Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

There was another reason, of a more general and perhaps more controlling character, for this reference to conventions for ratification, even if entire unanimity of the state legislatures could have been expected. Under the American theory of republican government, conventions of the people, duly elected and accredited as such, are invested with the plenary power inherent in the people of an organized and independent community, assembled in mass. In other words, they represent and exercise what is properly the sovereignty of the people. State legislatures, with restricted powers, do not possess or represent sovereignty. Still less does the Congress of a union or confederacy of states, which is by two degrees removed from the seat of sovereignty. We sometimes read or hear of “delegated sovereignty,” “divided sovereignty,” with other loose expressions of the same sort; no such thing as a division or delegation of sovereignty is possible.

In order, therefore, to supersede the restraining article above cited and to give the highest validity to the compact for the delegation of important powers and functions of government to a common agent, an authoity above that of the state legislatures was necessary. Mr. Madison, in the Federalist,¹ says: “It has been heretofore noted among the defects of the Confederation, that in many of the States it had received no higher sanction than a mere legislative ratification.” This objection would of course have applied with greater force to the proposed Constitution, which provided for additional grants of power from the states, and the conferring of larger and more varied powers upon a general government, which was to act upon individuals instead of states, if the question of its confirmation had been submitted merely to the several state legislatures. Hence the obvious propriety of referring it to the respective people of the states in their sovereign capacity, as provided in the final article of the Constitution.

In this article provision was deliberately made for the secession (if necessary) of a part of the states from a union which, when formed, had been declared “perpetual,” and its terms and articles to be “inviolably observed by every State.”

Opposition was made to the provision on this very ground—that it was virtually a dissolution of the Union, and that it would furnish a precedent for future secessions. Gerry, a distinguished member from Massachusetts—afterward Vice-President of the United States—said, “If nine out of thirteen (States) can dissolve the compact, six out of nine will be just as able to dissolve the future one hereafter.”