“The Convention, acknowledging with grateful hearts the goodness of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe in affording the people of the United States, in the course of his providence, an opportunity deliberately and peaceably without fraud or surprise of entering into an explicit and solemn compact with each other, by assenting to and ratifying a new constitution in order to form a more perfect union, ... do, in the name and behalf of the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, assent to and ratify the said Constitution for the United States of America.”
It is the people of the United States, not the States, nor the people of the State of Massachusetts, that enter into this explicit and solemn compact with each other for a more perfect union. As we have said before, a compact may be for a national government or for a confederacy. If the convention understood that it was States making a confederacy, they would have said the people of the State, and not the people of the United States.
We come next to Virginia’s acceptance of the Constitution, which, to Calhoun’s peculiar mind, was “a conditional one.” “A condition made in the interest of all the States, and of which any State could avail.”
The acceptance was made “in behalf of the people of Virginia”; the condition was, “that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the people of the United States may be resumed by them, whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression,” and that “among other essential rights the liberty of conscience and of the press cannot be cancelled, abridged, restrained, or modified by any authority of the United States.”
It cannot be disputed that the convention, by this acceptance, understood and declared that there was thence but one nation; they accept the government in behalf of the people of Virginia; they acknowledge that the powers are derived from “the people of the United States”; and add, if the government be perverted to the injury and oppression of the people of the United States, they, the people of the United States, may resume the granted powers, not the people of Virginia or the State of Virginia. If the convention understood that they were making a compact between States that were to retain sovereignty, or the right to withdraw, it certainly would have said: if the United States Government be perverted to the injury of the States, then the State or sovereign State of Virginia or the people of the State could resume the powers granted by her.
Clinton is one of the four persons whom Mr. Lodge cites as of the opinion that the Union was a dissoluble, precarious, and temporary affair. The letter of Madison to Hamilton—we have before [mentioned]—in relation to the perpetuity of the Union and that there could be no conditional acceptance, is well known to constitutional writers and historians, and regarded as of the highest authority; but the more emphatic and decisive declaration of the convention of New York, in its circular-letter to the governors of the different States, signed by Clinton, its President, and ordered unanimously, seems to have escaped all notice. In that letter he and they state to the governor of each State the ratification of the Constitution by New York and her recommendation of certain amendments. He and they add, none of these amendments originated in local views.
“Our attachment to our sister States, and the confidence we repose in them, cannot be more forcibly demonstrated than by acceding to a government which many of us think very imperfect, and devolving the power of determining whether that government shall be rendered perpetual in its present form or altered agreeably to our wishes and a minority of the States with whom we unite.”[56]
Can anything be more explicit that every one, everywhere, at that time understood the Union was perpetual, than this unanimous address of the convention of New York saying so to all the other States, and the submissive request that they would amend the Constitution in accordance with their wishes?
The conventions of Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York passed resolutions recommending what they considered important necessary amendments to the Constitution. These resolutions and the recommendations of other States were considered in the first Congress, and ten articles, commonly called the Bill of Rights, were passed, and duly ratified by the legislatures of the States. These articles are safeguards against the feared tyrannical grants that had been given, and are all restrictive of the powers of the United States over its citizens, not of its powers over States. They are: that the people should have the right of petition; and “a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” This shows how deep and serious the States believed the danger to be from the great powers of the General Government with a standing army and navy.