Marshall and his fellow Nationalists strove earnestly to extract from the memorial as much venom as possible, but were able to get only three or four lines left out;[176] and the report was adopted practically as originally drafted.[177] Thus Marshall was in the first skirmish, after the National Government had been established, of that constitutional engagement in which, ultimately, Nationalism was to be challenged on the field of battle. Sumter and Appomattox were just below the horizon.
The remainder of Hamilton's financial plan was speedily placed upon the statute books of the Republic, though not without determined resistance which, more and more, took on a grim and ugly aspect both in Congress and throughout the country.
When Henry's resolution, on which the Virginia remonstrance was based, reached Hamilton, he instantly saw its logical result. It was, he thought, the major premise of the syllogism of National disintegration. "This," exclaimed Hamilton, of the Virginia resolution, "is the first symptom of a spirit which must either be killed or it will kill the Constitution of the United States."[178]
The Anti-Nationalist memorial of the Legislature of Virginia accurately expressed the sentiment of the State. John Taylor of Caroline two years later, in pamphlets of marked ability, attacked the Administration's entire financial system and its management. While he exhaustively analyzed its economic features, yet he traced all its supposed evils to the Nationalist idea. The purpose and result of Hamilton's whole plan and of the manner of its execution was, declared Taylor, to "Swallow up ... the once sovereign ... states.... Hence all assumptions and ... the enormous loans." Thus "the state governments will become only speculative commonwealths to be read for amusement, like Harrington's _Oceana_ or Moore's _Utopia_."[179]
The fight apparently over, Marshall declined to become a candidate for the Legislature in the following year. The Administration's financial plan was now enacted into law and the vital part of the National machinery thus set up and in motion. The country was responding with a degree of prosperity hitherto unknown, and, for the time, all seemed secure.[180] So Marshall did not again consent to serve in the House of Delegates until 1795. But the years between these periods of his public life brought forth events which were determinative of the Nation's future. Upon the questions growing out of them, John Marshall was one of the ever-decreasing Virginia minority which stanchly upheld the policies of the National Government.