people, and
governs only by the authority of the French nation, which is as
competent to revoke the powers it has conferred on him, when it judges
proper, as it was to confer them. The Union exists and governs, if the
States are sovereign, only by the will of the State, and she is as
competent to revoke the powers she has delegated as she was to delegate
them. The Union, as far as she is concerned, is her creation, and what
she is competent to make she is competent to unmake.

In seceding or withdrawing from the Union a State may act very
unwisely, very much against her own interests and the interests of the
other members of the confederacy; but, if sovereign, she in doing so
only exercises her unquestionable right. The other members may regret
her action, both for her sake and their own, but they cannot accuse her
or her citizens of disloyalty in seceding, nor of rebellion, if in
obedience to her authority they defend their independence by force of
arms against the Union. Neither she nor they, on the supposition, ever
owed allegiance to the Union. Allegiance is due from the citizen to
the sovereign state, but never from a sovereign state or from its
citizens to any other sovereign state. While the State is in the Union
the citizen owes obedience to the United States, but only because his
State has, in ratifying the Federal constitution, enacted that it and
all laws and treaties made under it shall be law within her territory.
The repeal by the State of the act of ratification releases the citizen
from the obligation even of obedience, and renders it criminal for him
to yield it without her permission.

It avails nothing, on the hypothesis of the sovereignty of the States
as distinguished from that of the United States, to appeal to the
language or provisions of the Federal constitution. That constitutes
the government, not the state or the sovereign. It is ordained by the
sovereign, and if the States were severally independent and sovereign
states, that sovereign is the States severally, not the States united.
The constitution is law for the citizens of a State only so long as the
State remains one of the United States. No matter, then, how clear and
express the language, or stringent the provisions of the constitution,
they bind only the citizens of the States that enact the constitution.
The written constitution is simply a compact, and obliges only while
the compact is continued by the States, each for its