Robert Lewis Dabney, Life and Commands of Lieutenand- General Thomas J. Jackson

[128] obligation to obey any law he enjoined, just or unjust. The argument is perfectly sound against the theory of a social contract between individuals, because the government of a State over them is not founded on any such contract, but on the ordinance of God. But in the case of the United States the fact was precisely opposite, for the whole Central Government actually did originate avowedly in “a social contract,” to which the parties were States instead of persons. So that Paley's deduction is, in this case, perfectly true. But its results are, here, in no wise absurd or disorganizing; because the creation of the Federal Government did not originate a social order or civic life for the States, and its destruction, therefore, would not destroy nor even relax it. The jurisdiction of the States themselves — older and more sovereign societies, indestructible save by the hand of political murder from without-preserved and regulated the whole social order; and the few functions which had been by them lent to the Federal Government, upon the fall of the latter, would not perish, but naturally revert to the States which had granted them. In the integrity of their powers, therefore, was the civic life of the American people.

The conception which the fathers of the Federal Constitution formed of their confederation, was that of a Common Agent for the equal benefit of the parties confederated, exercising no powers except those derived from their consent, and. neither possessing nor needing any guarantee for those powers as against the parties, the States, save the obvious beneficence towards them of all its action. The Union was not a prison owned by some despot, within which the unwilling inhabitants were to be kept by force, making residence there the infliction, and escape the privilege; it was to be the home, created for their common happiness by a family of freemen, where residence would be the privilege, and exclusion the penalty; where each member of the