These latter
consequences, not stated in the Kentucky resolutions, and apparently not
contemplated by the Virginia resolutions, were put into complete form by
Professor Tucker, of the University of Virginia, in 1803, in the notes
to his edition of "Blackstone's Commentaries." Thereafter its statements
of American constitutional law controlled the political training of the
South.

Madison held a modification of the State sovereignty theory, which has
counted among its adherents the mass of the ability and influence
of American authorities on constitutional law. Holding that the
Constitution was a compact, and that the States were the parties to it,
he held that one of the conditions of the compact was the abandonment
of State sovereignty; that the States were sovereign until 1787-8, but
thereafter only members of a political state, the United States. This
seems to have been the ground taken by Webster, in his debates with
Hayne and Calhoun. It was supported by the instances in which the
appearance of a sovereignty in each State was yielded in the fourteen
years before 1787; but, unfortunately for the theory, Calhoun was able
to produce instances exactly parallel after 1787. If the fact that each
State predicated its own sovereignty as an essential part of the steps
preliminary to the convention of 1787 be a sound argument for State
sovereignty before 1787, the fact that each State predicated its
sovereignty as an essential part of the ratification of the Constitution
must be taken as an equally sound argument for State sovereignty under
the Constitution; and it seems difficult, on the Madison theory, to
resist Calhoun's triumphant conclusion that, if the States went into the
convention as sovereign States, they came out of it as sovereign States,
with, of course, the right of secession. Calhoun himself had a sincere
desire to avoid the exercise of the right of secession, and it was as a
substitute for it that he evolved his doctrine of nullification,
which has been placed in the first volume. When it failed in 1833, the
exercise of the right of secession was the only remaining remedy for an
asserted breach of State sovereignty.

The events which led up to the success of the Republican party in
electing Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency in 1860 are so intimately
connected with the anti-slavery struggle that they have been placed in
the preceding volume. They culminated in the first organized attempt to
put the right of sece