on a special committee to attend to a memorial from Governor Trumbull calling attention to the unrewarded services and sacrifices of his son, Colonel Joseph Trumbull, who had been the commissary-general of the army. He was on another special committee to look into certain. seizures of property at the time when Philadelphia was evacuated by the British; and he was also on the committee which, after investigating fully Robert Morris's management, through the firm of Morris and Willing, of certain large purchases for the army, not merely exonerated Morris from all the charges against his integrity, but praised him highly for ability and patriotism. This report may very well have opened the way for the later determination of Congress to put Morris in control of the Continental finances. Per contra, when charges were brought against Benedict Arnold, who was at this time in command at Philadelphia, living beyond his means, consorting most with an aristocratic and decidedly Tory set in the society of the gayest of all colonial cities, and about to be married to the beautiful daughter of a prominent Tory family, Ellsworth voted against a motion to postpone investigation. Another important assignment was to a committee of all the states, charged to investigate the disputes among our agents abroad and to consider the whole subject of our foreign relations. When it reported, Congress voted to recall several of our representatives at European courts and adopted rules intended to prevent disagreements and conflicts of authority such as that which had arisen between Silas Deane and Arthur Lee. His last assignment was to a committee which conferred with Washington about the office of inspectorgeneral.

Unfortunately, too, his letters do not greatly increase our knowlJournals of Congress, IV, 590, 602-603.

edge of the clearly active and varied part which he was already playing at Philadelphia. The letters to Trumbull for this term of service are all joint epistles; the first two signed by Sherman and Ellsworth, the remainder, written after Sherman had gone home, by Eliphalet Dyer, Ellsworth, and Jesse Root. Like most joint letters, they are dry and matter-of-fact; but if they had been written by Ellsworth alone they would not, in all probability, have been much more readable. Three or four letters which he did write at this time to his younger brother, David, have been preserved.1 The first of them begins with a "Dear Sir", and another "Sir", with a comma, precedes " 'your affectionate brother " at the end. It runs:

2

Neither the business of Congress, nor amusements of this gay City have been able to make me forget my friends at Windsor. Among others of them you in particular have my most constant remembrance and continued good wishes. If in anything at this distance I can serve you, you will oblige me by letting me know it. Do you want any [thing] that I could purchase for you here? Almost everything is to be bo't here tho' at exorbitant prices. A principal object under consideration of Congress at present is if possible to establish the credit of the currency, and so to reduce prices. The best time to have done this is indeed past. I do not, however, despair of its being affected yet. My little family I suppose are now at Windsor and doubt not they have your particular care to make them comfortable in my absence, and the rather as you have none of your own yet to be concerned for. I desire a suitable remembrance to all our family.

It is not a particularly unfavorable specimen of Ellsworth's epistolary style during these years of absorbing work. As he grew older, more signs of culture began to appear in his rare letters, and also for in this, too, he was a New England type-a bit more of himself and his human interests and affections, and even, here and there, mild displays of humor. But the Revolutionary statesmen were not, as a rule, amusing correspondents. As a group, they strike one as uncommonly serious-minded and self-contained. Such high spirits as Gouverneur Morris sometimes displayed were rare among them. Ellsworth's allusion to his brother's lack of any family of his own may have been meant for a sly hint of a suspicion that the other was soon to be married. A little later, the fact of an engagement being announced, he wrote his congratulations. But the nearest he came to a joke on an occasion which might be con1 For copies, I am indebted to Mr. G. E. Taintor, of Hartford, Conn.

2 October 25, 1778.

3 Professor Barrett Wendell has somewhere amiably described them as the group of " grave and learned obstetricians who presided at the birth of their country".