Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 9.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

By the act of the 24th of September, 1789, (not appended hereto, but to be found in any edition of the United States statutes at large ) Congress created the Supreme Court of the United States and divided up into thirteen judicial districts the eleven States then composing the United States, mentioning each of them by name, and calling them in the aggregate “The United States” ; but it took care not to mention North Carolina or Rhode Island in the act, nor to make either of them part or parcel of those judicial districts. Here was another recognition by the United States of the independence of those two States as foreign countries.

By the act of March 1st, 1790, (not appended hereto) after North Carolina had entered the Union, Congress provided for taking a census of “the inhabitants of the United States.” In that act it directs the appointment of marshals and their assistants to execute the objects of the act, and it specifies by name each of the twelve States that, in March of that year, composed the United States, but among the twelve names that of Rhode Island does not appear, and the act appoints no marshals for the enumeration of her inhabitants.

What does this mean but an acknowledgement by Congress of the independence and foreign character of Rhode Island?

After that State entered the Union in May, 1790, Congress by a special act, viz: the act of July 5th, 1790, (not appended hereto) provided for the separate enumeration of her inhabitants.

What I have herein adduced proves, I think, beyond all question that the Government of the United States did in 1789 formally and officially acknowledge the absolute independence and sovereignty in that year of North Carolina and Rhode Island, and of the latter State in 1790 also; that those two States were then not subject to the “supremacy of the Union,” and that they were countries as much foreign to the United States as France or Spain was; and it of course utterly demolishes Judge Story's theory (attempted to be based on an expression in the Declaration of Independence) that the people of the United States were, in a political sense, one sovereign consolidated people.

By-the-way, Mr. Secretary, with regard to that expression, viz: “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds,” &c., there is a view of it which I have never seen taken, but which, I think, shows that the expression was not intended to mean or to assert that the people of the several colonies then in rebellion were the people of only one sovereign political community, divided up into territorial factions called States. Who