ing, as the official style of the nation or new
power, united, not confederate States.

That the sovereignty vested in the States united, and was represented
in some sort by the Congress, is evident from the fact that the several
States, when they wished to adopt State constitutions in place of
colonial charters, felt not at liberty to do so without asking and
obtaining the permission of Congress, as the elder Adams informs us in
his Diary, kept at the time; that is, they asked and obtained the
equivalent of what has since, in the case of organizing new States,
been called an "enabling act." This proves that the States did not
regard themselves as sovereign States out of the Union, but as
completely sovereign only in it. And this again proves that the
Articles of Confederation did not correspond to the real, living
constitution of the people. Even then it was felt that the
organization and constitution of a State in the Union could be
regularly effected only by the permission of Congress; and no Territory
can, it is well known, regularly organize itself as a State, and adopt
a State constitution, without an enabling act by Congress, or its
equivalent.

New States, indeed, have been organized and been admitted into the
Union without an enabling act of Congress; but the case of Kansas, if
nothing else, proves that the proceeding is irregular, illicit,
invalid, and dangerous. Congress, of course, can condone the wrong and
validate the act, but it were better that the act should be validly
done, and that there should be no wrong to condone. Territories have
organized as States, adopted State constitutions, and instituted State
governments under what has been called "squatter sovereignty;" but such
sovereignty has no existence, because sovereignty is attached to the
domain; and the domain is in the United States. It is the offspring of
that false view of popular sovereignty which places it in the people
personally or generically, irrespective of the domain, which makes
sovereignty a purely personal right, not a right fixed to the soil, and
is simply a return to the barbaric constitution of power. In all
civilized nations, sovereignty is inseparable from the state, and the
state is inseparable from the domain. The will of the people, unless
they are a state, is no law, has no force, binds nobody, and justifies
no act.

The regular process of forming and admitting new States explains
admirably the mutual relation o