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States, not from oversight, but of set purpose.
The proposal to give this power was made by one, and was rejected by the rest.
Il this, the men who were afterwards claimed as the leaders of the party of centralization, such as Alexander Hamilton, agreed precisely with the men who thenceforward asserted the rights of the States, represented by Mr. Madison.1 All agreed in declaring, that to give such a power over States, was inconsistent with the nature of the government designed, would infallibly corrupt it, and would make it justly odious to the States, and impracticable to be maintained, save by the utter banishment of republican freedom out of the land.
What more complete proof is needed of this truth, than the fact displayed in 1861, that in the very attempt to coerce States, the Constitution immediately perished?
The Constitution was therefore, of purpose, left silent as to any such power; and on the completion of the document, the lack of it was expressly avowed in the words: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Another fact was, that when the State of Virginia, then the leading one in fame, power, and the ability of her statesmen, gave her reluctant and chary adhesion to the Federal Union, she coupled it, in the very act accepting the Constitution, with this condition: that she should be for ever free to retract her adhesion, whenever she found the Union inconvenient, of which juncture she was to be sole judge; and to resume her separate independence, unmolested.
Her reception upon these declared
1 In the Convention on the 31st May, 1787, Madison declared that “the use of force against a State would be more like a declaration of war, than an infliction of punishment, and would probably be considered by the party attacked, as a dissolution of all previous compacts: a Union of States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction.” In one of the debates on the New York State Convention, Hamilton said, “To coerce a State would be one of the maddest projects ever devised.” We have lived to see an attempt to coerce not one State but eleven.
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