of the whole Union--not from the
Declaration of Independence--not from the people of the State itself. It
was assumed by agreement between the Legislatures of the several States,
and their delegates in Congress, without authority from or consultation
of the people at all.

In the Declaration of Independence, the enacting and constituent party
dispensing and delegating sovereign power is the whole people of the
United Colonies. The recipient party, invested with power, is the United
Colonies, declared United States.

In the Articles of Confederation, this order of agency is inverted. Each
State is the constituent and enacting party, and the United States in
Congress assembled the recipient of delegated power--and that power
delegated with such a penurious and carking hand that it had more
the aspect of a revocation of the Declaration of Independence than an
instrument to carry it into effect.

None of these indispensably necessary powers were ever conferred by the
State Legislatures upon the Congress of the federation; and well was
it that they never were. The system itself was radically defective. Its
incurable disease was an apostasy from the principles of the Declaration
of Independence. A substitution of separate State sovereignties, in the
place of the constituent sovereignty of the people, was the basis of the
Confederate Union.

In the Congress of the Confederation, the master minds of James Madison
and Alexander Hamilton were constantly engaged through the closing years
of the Revolutionary War and those of peace which immediately succeeded.
That of John Jay was associated with them shortly after the peace,
in the capacity of Secretary to the Congress for Foreign Affairs. The
incompetency of the Articles of Confederation for the management of the
affairs of the Union at home and abroad was demonstrated to them by the
painful and mortifying experience of every day. Washington, though
in retirement, was brooding over the cruel injustice suffered by his
associates in arms, the warriors of the Revolution; over the prostration
of the public credit and the faith of the nation, in the neglect to
provide for the payments even of the interest upon the public debt; over
the disappointed hopes of the friends of freedom; in the language of
the address from Congress to the States of the eighteenth of April,
1788--"the pride and boast of America, that the rights for which she
contended were the rights of human nature."