the protests of a drowning man in the midst of a resistless current. His declarations that he will not drown can hardly save him without the added exertion of swimming.

In point of fact, the States are not and have never been sovereign. The Nation may calmly ignore the multitude of resolutions as long as they are confined to theory; but any attempt to enforce them would speedily be crushed. No State has ever exercised the prerogatives of sovereignty. No State except Texas has ever been recognized by the nations as an independent power; no State has sent or received an ambassador, made a treaty, waged war, or concluded a peace.1

No State has been able to stand alone, though several have had the opportunity to try. At the outbreak of the Revolution the rupture was between England and a single colony, Massachusetts; and while that colony bravely faced the issue, she at the same time called frantically upon her sister colonies for help. When our Federal Government was organized

1 Lalor's "Cyclopedia of Political and Social Science," Vol. III. p. 794.

in 1789 two States, Rhode Island and North Carolina, failing to ratify the Constitution, remained out of the Union for a time; but in less than two years both had joined it, thus confessing their inability to stand alone. South Carolina was on the verge of secession in 1832, but, receiving no support from the other States, she soon settled back into her rightful place. Even in 1861 the seceding States did not attempt to remain separate and independent powers. They immediately banded together in a confederacy.

But the most conclusive and unanswerable argument against State Sovereignty is, not only that the Federal Constitution forbids the exercise of sovereign powers to the States, but especially the fact that the Constitution is subject to almost unlimited amendment without the consent of any particular State.1 The people of a State may be unanimously opposed to any particular amendment, which may nevertheless be adopted and become binding on that State. When a nation as a whole has such power over its several parts, it is idle and 1 Ibid., p. 796.

absurd to attribute sovereignty to any of the parts.1

True sovereignty in the United States rests, not with the States, nor even with the Federal Government, but with the people of the nation. The National will, humanly speaking, is absolutely supreme. It is above all laws, congresses, courts, and constitutions, and can change them at its pleasure. The National will alone is sovereign. But the voice of the Nation is seldom heard except through the ordinary channels of law. It is only some great emergency, as the adoption of the Constitution, or the Civil War, that brings forth an extra expression of the National will, and at such times the sound is indescribably vast.

Early Threats of Disunion

Scarcely had our National Government been organized when threats of secession and disunion

1 The reader should carefully distinguish between State Sovereignty and States' Rights. No one denies the existence of the latter. It is necessary to our form of government; but for many years before the war the term was misused until it almost lost its true signification. See "Side Lights," Vol. I. p. 384.

were first heard, and from that time to the Civil War not a decade passed in which the same cry was not renewed. From the Congressional halls, from the public platform, and through the press the threat of dismembering the Union has been reiterated over and over again. Sometimes this disunion fever took the milder form of simple prediction that the Union could endure but a short time, at other times it would break forth in the wildest and most intemperate threats of secession from the disappointed and the aggrieved. Only a few of the more notable examples can here be given.

Some years after the Government had been organized, Elbridge Gerry, one of the framers of the Constitution and afterward Vice-President, pronounced the Republic a failure and openly predicted that it could not long continue. Scores of similar expressions were heard from members of Congress and other public men, but it was left for the Louisiana Purchase to call forth the first serious threats of disunion. The old New England Federalists sternly resisted the acquisition of the new territory. New England, they claimed, will be rendered powerless

VOL. II.D

when a dozen or more new States peopled with the wild men of Missouri shall be added to the Union. The Constitution was made only for the original territory of the United States; the act is therefore unconditional and void. In January, 1811, when the bill to admit Louisiana as a State into the Union was debated in Congress, Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts spoke as follows, "It is my deliberate opinion, that, if this bill passes, the bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved; that the States which compose it are free from their moral obligations; and that, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, to prepare definitely for a separation, amicably if they can, forcibly if they must."

The embargo of President Jefferson was another source from which the disunion spirit emanated. The embargo became so unpopular in commercial New England that the Federal leaders decided to break it, and to withdraw the New England States from the Union, if the Government attempted to use force. It was also broadly rumored that unofficial negotiations had already begun toward securing British aid in breaking up the Union.