, a league, or a
confederation, which no one can pretend is a sovereign state, nation,
or republic.

The question, then, whether the United States are a single sovereign
state or nation, or a confederacy of independent sovereign states
depends on the question whether the American people originally existed
as one people or as several independent states. Mr. Jefferson
maintains that before the convention of 1787 they existed as several
independent sovereign states, but that since that convention, or the
ratification of the constitution it proposed, they exist as one
political people in regard to foreign nations, and several sovereign
states in regard to their internal and domestic relations. Mr. Webster
concedes that originally the States existed as severally sovereign
states, but contends that by ratifying the constitution they have been
made one sovereign political people, state, or nation, and that the
General government is a supreme national government, though with a
reservation in favor of State rights. But both are wrong. If the
several States of the Union were severally sovereign states when they
met in the convention, they are so now; and the constitution is only an
agreement or compact between sovereigns, and the United States are, as
Mr. Calhoun maintained, only a confederation of sovereign states, and
not a single state or one political community.

But if the sovereignty persists in the States severally, any State,
saving its faith, may whenever it chooses to do so, withdraw from the
Union, absolve its subjects from all obligation to the Federal
authorities, and make it treason in them to adhere to the Federal
government. Secession is, then, an incontestable right; not a right
held under the constitution or derived from the convention but a right
held prior to it, independently of it, inherent in the State
sovereignty, and inseparable from it. The State is bound by the
constitution of the Union only while she is in it, and is one of the
States united. In ratifying the constitution she did not part with her
sovereignty, or with any portion of it, any more than France has parted
with her sovereignty, and ceased to be an independent sovereign nation,
by vesting the imperial power in Napoleon III. and his legitimate heirs
male. The principal parts not with his power to his agent, for the
agent is an agent only by virtue of the continued power of the
principal. Napoleon is emperor by the will of the French