[110] such extent as to begin to hide from view the purposes for which it was founded, those very objections which in the beginning had been answered, abandoned, and thrown aside, were brought to light again, and presented to the country as expositions of the true meaning of the Constitution. Webster, one of the first to revive some of those early misconceptions so long ago refuted as to be almost forgotten, and to breathe into them such renewed vitality as his commanding genius could impart, in the course of his well-known debate in the Senate with Hayne in 1830, said:
It can not be shown that the Constitution is a compact between State governments. The Constitution itself, in its very front, refutes that proposition: it declares that it is ordained and established by the people of the United States. So far from saying that it is established by the governments of the several States, it does not even say that it is established by the people of the several States; but it pronounces that it is established by the people of the United States in the aggregate.1Judge Story about the same time began to advance the same theory, but more guardedly and with less rashness of statement. It was not until thirty years after that it attained its full development in the annunciations of sectionists rather than statesmen. Two such may suffice as specimens: Edward Everett, in his address delivered on July 4, 1861, and already referred to, says of the Constitution:
That instrument does not purport to be a “compact,” but a constitution of government. It appears, in its first sentence, not to have been entered into by the States, but to have been ordained and established by the people of the United States for themselves and their “posterity.” The States are not named in it; nearly all the characteristic powers of sovereignty are expressly granted to the General Government and expressly prohibited to the States.2Mr. Everett afterward repeats the assertion that “the States are not named in it.”3 But a yet more extraordinary statement of the “one people” theory is found in a letter addressed to the London Times, in the same year, 1861, on the “Causes of the civil war,” by John Lothrop Motley, afterward Minister to the Court of St. James. In this letter Motley says of the Constitution of the United States:
It was not a compact. Who ever heard of a compact to which there were no parties? or who ever heard of a compact made by a single party with himself? Yet the name of no State is mentioned in the whole document; the States
