ABSTRACT
After independence from Great Britain had been won and formally recognized, two broad tendencies appeared during the formative period of the Union, - the reactionary and the radical. What may be called the reactionary theory was the outgrowth of certain conditions which must now be briefly noticed. The eleven years that intervened between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention witnessed rapid and extensive changes in the political conditions of America. With a constitutional requirement of unanimity for amendment and of an overwhelming majority for the passage of any measure of importance, and at the same time with the actual existence of discord upon almost every subject of common interest, the Congress was soon reduced to a condition of pitiful impotence. In the Constitutional Convention there were clear-cut expressions of the change in sentiment since the days of 1776.
