Such was the constitutional status of the English judiciary when the American colonies asserted their independence. The new state constitutions adopted at the outbreak of the war, as has been shown in a previous chapter, represented the more democratic thought of the period and were really revolutionary in character. They abolished the veto power of the governor and failed to abolish the judicial negative only because it did not then exist.[64] This was followed after the Revolution by a conservative reaction which was not, however, a popular movement. It received no general support or sympathy from the masses of the people, but was planned and carried through by those whom we may describe as the ruling class, and who were, for the most part, strongly in sympathy with English political institutions. It was characterized by real, if not avowed, hostility to the new political ideas embodied in the Declaration of Independence and in the Revolutionary state constitutions. Its aim was to reform the state governments by restoring, as far as possible, the checks on democracy which the Revolutionary movement had swept away. The judiciary was the only branch of the state government in which the principle of life tenure had been retained, and therefore the only one which could be depended on to offer any effectual resistance to public opinion. Evidently, then, the easiest and most practicable method of accomplishing the end which the conservative classes had in view was to enlarge the powers of the judiciary. Accordingly an effort was made at this time in several of the states to revive and develop the judicial veto. A practical argument in favor of this check was doubtless the fact that it required no formal changes in the state constitutions, and, for this reason, was less likely to arouse formidable opposition than any avowed attempt to restore the system of checks. When the Constitutional Convention met in 1787 the courts in five states were beginning to claim the power to declare acts of the legislature unconstitutional. In a Virginia case as early as 1782 the judges of the court of appeals expressed the opinion "that the court had power to declare any resolution or act of the legislature, or of either branch of it, to be unconstitutional and void."[65] The court, however, did not exercise the power to which it laid claim. It merely declared a resolution of the House of Delegates invalid on the ground that it had been rejected by the Senate. This case is important only as showing that the court was then paving the way for the exercise of the power to annul acts of the legislature.