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

Having, I think, Mr. Secretary, effectually disposed of our imaginary disciple of Judge Story I will now go back to the subject that was before us before he came on the tapis. That subject was my theory attempting to account for the very strange delay of Congress in providing for the collection of revenues for the Treasury of the United States. As additional and corroborative proof of the probable correctness of that theory I now call your attention to the fact that Congress did not, until the 31st of July, divide the seaboard territory of the United States and a part of the Ohio river into revenue districts and establish ports of entry therein. They could very easily have done this in the first week of May, but they refrained from doing so, and why? Plainly because, as I think, they saw that when they should come to do so they could not divide up into revenue districts the territory of foreign countries (i. e. North Carolina and Rhode Island), nor establish United States ports of entry in those countries.

They wished, as before said, to avoid as long as possible any legislation that would bear on North Carolina and Rhode Island as foreign countries, and that would acknowledge them to be such. But the 1st of August was only one day off, and action must be taken, and that action resulted in the first thirty-seven sections of the act of July 31st.

In those sections Congress among other things divided up the territory of eleven only of the States, and certain territory on the Ohio river, from its rapids to its mouth, (being the district of Louisville,) into revenue districts, and established ports of entry therein; but it carefully refrained in that act from dividing the territory of North Carolina and Rhode Island into such districts, and from establishing ports of entry in either of those two States This, of course, was an open, unqualified admission by Congress that those two States were countries foreign to the United States.

But Mr. Secretary, even if my theory accounting for the delay referred to be without foundation, it cannot have any bearing on nor affect in the slightest degree the impregnability of the facts which I have brought forward, and will yet produce in this paper to prove conclusively that the Congress of 1789 did not deem the people of the United States to be “one whole people,” one political community possessed of its own original inherent sovereignty, supreme in all respects over every other power in the land.

In addition to the evidences already adduced herein proving the Confederate status of the separate people of the several States, and