IS A STATE SOVEREIGN?

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owe to our own Sovereign State." This is the doctrine which I propose to consider; and it is given in the words of one who is believed by many to have done more to make it the prevalent doctrine of the South than any other man, with the possible exception of John C. Calhoun.

The words sovereign and sovereignty have been used in a loose and vague sense. A man may be said to be a sovereign in his own house; a captain of a ship is a sovereign, in a modified sense. In like manner, the words have been used in connection with governmental matters during our whole history. They are not in the Declaration of Independence, or in the Constitution of the United States; they are in neither of the Constitutions of Ohio, though they may be found in the earlier Constitutions of some of the States. They have been frequently used by those who never thought of attaching to them the strict meaning in which they have been understood and used by the political leaders of the South for many years. A sovereign State or Nation is properly one that has no political superior. This is the signification given to the word by Southern statesmen, and it is the one we must keep in mind when discussing the question of State Sovereignty. Is a State sovereign in this strict and only true sense of the word? Is it true that Ohio or Indiana has no political superior?

My first remark in support of the position that there is no true sovereignty in any State, is that sovereignty leads legitimately to secession. This is the argument of Mr. Jefferson Davis and his associates; and I hold their conclusion to be irresistible, if their premises are admitted. Says Mr. D., before leaving the United States Senate, "I have for many years advocated, as an essential attribute of State Sovereignty, the right of a State to secede from the Union." And, again, speaking of Nullification, he says, "Secession belongs to a different class of rights, and is to be justified upon the basis that the States are sovereign." This right of secession is not a revolutionary one, according to him, but a pacific, legitimate right, to be exercised whenever, and for whatever reasons, the State may deem proper. In his inaugural, he says, "It is an abuse of language to call the act of the Southern States in forming their Confederacy, a revolution."

In a tract by Hon. Wm. D. Potter, published before the last presidential election, occurs this language: "It results from the sovereign character of the States, and from the nature of the compact of union, that any State, which conceives herself aggrieved beyond endurance, may, at her sovereign will and pleasure, shake off the bonds of a broken covenant and seek her safety in a separate nationality." And again, "The whole question is whether or not the State can release her citizens from their obligations to the Federal authority, and protect them under the sufficient shield of her own sovereign authority? This is the right which Mr.

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STATE SOVEREIGNTY LEADS TO SECESSION.

Douglas absolutely denies, except in the way of revolution; but which Mr. Johnson, his colleague on the presidential ticket, has said, is the last and only hope of the South.' If there be such a right, then the States are sovereign and independent; if there be not, then they are amalgamated and fused down, hopelessly and helplessly, into one government and one people." In a declaration of the causes justifying the secession of South Carolina, issued by the convention which passed the ordinance of secession, we find sovereign and sovereignty bristling up in almost every paragraph. Secession is a right, because South Carolina is a sovereign State; it is a duty, because when Mr. Lincoln becomes President, "The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy." (I quote this as a political curiosity; a State dissolves her connection with the Union through the fear that the Constitution will be violated!)

The advocates of secession everywhere maintain the dogma of State Sovereignty. The latter leads legitimately to the former, they claim, and the claim seems to be valid. It is true, the word "sovereignty" has been often used in a much narrower sense. Thousands have spoken of the States as sovereign, with no thought of attributing to them absolute independence. And it is this very vagueness of expression, this loose way of speaking, of which the South has now taken advantage. Her statesmen never attempt to prove the sovereignty of the States; they always assume it as something admitted by all. They are continually asserting it, but attaching to the word the widest meaning, while ordinarily it has been used in a much narrower sense. But it can hardly be doubted that the signification they give it is the correct one, according to present usage; and if we now advocate or admit State Sovereignty, we must expect it to be understood in the absolute sense.

The right of secession is a solecism in government. It tends directly to the destruction of all civil society. It is a political absurdity. Now, whatever proposition leads directly and legitimately to an absurd conclusion, is itself untenable. The premise is, the States are sovereign; the conclusion is, the States have the right to secede. The conclusion we know to be absurd; therefore the premise which leads to it is vicious, and must be abandoned.

But State Sovereignty not only leads to secession, as a logical inference— it has led to it as a bloody reality. Secession is no longer a mere political heresy; it has been acted out by nearly all the States of the South. It has already cost hundreds of millions of treasure, and hundreds of thousands of lives. If anything were wanting to show the absurdity of secession, it has been furnished by this attempt to carry it into practice.

THE CONSTITUTION DISPROVES STATE SOVEREIGNTY.

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And no one knows this better than Jefferson Davis and his asssociates. They have succeeded in inducing divers States to secede from the Union, but no one is simple enough to believe a State will ever be allowed peaceably to secede from the Confederacy. The Constitution of the "Confederate States contains no intimation of any such right. The doctrine has served its purpose, and may now be kept in abeyance. The rebel leaders knew that the people of the South could never be seduced into open revolt. If they could be made to believe in the right of peaceable secession, their States might be withdrawn from the Union; but the people as a whole would never engage in undisguised rebellion.

Were the doctrine of State Sovereignty obnoxious to no other objection, this would be fatal to it, that it legitimately leads to secession.

The falsity of the doctrine will also appear from an examination of our National and State Constitutions. It has already been said that our Government is an anomaly. There is no other like it. There is a State Constitution for municipal or internal functions, and a National Constitution for those that are general and external. In origin, these two stand upon an equality; both have been made by the people. We must then look at the respective Constitutions to ascertain whether the sovereignty is in the State or the Nation. Does the Constitution of Ohio say that all laws enacted by the Congress of the United States which are contrary to that Constitution, shall be null and void? That would be a distinct assertion of the sovereignty of Ohio: but such language is not found in her Constitution. But the Constitution of the United States declares that it, "and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." And, further, "the members of the several State legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several States shall be bound, by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution."

This is sufficiently explicit. Whether the States were sovereign before the formation of the Constitution or not, if language has any meaning, they have not been so since. Yet, notwithstanding the explicitness of the Constitution, men sometimes confuse themselves in regard to State rights. They forget that the National Constitution is as much theirs and their work, as the constitution of the State in which they live. The people of New York, by themselves, have framed one constitution, and, in conjunction with the people of the other States, they have framed another. The language of each is their language, and each is their constitution. In the National Constitution, the people of New York have asserted that all laws made by Congress, in accordance with it, shall be the supreme law of the land, and, of course, supreme in New York.

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SHALL THE WHOLE YIELD TO A PART?

Mark, now, that the people of New York have said this for themselves; it is their organic law. If they did not intend the national laws to be supreme, why did they say so? We must regard it as their deliberate

and solemn declaration.

Even if a State had not thus declared that its own laws must conform to the National Constitution, still we could not expect that a part would be supreme over the whole. The sovereignty must be with the whole rather than with the parts. But, besides this, each State has formed two constitutions, in one of which sovereignty is distinctly ascribed to the National Government, and in the other there is nothing contradictory to this. By its participation in making or assenting to the National Constitution, each State has thus expressly denied sovereignty to itself; if it ever possessed any, it has, in that instrument, explicitly parted with it.

The National Constitution claims for itself the exercise of all national powers, and denies them to the States. These latter are to exercise all the functions of municipal and internal government. There is little need of conflict; but if it comes, which shall yield, the State or the Nation? Shall the whole give up to the part, or the part yield to the whole? This is the true view to be taken, instead of that which makes the General Government something entirely foreign to the State. The very State which complains of the General Government, is itself a part of that Government. The doctrine of individual sovereignty, of which I have before spoken, tends to give the people a low estimate of government, and especially of our General Government. Mr. Davis called it the agent through which the State communicated with foreign nations. And Mr. Potter says: "There is no such thing as sovereignty in any political machinery. Government is simply an agency or instrumentality, and it is the people of States that make or unmake governments." The embodied authority of twenty or thirty millions of people is a mere agency, an instrumentality, a political machinery! If the General Government is a mere political machinery, pray, what is a State government? And yet, by some hocus-pocus, such political doctors as those above quoted from, contrive to infer from their jargon, not only that the General Government is not sovereign, but that the States are.

No part of the Constitution is quoted so often by the advocates of State sovereignty as the amendment, which declares that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. How this clause can be made to sustain that doctrine, it is not easy to The people of the Nation gave the Constitution such form as they thought best, or, in other words, delegated certain powers to the General Government; the powers not thus delegated remained, of course, with

see.

DELEGATED POWERS.

15 the people-the people of the Nation. Such of these as had not been prohibited to the States by the Constitution, the people of any State might incorporate into their State constitution. In all this, where is any trace of State sovereignty? Is it in the positive prohibition of certain powers to the States, and the implication, that by the same authority, others might be prohibited? Is there anything to prevent the people of the Nation amending the Constitution, by delegating to the General Government powers now found in some of the State constitutions? There is nothing mysterious in this matter of delegated powers, though so much is made of it by those who would cripple the General Government. "When States or peoples make a government, they delegate the necessary powers and authorities; but delegated power is never sovereign, for sovereign power is inherent, original, and self-existent." "The United States Government derived its being and its powers from precisely the same source that the local governments did, to wit: from the peoples of the States respectively." "Whatever power it has, is derived from others, and is held in trust for others; and it is, therefore, in no proper sense of the word, sovereign." Admit all this, and what then? Does it prove that the States are sovereign? And yet this is the conclusion which the writer, from whom the above is quoted, draws from it.

His argument, stated in form, is, "No government, whose powers are delegated, is sovereign. The United States Government is one of delegated powers, therefore the States are sovereign!" Wonderful conclusion ! Yet he admits that the States-the local governments-derive their being and powers from the people, precisely as the General Government. All the powers of the States are delegated, and no delegated power is sovereign; yet, somehow, the States are sovereign! This is a specimen of their logic. Error is always self-contradictory. Wherever there is a constitution there is delegated power; and the power not delegated remains with the people. The people of a nation like ours frame a constitution, and enumerate the powers delegated; the others remain with the people. The people of a State frame a constitution in like manner, delegating some powers and retaining some; the whole subject, however, to the National Constitution, which is the expressed will of the whole people. The Nation can change their Constitution at pleasure, in obedience to the forms which they themselves have prescribed. The people of a State can change theirs only in accordance with the National Constitution.

But the advocates of State Sovereignty affirm that the Constitution was made, not by the people, but by the States. Says Jefferson Davis, "The creature (the General Government) has been exalted above its creator-the States; the principals have been made subordinate to the