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

[443] was the author of the Declaration? Thomas Jefferson. Who was the author of the celebrated Kentucky Resolutions of 1798? I answer again, Thomas Jefferson. Now will any sane man who has read those resolutions have the hardihood to assert that he believes Thomas Jefferson, when writing the expression I have quoted from the Declaration of Independence, thought, or intended to assert in that expression, that the people of the several revolted colonies were one sovereign, supreme political community?

To assert such belief is to assert that either in the one or the other of those two documents Mr. Jefferson consciously stultified and contradicted himself in the grossest and most palpable manner imaginable. Is it conceivable that the great statesmen who in 1798 decribed the Constitution as a “Federal Compact,” to which “each State acceded as a State and is an integral party, its co States forming as to itself the other party,” that the statesman who was first to declare that “nullification” by a State or States of acts of Congress under certain circumstances “is the rightful remedy,” and that “every State has a natural right in cases not within the compact, (casus nonfoederis), to nullify of their own right, all assumptions of power by others within their own limits,” and who asserted that “Congress [i. e. the general government] was not a party [to] but merely the creature of the compact and subject, as to its assumption of power, to the final judgment of” the States, “by whom and for whose use itself and its powers were all created and modified;” and who asserted “that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the powers delegated to itself, * * * * but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself as well of infractions as of the mode and manner of redress,” --is it, I repeat, conceivable that the author of such views of the Constitution, of the States and the general government, could ever have entertained the idea, much more could have promulgated it throughout the Union and to the world in an important public document, that the people of the several States were only mere territorial fractions of one great sovereign political community possessed by its own inherent, original right of all the powers of absolute sovereignty? Why, the question answers itself, and only in one way to any man of ordinary intelligence who has read the Declaration of Independence and the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798.

Have we any reason to suppose that the signers (other than Mr. Jefferson) to the Declaration of Independence, entertained Judge Story's theory as based on the phrase “one people?” To say nothing of their