  In October, 1787, Governor Edmund Randolph, delegate to the Federal Convention from Virginia, addressed to the Speaker of the House of Delegates a letter on the Federal Constitution. This was published in December, 1787, in both The Virginia Gazette and The Virginia Independent Chronicle, as well as in pamphlet form at the time, and recently in Ford's Pamphlets on the Constitution. Randolph had declined to give his assent to the Constitution in the Convention, but had so far altered his views in the intervening period as to make his letter on the whole an argument in favor of rather than against its adoption. Uncertain in exactly what light to regard his utterances, it was one of the few writings of the time which did not receive replies from one party or the other. The essay of “A Plain Dealer” is the only notice I have found of this letter, and deals rather more with the inconsistencies of Randolph's views, than with the arguments advanced in the letter. Of the author, Randolph himself gives us a clue in his letter to Madison, of February 29, 1788, where he writes: A writer calling himself Plain Dealer, who is bitter in principle vs. the Constitution, has attacked me in the paper. I suspect the author to be Mr. Spencer Roane; and the importunities of some to me in public and private are designed to throw me unequivocally and without condition into the opposition. |
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