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 rebellion.
The formidable rebellion which is now happily suppressed, and
which attempted to justify itself by the doctrine of State
sovereignty, has thrown, in many minds, new light on the subject,
and led them to re-examine the historical facts in the case from
a different point of view, to see if Mr.
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