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

I mention the Judge's belief as a seeming belief. It may appear harsh, but when we remember that the Judge was a lawyer, and a very able one, I find it exceedingly difficult to entertain the idea that he sincerely believed in his own theory. The historian, Motley, as Mr. Davis shows, published in England during the late war, most glaring misstatements on the general subject discussed in this paper, statements of whose atrocious falsehood he (Motley) could not, in view of his most extensive political erudition, possibly have been ignorant.

It may be possibly asked by some consolidationist, if Mr. Jefferson, by the phrase “one people,” did not mean one people, why then did he employ the phrase?

While I have shown, I think, beyond all question, that he could not have meant nor have intended to indicate by the words “one people” that the people of the several States were a consolidated people composing as to the supreme sovereignty only one sole political community, there is no question in my mind, especially when we remember that the Declaration was intended much more as an address and an appeal to the outside world than to the inhabitants of the States, that he employed the words in question only in the sense that as to the common enemy (Great Britain) as well as to the other powers of the world, the people of the Confederated Colonies were, to all intents and purposes, politically one people, while as to the internal political relations between themselves, he well knew they were altogether of another character. The Kentucky resolutions prove that. The people of the States, under the first Constitution as well as under the present Constitution, always have been regarded by foreign powers and treated with as one single political community, one sovereign State, and that, too, very properly. In fact, from the necessity of the case, it could not be otherwise; for when the States, one by one, and at different dates acceded each as an integral State and not as a faction of one people, to the first as well as to the present Constitution, and appointed their common agent, the government of the United States, to be their only medium of political intercourse between themselves and foreign powers, they thereby gave notice to all those powers that as to them (i. e., all foreign powers,) they were but one power, one people. This, of unavoidable necessity, must be the case in all Confederations of sovereign States, who, by the terms of the compact between the Confederating parties, notify the other powers of the world that political or diplomatic intercourse can be had with them only through their common agent.

It must be further recollected that when the Declaration of Independence was published to the world, there was not the scrip of a pen