12 
Indiana University Studies 
federation, however, were incompetent to the adoption and 
enforcement of a system of regulations for the trade which 
should countervail those of Great Britain. The power to 
regulate commerce rested in the respective States, and one 
after another as they felt the pressure of the British system, 
each of them attempted, by separate legislation, to counteract 
it, but their helter-skelter measures failed of their purposes. 
British ships and British goods still came into the ports of 
the States which had not yet enacted their laws or had aban- 
doned as useless those which they had enacted, and American 
ships lay idle at their moorings. 
As early as 1785 Adams had arrived at the conviction that 
the United States would never secure a satisfactory arrange- 
ment from Great Britain until Congress should be made su- 
preme in matters of foreign commerce and treaties of com- 
merce, and until Congress should have exacted that supremacy 
with a decent firmness. In fact he had already suggested to 
Secretary Jay that it might be necessary for the States to 
give Congress unlimited authority to enter into commercial 
treaties for a limited number of years, as well as to confer 
upon Congress authority to regulate the external commerce 
of all the members of the Confederation for a like period.^^ 
Some of the States themselves gradually came to realize 
this need. In 1785 the legislature of New York did vest in 
the American Congress the powers to prohibit any goods 
from being imported into, or exported from, any of the United 
States in vessels belonging to, or navigated by, the subjects 
of any power with whom the United States should not have 
formed treaties of commerce; and also with powers to pro- 
hibit the subjects of any other foreign country, unless author- 
ized by treaty, from importing into the United States any 
goods which were not the produce or manufacture of the 
dominions of the sovereign whose subjects they were.^^ The 
legislature of Pennsylvania was not to be outdone by that of 
New York. Upon receipt of a memorial from a committee 
of the merchants and traders of the city of Philadelphia, it 
passed resolutions to the effect, first, that the system of state 
regulation of trade was no longer compatible with the gen- 
21 Works of John Adams, VIII, 336. Marvin, The Am. Merchant Marine, 32. Keiler, 
American Shipping, 23. 
22 Works of John Adams, VIII, 289, 273, 274. 
^^Ihid., VIII, 279, 280. 
