and their Fate.--Further
Testimony.--Hamilton, Madison, Washington, Marshall, etc.--Later
Theories.--Mr. Webster: his Views at Various Periods.--Speech at
Capon Springs.--State Rights not a Sectional Theory.

Looking back for a moment at the ground over which we have gone, I think
it may be fairly asserted that the following propositions have been
clearly and fully established:

1. That the States of which the American Union was formed, from the
moment when they emerged from their colonial or provincial condition,
became severally sovereign, free, and independent States--not one State,
or nation.

2. That the union formed under the Articles of Confederation was a
compact between the States, in which these attributes of "sovereignty,
freedom, and independence," were expressly asserted and guaranteed.

3. That, in forming the "more perfect union" of the Constitution,
afterward adopted, the same contracting powers formed an _amended
compact_, without any surrender of these attributes of sovereignty,
freedom, and independence, either expressed or implied: on the contrary,
that, by the tenth amendment to the Constitution, limiting the power of
the Government to its express grants, they distinctly guarded against
the presumption of a surrender of anything by implication.

4. That political sovereignty resides, neither in individual citizens,
nor in unorganized masses, nor in fractional subdivisions of a
community, but in the people of an organized political body.

5. That no "republican form of government," in the sense in which that
expression is used in the Constitution, and was generally understood by
the founders of the Union--whether it be the government of a State or of
a confederation of States--is possessed of any sovereignty whatever, but
merely exercises certain powers delegated by the sovereign authority of
the people, and subject to recall and reassumption by the same authority
that conferred them.

6. That the "people" who organized the first confederation, the people
who dissolved it, the people who ordained and established the
Constitution which succeeded it, the only people, in fine, known or
referred to in the phraseology of that period--whether the term was used
collectively or distributively--were the people of the respective
States, each acting separately and with absolute independence of the
others.

7. That, in forming and adopting the Constitution, the States, or the
people of th