Footnote 46:[ (return) ]
Article III, section 3.
Footnote 47:[ (return) ]
"American Museum," February, 1788.
Footnote 48:[ (return) ]
Benton's "Abridgment," vol. x, p. 448.
Footnote 49:[ (return) ]
See address by Edward Everett at the Academy of Music, New York, July 4, 1861.
Footnote 50:[ (return) ]
Ibid.
Footnote 51:[ (return) ]
"Federalist," No. xxxix.
CHAPTER VII.
Verbal Cavils and Criticisms.—"Compact," "Confederacy," "Accession," etc.—The "New Vocabulary."—The Federal Constitution a Compact, and the States acceded to it.—Evidence of the Constitution itself and of Contemporary Records.
I have habitually spoken of the Federal Constitution as a compact, and of the parties to it as sovereign States. These terms should not, and in earlier times would not, have required explanation or vindication. But they have been called in question by the modern school of consolidation. These gentlemen admit that the Government under the Articles of Confederation was a compact. Mr. Webster, in his rejoinder to Mr. Hayne, on the 27th of January, 1830, said:
"When the gentleman says the Constitution is a compact between the States, he uses language exactly applicable to the old Confederation. He speaks as if he were in Congress before 1789. He describes fully that old state of things then existing. The Confederation was, in strictness, a compact; the States, as States, were parties to it. We had no other General Government. But that was found insufficient and inadequate to the public exigencies. The people were not satisfied with it, and undertook to establish a better. They undertook to form a General Government, which should stand on a new basis—not a confederacy, not a league, not a compact between States, but a Constitution."[52]