Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 9.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

[439] the way, how the revenue act of the 4th of July was brought into operation on North Carolina and Rhode Island, although neither of those two States is mentioned either in the title or in the text of that act. If the two States were at that time integral portions of the United States, then it would have been utterly impossible, even if both parties were were willing, for goods to be imported from them into the United States, because the goods would be already in the United States before leaving either of the two States, and the Constitution would prohibit Congress from levying duties on them. When we come, however, to analyze the whole phrase, including the eight words before referred to, and taken in connection with the entire section, we see at once what Congress meant. The entire phrase, including the eight words referred to, does not describe, nor was it meant to describe the United States of July, 1789, but that geographical area on the Continent of America which Great Britain had acknowledged, in the Treaty of Peace, to be free from her jurisdiction in 1782.

Why Congress employed this peculiar and cumbersome phraseology in section 39 is, I think, very apparent Out of a kind regard for the feelings of their late two political associates they desired, even when framing revenue laws designed to tax goods coming into the United States from those former associates, to employ, and they deemed it politic to employ, language that would, as much as possible, disguise and soften the situation, which it was hoped would be of but short duration. In accordance with this view we find Congress using, in section 38, such mollifying phrases as “for the present” and “as yet.” But as time rolled on and the two States still kept out of the Union we find Congress, in the act of September 16th, throwing aside this sentimentality, and speaking right out in church, when they commenced in that act to call things by their plain every-day names without employing any roundabout, namby-pamby phraseology. Let any one read sections 2 and 3 of that act and he will see that if France and Spain had been the only and special subjects of those sections they could not have been mentioned and referred to therein in language more strongly recognizing their unqualified independence of and complete political alienation from the United States of that day than North Carolina and Rhode Island are mentioned and referred to in the act.

In like manner does the 7th section of the act of February 7th and 8th, 1790, enacted after North Carolina entered the Union, and reviving the 2d section of the act of September 16th towards the citizens of Rhode Island, go direct to the point in the fewest possible