7

Union

CHAPTER 7|Document 7

Benjamin Rush to Richard Price

Some of our enlightened men who begin to despair of a more complete union of the States in Congress have secretly proposed an Eastern, Middle, and Southern Confederacy, to be united by an alliance offensive and defensive. These confederacies they say will be united by nature, by interest, and by manners, and consequently they will be safe, agreeable and durable. The first will include the four New England states and New York. The second will include New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland; and the last Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. The foreign and domestic debt of the United States they say shall be divided justly between each of the new confederations. This plan of a new continental government is at present a mere speculation. Perhaps necessity, or rather divine providence, may drive us to it. Whatever form of political existence may be before us, I am fully satisfied that our independence rests upon a firm basis and that Great Britain will never recover from any of our changes in opinion or government her former dominion or influence in this country.

The Founders' Constitution
Volume 1, Chapter 7, Document 7
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch7s7.html
The University of Chicago Press

Letters of Benjamin Rush. Edited by L. H. Butterfield. 2 vols. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 30, parts 1 and 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, for the American Philosophical Society, 1951.