From the outset Marshall ranged himself on the side of that party in the Virginia Legislature which, under the leadership of Madison, demanded with growing insistence a general and radical constitutional reform designed at once to strengthen the national power and to curtail state legislative power. His attitude was determined not only by his sympathy for the sufferings of his former comrades in arms and by his veneration for his father and for Washington, who were of the same party, but also by his military experience, which had rendered the pretensions of state sovereignty ridiculous in his eyes. Local discontent came to a head in the autumn of 1786 with the outbreak of Shays's Rebellion in western Massachusetts. Marshall, along with the great body of public men of the day, conceived for the movement the gravest alarm, and the more so since he considered it as the natural culmination of prevailing tendencies. In a letter to James Wilkinson early in 1787, he wrote: "These violent ... dissensions in a State I had thought inferior in wisdom and virtue to no one in our Union, added to the strong tendency which the politics of many eminent characters among ourselves have to promote private and public dishonesty, cast a deep shade over that bright prospect which the Revolution in America and the establishment of our free governments had opened to the votaries of liberty throughout the globe. I fear, and there is no opinion more degrading to the dignity of man, that those have truth on their side who say that man is incapable of governing himself." Marshall accordingly championed the adoption of the Constitution of 1787 quite as much because of its provisions for diminishing the legislative powers of the States in the interest of private rights as because of its provisions for augmenting the powers of the General Government. His attitude is revealed, for instance, in the opening words of his first speech on the floor of the Virginia Convention, to which he had been chosen a member from Richmond: "Mr. Chairman, I conceive that the object of the discussion now before us is whether democracy or despotism be most eligible.... The supporters of the Constitution claim the title of being firm friends of liberty and the rights of man.... We prefer this system because we think it a well-regulated democracy.... What are the favorite maxims of democracy? A strict observance of justice and public faith.... Would to Heaven that these principles had been observed under the present government. Had this been the case the friends of liberty would not be willing now to part with it." The point of view which Marshall here assumed was obviously the same as that from which Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and others on the floor of the Federal Convention had freely predicted that republican liberty must disappear from the earth unless the abuses of it practiced in many of the States could be eliminated.