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

[435] In the course of this paper, I shall cite other acts, which are not appended hereto. The title of neither of the first four of these acts makes any mention of North Carolina or Rhode Island, nor do the two first acts mention either of those States even in their text; but before the reader shall have finished reading in this paper the study of those five acts as taken together, and as bearing on each other, he will see clearly how the text of the two first came to operate on the commerce and ships of North Carolina and Rhode Island, and were intended to be made so to operate. The text, however, of the last three of the acts will destroy forever any doubt that may have heretofore lingered in the reader's mind, even if he were Judge Story redivivus; who, it is clear to my mind, (if he was sincere in his theory) could never have read and made a study of these five acts grouped together in one body, as it were, and separated from the many other acts that lie between them, but have no bearing on them. Had he done so, he, even if he had been only a second-rate lawyer, would have seen that they constituted a fatal obstacle to the validity of his theory.

The mention of North Carolina by name in the title of the fifth of these acts, (viz.: that of Febuary 8th, 1790,) while Rhode Island is not mentioned in that title, would naturally not be suggestive of anything of the slightest importance to any one searching for information on this subject, inasmuch as he would infer from the date of the act (over two months after North Carolina had ratified the Constitution), and from the mention of that State only in the title, that the act had reference only to the entrance of that State into the Union. While the act does provide for extending the laws of the Union over North Carolina, it, at the same time, makes in its text most unqualified admissions of the independent nationality of Rhode Island, (reciting her name,) and of her entire independence of and political alienation from the United States.

From the beginning of the government, in April, 1789, down to the 31st of July, of that year, there was no revenue law whatever of the United State in force. The first act laying “duties on goods, wares and merchandizes,” (being the second act of any kind ever passed by Congress) although enacted on the 4th of July, yet, by its own terms, was not nor could it become an operative law until the 1st of August next following. The next revenue act, being the third act ever passed by Congress, was enacted on the 20th of July, 1789, and it imposed duties not on the cargoes, but on the tonnage only of ships or vessels coming into the ports of the eleven United States; but this act, by its own terms, could not become operative law until the 15th of August next