Again, in his discussion with Mr. Calhoun, three years afterward, he vehemently reiterates the same denial. Of the Constitution, he says: "Does it call itself a compact? Certainly not. It uses the word 'compact' but once, and that when it declares that the States shall enter into no compact.[53] Does it call itself a league, a confederacy, a subsisting treaty between the States? Certainly not. There is not a particle of such language in all its pages."[54]
The artist, who wrote under his picture the legend "This is a horse," made effectual provision against any such cavil as that preferred by Mr. Webster and his followers, that the Constitution is not a compact, because it is not "so nominated in the bond." As well as I can recollect, there is no passage in the "Iliad" or the "Æneid" in which either of those great works "calls itself," or is called by its author, an epic poem, yet this would scarcely be accepted as evidence that they are not epic poems. In an examination of Mr. Webster's remarks, I do not find that he announces them to be either a speech or an argument; yet their claim to both these titles will hardly be disputed—notwithstanding the verbal criticism on the Constitution just quoted.
The distinction attempted to be drawn between the language proper to a confederation and that belonging to a constitution, as indicating two different ideas, will not bear the test of examination and application to the case of the United States. It has been fully shown, in previous chapters, that the terms "Union," "Federal Union," "Federal Constitution," "Constitution of the Federal Government," and the like, were used—not merely in colloquial, informal speech, but in public proceedings and official documents—with reference to the Articles of Confederation, as freely as they have since been employed under the present Constitution. The former Union was—as Mr. Webster expressly admits—as nobody denies—a compact between States, yet it nowhere "calls itself" "a compact"; the word does not occur in it even the one time that it occurs in the present Constitution, although the contracting States are in both prohibited from entering into any "treaty, confederation, or alliance" with one another, or with any foreign power, without the consent of Congress; and the contracting or constituent parties are termed "United States" in the one just as in the other.
Mr. Webster is particularly unfortunate in his criticisms upon what he terms the "new vocabulary," in which the Constitution is styled a compact, and the States which ratified it are spoken of as having "acceded" to it. In the same speech, last quoted, he says:
"This word 'accede,' not found either in the Constitution itself or in the ratification of it by any one of the States, has been chosen for use here, doubtless not without a well-considered purpose. The natural converse of accession is secession; and therefore, when it is stated that the people of the States acceded to the Union, it may be more plausibly argued that they may secede from it. If, in adopting the Constitution, nothing was done but acceding to a compact, nothing would seem necessary, in order to break it up, but to secede from the same compact. But the term is wholly out of place. Accession, as a word applied to political associations, implies coming into a league, treaty, or confederacy, by one hitherto a stranger to it; and secession implies departing from such league or confederacy. The people of the United States have used no such form of expression in establishing the present Government."[55]
Repeating and reiterating in many forms what is substantially the same idea, and attributing the use of the terms which he attacks to an ulterior purpose, Mr. Webster says:
"This is the reason, sir, which makes it necessary to abandon the use of constitutional language for a new vocabulary, and to substitute, in the place of plain, historical facts, a series of assumptions. This is the reason why it is necessary to give new names to things; to speak of the Constitution, not as a constitution, but as a compact; and of the ratifications by the people, not as ratifications, but as acts of accession."[56]
In these and similar passages, Mr. Webster virtually concedes that, if the Constitution were a compact; if the Union were a confederacy; if the States had, as States, severally acceded to it—all which propositions he denies—then the sovereignty of the States and their right to secede from the Union would be deducible.
Now, it happens that these very terms—"compact," "confederacy," "accede," and the like—were the terms in familiar use by the authors of the Constitution and their associates with reference to that instrument and its ratification. Other writers, who have examined the subject since the late war gave it an interest which it had never commanded before, have collected such an array of evidence in this behalf that it is necessary only to cite a few examples.
The following language of Mr. Gerry, of Massachusetts, in the Convention of 1787, has already been referred to: "If nine out of thirteen States can dissolve the compact, six out of nine will be just as able to dissolve the new one hereafter."