Constitution became evident, the
latent State feeling took fire. Its first symptom was the adoption
of the name Republican by the new opposition party which took form in
1792-3 under Jefferson's leadership. Up to this time the States had been
the only means through which Americans had known any thing of republican
government; they had had no share in the government of the mother
country in colonial times, and no efficient national government to take
part in under the Articles of Confederation. The claim of an exclusive
title to the name of Republican does not seem to have been fundamentally
an implication of monarchical tendencies against the Federalists so much
as an implication that they were hostile to the States, the familiar
exponents of republican government. When the Federalist majority in
Congress forced through, in the war excitement against France in 1798,
the Alien and Sedition laws, which practically empowered the President
to suppress all party criticism of and opposition to the dominant party,
the Legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia, in 1798-9, passed series of
resolutions, prepared by Jefferson and Madison respectively, which for
the first time asserted in plain terms the sovereignty of the
States. The two sets of resolutions agreed in the assertion that the
Constitution was a "compact," and that the States were the "parties"
which had formed it. In these two propositions lies the gist of State
sovereignty, of which all its remotest consequences are only natural
developments. If it were true that the States, of their sovereign will,
had formed such a compact; if it were not true that the adoption of
the Constitution was a mere alteration of the form of a political state
already in existence; it would follow, as the Kentucky resolutions
asserted, that each State had the exclusive right to decide for itself
when the compact had been broken, and the mode and measure of redress.
It followed, also, that, if the existence and force of the Constitution
in a State were due solely to the sovereign will of the State, the
sovereign will of the State was competent, on occasion, to oust the
Constitution from the jurisdiction covered by the State. In brief, the
Union was wholly voluntary in its formation and in its continuance; and
each State reserved the unquestionable right to secede, to abandon the
Union, and assume an independent existence whenever due reason, in
the exclusive judgment of the State, should arise.