heir rights, organize their surrendered rights into a real
government, and leave the convention shorn, at least, of a portion of
their sovereignty. This doctrine crops out everywhere in the writings
of the elder Adams, and is set forth with rare ability by Mr. Webster,
in his great speech in the Senate against the State sovereignty
doctrine of General Hayne and Mr. Calhoun, which won for him the
honorable title of Expounder of the Constitution--and expound it he, no
doubt, did in the sense of its framers. He boldly concedes that prior
to the adoption of the constitution, the people of the United States
were severally sovereign states, but by the constitution they were made
one sovereign political community or people, and that the States,
though retaining certain rights, have merged their several sovereignty
in the Union.

The subtle mind of Mr. Calhoun, who did not hold that a state can
originate in compact, proved to Mr. Webster that his theory could not
stand; that, if the States went into the convention sovereign States,
they came out of it sovereign States; and that the constitution they
formed could from the nature of the case be only a treaty, compact, or
agreement between sovereigns. It could create an agency, but not a
government. The sovereign States could only delegate the exercise of
their sovereign powers, not the sovereign powers themselves. The
States could agree to exercise certain specific powers of sovereignty
only in common, but the force and vitality of the agreement depended on
the States, parties to the agreement retaining respectively their
sovereignty. Hence, he maintained that sovereignty, after as before
the convention, vested in the States severally. Hence State
sovereignty, and hence his doctrine that in all cases that cannot come
properly before the Supreme Court of the United States for decision,
each State is free to decide for itself, on which he based the right of
nullification, or the State veto of acts of Congress whose
constitutionality the State denies. Mr. Calhoun was himself no
secessionist, but he laid down the premises from which secession is the
logical deduction; and large numbers of young men, among the most open,
the most generous, and the most patriotic in the country, adopted his
premises, without being aware of this fact any more than he himself
was, and who have been behind none in their loyalty to the Union, and
in their sacrifices to sustain it, in the late rebell