Jonathan Smith, a plain farmer of Lanesborough, helped carry the Massachusetts Convention in favor of ratifying the Federal Constitution between September 1787 and February 1788 by a vote of 187 to 168 with a speech full of good sense and good feeling. He said that he had lived in a part of the country where he had known the worth of good government by the want of it, that he had been a member of the convention to form the state constitution and had learned something of the checks and balances of power and found them all here, and that the time had come to gather ripe fruit and reap the harvest of the labor begun when men were sent to the federal convention.