The Constitution created the United States a Sovereignty.

This, when analyzed, is a simple summary of the process by which the change was wrought in the relations of the people of the several States to the whole body of the people of all these collectively, in the matter of a single government for the whole, in which the sovereignty residing in the entire body of the people of the United States was exercised in framing a government to which was delegated the several powers enumerated in the Constitution. The question which had been submitted to the several peoples of the respective States, and by them deliberately acted upon, was whether, as to certain subjects matter of a purely national character they were willing to act as one nation, becoming, for that purpose, the integral parts and members of one body politic, including the territorial limits of all the States, while, in all other respects, they should remain separate peoples as to their own domestic or municipal affairs? They found a ready analogy for this general and local relationship in every State in the Union, in which the people of a town or county, while managing the local affairs of such town or county, were also equally members of the larger body, the State.

The Constitution the Act of the People, not of the States.

The extent to which this analysis of the process by which the people of the already existing States created a new independent government, has been carried, may seem unnecessarily tedious and minute. But the reason for this is readily found in the persistent efforts on the part of the advocates of secession to establish the theory of State rights, upon which they rest their cause, which assumes that the Federal Constitution was the act of the State governments in the exercise of State sovereignty. Whereas, so far from this being, in any measure, true, we have failed to discover a single act of any State bearing upon the matter, beyond taking measures to have the whole subject submitted to the people of such State to act upon through their own special agents elected by them

selves. The process by which this was accomplished may, at first sight, seem complex and not easy of explanation to one who has not given thought to the subject. There does not seem, however, to be any more intrinsic difficulty in thus forming a new government by the combination of the sovereignties of two or more communities of people, than there was in clothing the peers of Scotland with a portion of the sovereignty of the people of England, by extending the jurisdiction of Parliament over the united people of both, or in merging the various peoples of Italy, in our day, under the sovereignty of the kingdom of Italy. The acts by which these were done were voluntary, and not that of a conqueror over a conquered people. It may not be easy to explain, in view of the difficulty of reconciling the jarring interests of men, as we find them in masses, how the giving up, at first, of a part of their sovereignty to their government, by the people of any region or district, can be supposed to have been accomplished, and a civil body politic or State thereby created. Nor can we readily trace how it is that the people now upon the stage are supposed to have surrendered so much of their individual rights of original sovereignty, by the act of their progenitors when establishing a government a hundred or a thousand years ago, as to bind them thereby to submit to what they had no voice in establishing. The most that can be said is, it is a fact. People can create governments, and they do create them, and, when created, they and the generations that come after them are bound to submit to them till others are substituted in their places.

Why, therefore, should we seek to go behind the fact, which no one denies, that here, in the year of grace 1788, the people of the United States voted upon and adopted a form of government, with all the known attributes and elements of sovereignty and independence, and one whose powers and functions were carefully limited and defined by the very instrument which had been submitted to their approval under the name of a "Constitution for the United States of America?" Or why should we go beyond

the terms of this instrument itself, to ascertain what this government is and what are its powers and limitations?

The Powers given by the Constitution supreme.

If we now look into this Constitution, we nowhere find the first allusion to any power outside of those which it creates and delegates to the government which it establishes, which can revise or control the action of this government within the limits of its jurisdiction. Its only provision bearing upon this point is that which contemplates amending its terms in the manner prescribed in the instrument itself. In this light, nullification becomes simply absurd. It is claiming for a State not only the right to exercise the sovereignty which its people have already delegated to another government, but a power, through a limited, delegated agency, superior to and more unlimited than that which embraces not only the power of its own people, but that which emanates from the people of all the States united. And as for regarding this as a confederation of the States, it would be imputing an extreme of folly and madness to the men of that day, of which no one can conceive them guilty, to suppose they intended to escape the ruinous consequences of one confederation by substituting another equally friable and weak.

A State cannot secede from the Union.

When we come to consider the subject of secession from the Union on the part of any one of these States, the inquiry presents itself, not only whether they have the right so to secede, but whether they can effect it in any way short of a revolution? It was the doctrine of Mr. Calhoun, that, though force might be employed against a seceded State, "it must be a belligerent force, to be preceded by a declaration of war, and carried on with all its formalities." Others, who would repel the imputation of being disciples of Mr. Calhoun, nevertheless insist that as soon as a State has seceded she is out of the Union, some say as a hostile State,

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others as a territory, and can only be received back in the manner of originally admitting a State formed out of territory acquired by conquest or purchase.

The error in both these classes seems to arise from misapprehending what a State is, and what are its functions and the relation in which, through its government, it stands to the United States.

If the views thus far taken are well founded, a State, as such, can neither be in the Union nor out of it, except so far as relates to its geographical limits. That artificial person the body corporate of New York, for instance, can, in no sense, be acknowledged as a part of the people of the United States, made up, as these are by the very meaning of the term, of natural, individual persons. A State may go on executing its municipal powers and functions over its schools, its highways, and the support of its poor, without, in any manner, affecting the functions of the United States government. It may, indeed, refuse to exercise that agency through which the people of such State take a part in the administration of the government of the United States. It may refuse to district its territory for the election of members of Congress, or it may forbear to choose its senators. But the utmost that could result from this would be to suspend the action of so many of the people of the United States as lived within its borders, in the measures of the Federal government. Was it ever pretended that New York would lose all right, thereafter, to be represented in the Senate of the United States, if she failed to elect a senator, from any cause, when a vacancy in her representation had occurred?

It matters not, whether a State is limited as to its jurisdiction by the subjects over which it has cognizance, or by the boundary lines of its territorial sovereignty. The one forms as definite a limit of its action as the other. Massachusetts could not fix the rate of interest in Rhode Island, nor bind New York by a tariff of tolls which she might prescribe for the Erie Canal. Nor could she, through any act of her government, bind her own citizens to a measure of secession, for the simple reason that her action, in either of these

cases, would be equally and alike outside of and wholly beyond any power with which her government was clothed. She would, for such a purpose, have no more efficient rights of sovereignty within the limits of her own territory than she would within that of Rhode Island or New York.

A Resolution by the People to secede inoperative.

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It will be seen, therefore, that there can be no secession by any body, unless it be by the people themselves from themselves, people living in one part of the territory embraced within the United States seceding from those living in other parts of it. And inasmuch as there is one government over them all, which was created by the united act of sovereignty of every part, no part of this people could effectually resume their original sovereignty by any means short of a successful revolution. Nor does it make any difference whether this be attempted in the corporate name of a State, or of a county, or by the direct action of individuals without the form of an organization. And it is worthy of remark that the leaders of the rebellion seem to have recognized this want of power in State governments to withdraw States from the Union, when they caused whatever was attempted in that direction to be done through conventions of the people of the so-called seceded States. Such, too, was the character of the nullification ordinance of South Carolina in 1832. We do not propose to consider under what circumstances any part of a people may undertake or carry forward a revolution, because nobody places the cause of secession on that ground. But short of that, we see not, how the people of any locality can secede from the Union. So far as the United States are concerned, those who live along the shores of Massachusetts, or Delaware, or Chesapeake Bay, are not the people of Massachusetts, or Delaware, or Maryland, any more than they are the people of the United States, "however bounded." In this sense, citizenship is not local. The citizen of New York is just as much a citizen within the limits of Ohio, or North Carolina, as he is within the city of