That the
framers of the constitution held it to be a treaty, compact, or
agreement among sovereigns, there is no doubt, for they so held
in regard to all constitution of government; and there is just as
little doubt that they intended to constitute, and firmly
believed that they were constituting a real government.
Mr. Madison's authority on this point is conclusive. They
unquestionably regarded the States, prior to the ratification of
the constitution they proposed, as severally sovereign, as they
were declared to be by the old Articles of Confederation, but
they also believed that all individuals are sovereign prior to
the formation of civil society. Yet very few, if any, of them
believed that they remained sovereign after the adoption of the
constitution; and we may attribute to their belief in the
conventional origin of all government,--the almost universal
belief of the time among political philosophers,--the little
account which they made of the historical facts that prove that
the people of the United States were always one people, and that
the States never existed as severally sovereign states.
The political philosophers of the present day do not generally
accept the theory held by our fathers, and it has been shown in
these pages to be unsound and incompatible with the essential
nature of government. The statesmen of the eighteenth century
believed that the state is derived from the people individually,
and held that sovereignty is created by the people in convention.
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