It is a remarkable fact that one aspect of the opposition that they encountered, involving legislative construction of the constitution and an effort to focus public attention on this argument at the moment that final decision lay with the president, has remained unexplored.
There is little doubt that Washington was disturbed by the tone and force of arguments by Junius Americanus. In their handling of the thorny constitutional predicament in which their coalition effort had placed them, they were in effect engaged with Junius Americanus in a contest in which the decisive influence of the President was the goal. The prophecy was accurate. The debate on residence reached its peak six months later in an atmosphere in which the threat of disunion was clear and ominous.
But the old flames had never been extinguished. The issue had become intermingled with many important measures of the national government from the very beginning of the union, exacerbating sectional feelings and arousing personal and local interests. Jefferson and Madison had collaborated six years earlier in the effort to move the capital away from an eastern city and to a position central to the extreme northern and southern states and accessible to the western regions by improved navigation.
On Sunday, 13 June , Jefferson informed several friends in Virginia that the old issue of the residence would come on in that session. To George Mason, whose favorable disposition towards the administration it was important to cultivate, he said that the proposal for assuming the debts of the states, then quiescent because of the bitter animosities that had been aroused, would be revived in some form.
In view of the exacerbated feelings aroused by the proposal to assume the state debts, with the Massachusetts delegation leading the fight for adoption and, so Abigail Adams thought, with the Virginia representatives following Madison like a flock of sheep in his effort to defeat the measure, a composition of interests was a natural and perhaps inevitable plan that no doubt occurred to many.
