ther country. The
treaty of 1783 with Great Britain recognized the States separately and
by name as "free, sovereign, and independent," even while it established
national boundaries outside of the States, covering a vast western
territory in which no State would have ventured to forfeit its
interest by setting up a claim to practical freedom, sovereignty, or
independence. All our early history is full of such contradictions
between fact and theory. They are largely obscured by the
undiscriminating use of the word "people." As used now, it usually means
the national people; but many apparently national phrases as to the
"sovereignty of the people," as they were used in 1787-9, would seem
far less national if the phraseology could show the feeling of those
who then used them that the "people" referred to was the people of
the State. In that case the number of the contradictions would be
indefinitely increased; and the phraseology of the Constitution's
preamble, "We, the people of the United States," would not be offered
as a consciously nationalizing phrase of its framers. It is hardly to
be doubted, from the current debates, that the conventions of
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, Virginia, North
Carolina, and South Carolina, seven of the thirteen States, imagined and
assumed that each ratified the Constitution in 1788--90 by authority of
the State's people alone, by the State's sovereign will; while the facts
show that in each of these conventions a clear majority was coerced
into ratification by a strong minority in its own State, backed by
the unanimous ratifications of the other States. If ratification or
rejection had really been open to voluntary choice, to sovereign will,
the Constitution would never have had a moment's chance of life; so far
from being ratified by nine States as a condition precedent to going
into effect, it would have been summarily rejected by a majority of the
States. In the language of John Adams, the Constitution was "extorted
from the grinding necessities of a reluctant people." The theory of
State sovereignty was successfully contradicted by national necessities.

The change from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution,
though it could not help antagonizing State sovereignty, was carefully
managed so as to do so as little as possible. As soon as the plans
by which the Federal party, under Hamilton's leadership, proposed to
develop the national features of the