"I doubt," says Daniel Webster, "whether one single law of any law-giver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked, and lasting character than the Ordinance of 1787." Nothing could have been more emphatically an exercise of national sovereignty; yet, as Madison said, while warmly commending the act, Congress did it "without the least colour of constitutional authority." The ordinance was never submitted to the states for ratification. The articles of confederation had never contemplated an occasion for such a peculiar assertion of sovereignty. "A great and independent fund of revenue," said Madison, "is passing into the hands of a single body of men, who can raise troops to an indefinite number, and appropriate money to their support for an indefinite period of time.... Yet no blame has been whispered, no alarm has been sounded," even by men most zealous for state rights and most suspicious of Congress. Within a few months this argument was to be cited with telling effect against those who hesitated to accept the Federal Constitution because of the great powers which it conferred upon the general government. Unless you give a government specific powers, commensurate with its objects, it is liable on occasions of public necessity to exercise powers which have not been granted. Avoid the dreadful dilemma between dissolution and usurpation, urged Madison, by clothing the government with powers that are ample but clearly defined. In a certain sense, the action of Congress in 1787 was a usurpation of authority to meet an emergency which no one had foreseen, as in the cases of Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana and Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves. Each of these instances marked, in one way or another, a brilliant epoch in American history, and in each case the public interest was so unmistakable that the people consented and applauded. The theory upon which the Ordinance of 1787 was based was one which nobody could fail to understand, though perhaps no one would then have known just how to put it into words. It was simply the thirteen states, through their delegates in Congress, dealing with the unoccupied national domain as if it were the common land or folkland of a stupendous township. [Sidenote: Spain, hearing of the secret article in the treaty of 1783, loses her temper and threatens to shut up the Mississippi River.]