The term ratification itself, because the term commonly used in reference to treaties between sovereign powers, has been seized on, since sometimes used by the convention, to prove that the constitution emanates from the States severally, and is a treaty or compact between sovereign states, not an organic or fundamental law ordained by a single sovereign will; but this argument is inadmissible, because, as we have just seen, the convention is competent to ordain the constitution without submitting it for ratification, and because the convention uses sometimes the word adopt instead of the word ratify. That the framers of the constitution held it to be a treaty, compact, or agreement among sovereigns, there is no doubt, for they so held in regard to all constitution of government; and there is just as little doubt that they intended to constitute, and firmly believed that they were constituting a real government. Mr. Madison's authority on this point is conclusive. They unquestionably regarded the States, prior to the ratification of the constitution they proposed, as severally sovereign, as they were declared to be by the old Articles of Confederation, but they also believed that all individuals are sovereign prior to the formation of civil society. Yet very few, if any, of them believed that they remained sovereign after the adoption of the constitution; and we may attribute to their belief in the conventional origin of all government,--the almost universal belief of the time among political philosophers,--the little account which they made of the historical facts that prove that the people of the United States were always one people, and that the States never existed as severally sovereign states.
The political philosophers of the present day do not generally accept the theory held by our fathers, and it has been shown in these pages to be unsound and incompatible with the essential nature of government. The statesmen of the eighteenth century believed that the state is derived from the people individually, and held that sovereignty is created by the people in convention. The rights and powers of the state, they held, were made up of the rights held by individuals under the law of nature, and which the individuals surrendered to civil society on its formation. So they supposed that independent sovereign states might meet in convention, mutually agree to surrender a portion of their rights, organize their surrendered rights into a real government, and leave the convention shorn, at least, of a portion of their sovereignty. This doctrine crops out everywhere in the writings of the elder Adams, and is set forth with rare ability by Mr. Webster, in his great speech in the Senate against the State sovereignty doctrine of General Hayne and Mr. Calhoun, which won for him the honorable title of Expounder of the Constitution--and expound it he, no doubt, did in the sense of its framers. He boldly concedes that prior to the adoption of the constitution, the people of the United States were severally sovereign states, but by the constitution they were made one sovereign political community or people, and that the States, though retaining certain rights, have merged their several sovereignty in the Union.