... I rose yesterday to ask a question which arose in my own mind. When I asked that question, I thought the meaning of my interrogation was obvious. The fate of this question and of America may depend on this. Have they said, We, the states? Have they made a proposal of a compact between states? If they had, this would be a confederation. It is otherwise most clearly a consolidated government. The question turns, sir, on that poor little thing — the expression, We, the people, instead of the states, of America. I need not take much pains to show that the principles of this system are extremely pernicious, impolitic, and dangerous. Is this a monarchy, like England — a compact between prince and people, with checks on the former to secure the liberty of the latter? Is this a confederacy, like Holland — an association of a number of independent states, each of which retains its individual sovereignty? It is not a democracy, wherein the people retain all their rights securely. Had these principles been adhered to, we should not have been brought to this alarming transition, from a confederacy to a consolidated government.
Patrick Henry, speech to the Virginia ratification convention 1788
He understands that the government under the articles is a confederation. Under the constitution it is a consolidated government. Which is exactly what George Washington said it was in his letter that accompanied the transmittal of the constitution to the President of the Congress.
"In all our deliberations on this subject we kept steadily in our view, that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence."
George Washington's letter to the President of the Congress 1787
I believe woodpusher’s original comment was that Henry and Jefferson predicted what the Constitution would BECOME, not what it was thought to be in 1788 (recall Henry’s famous “I smell a rat,” comment). It was the old “Federalists vs Anti-Federalists” standoff, and was one of the reasons for the Bill of Rights.