Alliance’ of 1815, when certain European sovereigns, under a kind of approved orthodox despotism, assumed the prerogative to perpetuate existing dynasties, to suppress rebellions and revolutions, and to crush out civil and religious liberty. This alliance insisted that governments did not derive their authority or legitimacy from the assent of the people; that all who asserted such political heresies were outlaws and traitors; that constitutions have no legitimate source except absolute power; that governments grant or withhold what they please; that every movement in opposition to the ‘powers that be’ is a monster to be crushed, and that all resistance to oppression is involved in the same anathema, however legitimate or defensible.
There are some who see and concede the unreasonableness of making the discretion of a majority in Congress the measure of the powers granted or withheld in the Constitution, and that this nullifies the limitations and guarantees of the compact, and they recognize the necessity of resistance and interposition where reserved rights have been trampled on. Declining to accept the State rights theory, they have, under the stress of the necessity of not leaving wrongs unrighted and guarantees disregarded, suggested that the true remedy is an appeal to the ‘sober second thought’ of the people, or that failing, to a popular uprising to overthrow the offending government. This is the logical fallacy of begging the question. What people? En masse? No such people politically ever existed. The people who offended? Who will convince them of their error?
When self the wavering balance shakes,
It's rarely right adjusted.
Rebellion or revolution assumes that the acts complained of were done by legitimate authority, in due course of procedure, according to valid forms. That is the gist of the question in issue. If successful, rebellion becomes `right; if unsuccessful, it is treason. It is not an appeal to reason, justice, morality, law, but to brute force. It belongs to the slave and is the mere right of self-preservation. It is a travesty on freedom, on constitutions, on civilizations. Might can never make right. It is great only in the service of righteousness. Were Satan omnipotent, he would be none the less Satan, rather all the more the incarnation of evil, in potent antagonism to the good. Our fathers do not deserve such a reproach. They were not guilty of such folly. With a prescient statesmanship, far beyond their times, they made adequate protection for the rights and liberties of posterity and made not their maintenance dependent on avoirdupois, or the fluctuating will of an interested or fanatical populace.
States must decide. Sectionalism produced disunion.
The Federal government, as the representative and embodiment of the delegated powers, has no disposition, and, within itself or in its organization, no provisions to prevent the delegated from encroaching on the powers reserved to the several States. This government, neither through the President, the Congress nor the courts, having the right to determine finally whether the compact has been dangerously violated, or has failed to subserve the purpose of its formation, it follows irresistibly that where the forms of the Constitution prove ineffectual against dangers to the equality and essential rights of the States, the parties to it, these States have the sole right to interfere for arresting the progress of the evil and for maintaining within their respective limits the rights and liberties appertaining to them. The interposition of a State in its sovereign character, as a party to the constitutional compact, was the only means furnished by the system to resist encroachments and prevent entire absorption of the powers which were purposely withheld from the general government. Madison said: ‘Where resort can be had to no tribunal superior to the authority of the parties, the parties themselves must be the rightful judges in the last resort, whether the bargain made has been pursued or violated. The Constitution of the United States was formed by the sanction of the States, given by each in its sovereign capacity. The States, then, being parties to the constitutional compact, and in their sovereign capacity, it follows of necessity that there can be no tribunal above their authority to decide, in the last resort, whether the compact made by them be violated, and consequently that, as the parties to it, they must themselves decide, in the last resort, such questions as may be of sufficient magnitude to require their interposition.’ An assemblage of citizens of Boston in Faneuil Hall, in 1809, state, in a celebrated memorial, that they looked only to the state legislatures, who were competent to devise relief against the unconstitutional acts of the general government. ‘That your power is adequate to that object is evident from the organization of the confederacy.’ How the States were to exercise this high power of interposition, which constitutes so essential a portion of their reserved rights that it cannot be delegated without an entire surrender of their sovereignty and converting our system from a federal into a consolidated government, is a question that the States only are competent to determine. The reservation of powers is to ‘the States respectively,’ that is, to each State separately and distinctly. The Constitution contains no provision whatsoever for the exercise of the rights reserved nor any stipulation respecting it. It does not seem reasonable to look to the government of the United States, in which the delegated powers are vested, for the means of resisting encroachments on the reserved powers. That would be to expect power to tie its own hands, to relinquish its own claims, or to look for protection against danger to the quarter from which only it could possibly come. (1 Calhoun, 237.) Every sovereignty is the judge alone of its own compacts and agreements. Each State must have the right to interpret the agreement for itself unless it has clearly waived that right in favor of another power. That it has not been waived has been placed beyond refutation, for otherwise the powers of the government at Washington are universal and the enumerations and reservation are idle mockeries. And so a written constitution, however carefully guarded the grant and limitations, is no barrier against the usurpations of governments and no security for the rights and liberties of the people. Restrictions are contemptuously disregarded, or undermined by the gradual process of usurpation, until the instrument is of no more force, nor any more respected than an act of Congress. Constitutional scruples are hooted at, and suggested barriers of want of authority are ridiculed as abstractions or the theories of political doctrinaires. The Federal judiciary, the Congress, the Executive, the Constitution, the Union, are but emanations of the sovereignty of the States, and the States are not bound by their wishes, necessities, action, except as they have agreed to be bound, and this agreement was made, not with the Union, the Federal government, their agent and creature, but with one another. ‘Vicious legislation must be remedied by the people who suffer from the effects of it and not by those who enjoy its benefits.’ （Bryan.) They made their compact as sovereign States, and as such they alone are to determine the nature and extent of that agreement and how far they were to be bound. Each State was grantor and grantee receiving precisely what it had granted. The Federal government was in no sense a party to the Constitution; it has no original powers and can exert only what the States surrendered to it, and these States, from the very nature and structure of the common government, are alone competent to decide, in the last resort, what powers they intended to confer upon their agent. The States were not so stupid as to confer upon their creature, the Union, the power to obliterate them, or reduce them to the relation of dependence which counties sustain to the State. This high, supreme, ultimate power of our whole system resides in its fullness in the people of the several States, the only people known to us as performing political functions. The general government is not superior to the States, and has no existence nor autonomy, outside, irrespective of, contrary to, the States. The Union could not exist a day if all of the States were to withdraw their cooperation. The President, the Senate and Representatives, with all their powers, are conditioned upon the action of the States. Hamilton, in Federalist, No. LIX, said: ‘It is certainly true that the State legislatures, by forbearing the appointment of senators, may destroy the national government.’ The Federal government, the Union, as a corporate body politic, does not claim its life, nor a single power, from the people apart from State organizations. In truth and in fact, there is not, nor ever has been, such a political entity as the people of the United States in the aggregate, separated from, independent of, the voluntary or covenanted action of the States. That anything is constitutional or admissible, simply because the judiciary or the Executive or the Congress, or the moral convictions of citizens approve, or the country will be benefited by it, is a modern invention and has no basis in our constitutional federal republic. To put it in the least objectionable form, the States, in their undelegated powers, are as important, as