to
State sovereignty, he seems--as all of his disciples seem--unable even
to comprehend that it means the sovereignty, not of State governments,
but of people who make them. With minds preoccupied by the unreal idea
of one great people of a consolidated nation, these gentlemen are
blinded to the plain and primary truth that the only way in which the
people ordained the Constitution was as the people of States. When Mr.
Webster says that "in the Constitution it is the people who speak, and
not the States," he says what is untenable. The States _are_ the people.
The people do not speak, never have spoken, and never can speak, in
their sovereign capacity (without a subversion of our whole system),
otherwise than as the people of States.

There are but two modes of expressing their sovereign will known to the
people of this country. One is by direct vote--the mode adopted by Rhode
Island in 1788, when she rejected the Constitution. The other is the
method, more generally pursued, of acting by means of conventions of
delegates elected expressly as representatives of the sovereignty of the
people. Now, it is not a matter of opinion or theory or speculation, but
a plain, undeniable, historical _fact_, that there never has been any
act or expression of sovereignty in either of these modes by that
imaginary community, "the people of the United States in the aggregate."
_Usurpations of power_ by the _Government_ of the United States, there
may have been, and may be again, but there has never been either a
sovereign convention or a direct vote of the "whole people" of the
United States to demonstrate its existence as a corporate unit. Every
exercise of sovereignty by any of the people of this country that has
actually taken place has been by the people of States _as_ States. In
the face of this fact, is it not the merest self-stultification to admit
the sovereignty of the people and deny it to the States, in which alone
they have community existence?

This subject is one of such vital importance to a right understanding of
the events which this work is designed to record and explain, that it
can not be dismissed without an effort in the way of recapitulation and
conclusion, to make it clear beyond the possibility of misconception.

According to the American theory, every individual is endowed with
certain unalienable rights, among which are "life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness." He is entitled to all the freedom, in thes