eated the
States, not that the States and people created the Government. Some of
them had acquiesced in certain principles which were embodied in the
fundamental law called the Constitution; but the Constitution was in
their view the child of necessity, a mere crude attempt of the theorists
of 1776, who made successful resistance against British authority, to
limit the power of the new central Government which was substituted for
that of the crown. For a period after the Revolution it was admitted
that feeble limitations on central authority had been observed, though
it was maintained that those limitations had been obstructions to our
advancing prosperity, the cause of continual controversy, and had
gradually from time to time been dispensed with, broken down, or made to
yield to our growing necessities. The civil war had made innovations--a
sweep, in fact, of many constitutional barriers--and radical
consolidationists like Thaddeus Stevens and Henry Winter Davis felt that
the opportunity to fortify central authority and establish its supremacy
should be improved.

These were the ideas and principles of leading consolidationists and
radicals in Congress who were politicians of ability, had studied the
science of government, and were from conviction opponents of reserved
rights and State sovereignty and of a mere confederation or Federal
Union, based on the political equality and reserved sovereignty of the
States, but insisted that the central Government should penetrate
further and act directly on the people. Few of these had given much
study or thought to fundamental principles, the character and structure
of our Federal system, or the Constitution itself. Most of them, under
the pressure of schemers and enthusiasts, were willing to assume and
ready to exercise any power deemed expedient, regardless of the organic
law. Almost unrestrained legislation to carry on the war induced a
spirit of indifference to constitutional restraint, and brought about an
assumption by some, a belief by others, that Congress was omnipotent;
that it was the embodiment of the national will, and that the other
departments of the Government as well as the States were subordinate and
subject to central Congressional control. Absolute power, the
centralists assumed and their fanatical associates seemed to suppose,
was vested in the legislative body of the country, and its decrees,
arbitrary and despotic, often originating in and carried first