Note (return) — Chapter XI

I am well aware that it has been attempted to construe these declarations concerning the right of the people to reassume their delegations of power—especially in the terms employed by Virginia, "people of the United States"—as having reference to the idea of one people, in mass, or "in the aggregate." But it can scarcely be possible that any candid and intelligent reader, who has carefully considered the evidence already brought to bear on the subject, can need further argument to disabuse his mind of that political fiction. The "people of the United States," from whom the powers of the Federal Government were "derived," could have been no other than the people who ordained and ratified the Constitution; and this, it has been shown beyond the power of denial, was done by the people of each State, severally and independently. No other people were known to the authors of the declarations above quoted. Mr. Madison was a leading member of the Virginia Convention, which made that declaration, as well as of the general Convention that drew up the Constitution. We have seen what his idea of "the people of the United States" was—"not the people as composing one great body, but the people as composing thirteen sovereignties."94 Mr. Lee, of Westmoreland ("Light-Horse Harry"), in the same Convention, answering Mr. Henry's objection to the expression, "We, the people," said: "It [the Constitution] is now submitted to the people of Virginia. If we do not adopt it, it will be always null and void as to us. Suppose it was found proper for our adoption, and becoming the government of the people of Virginia, by what style should it be done? Ought we not to make use of the name of the people? No other style would be proper."95 It would certainly be superfluous, after all that has been presented heretofore, to add any further evidence of the meaning that was attached to these expressions by their authors. "The people of the United States" were in their minds the people of Virginia, the people of Massachusetts, and the people of every other State that should agree to unite. They could have meant only that the people of their respective States who had delegated certain powers to the Federal Government, in ratifying the Constitution and acceding to the Union, reserved to themselves the right, in event of the failure of their purposes, to "resume" (or "reassume") those powers by seceding from the same Union.