CHAPTER I THE NATION AND THE STATES A STATE is usually defined as a political body or body politic.1 A body politic differs from other bodies of people by the purposes of its organization and the powers with which it is endowed. The purposes of its organization are well put in the preamble to the Constitution of the United States. They are: to form a more perfect union of the people concerned, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to the people of the body politic and their posterity. The powers which may be vested in a body politic extend to a complete control over the lives, liberty, and property of the people thereof. No body of people except a body politic may possess such unlimited authority, although unlimited authority is not necessarily possessed by every body politic. When unlimited or absolute political authority is possessed by a state, it is a sovereign state or sovereignty. THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE NATION The states of the American Union are not states in the sense of being sovereign states or sovereignties. This proposition was long disputed. The most eminent statesmen and political scientists were to be found on each side of the discussion. The issue was finally decided only after an appeal to arms. It was thus settled that the people of a particular state do not possess sovereign powers. As Abraham Lincoln has said: "Our states have neither more nor less power than that reserved to them in 1 For a definition of the term, "body politic," as understood at the Revolution, see the Preamble to the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1780, in Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, iii, pp. 1888–9. the Union by the Constitution, none of them ever having been a state out of the Union." Their place in the Union is a subordinate one, for, as Lincoln pointed out, "The Union is older than any of the states, and in fact it created them as states." Whatever may have been the case when Lincoln wrote these words, there is now no doubt of the soundness of his views. The people of the whole United States are the only people possessing sovereignty in the United States. The principle of the sovereignty of the people of the United States has been misunderstood because of the peculiar division of political power between the federal government and the governments of the several states. The federal government possesses those powers which have been granted to it by the people of the United States either expressly in the Federal Constitution or by a reasonable implication therefrom, plus the power to make all laws which are necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers. Of the remaining powers of government, the Federal Constitution attempts to make a summary disposition in the following terms: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people." 2 The ambiguity of this statement long served to cloak with a garment of legality the most contradictory doctrines concerning the respective powers of the federal and state governments. For example, has a state the right to secede from the Union? The Constitution does not expressly say. If the Constitution neither delegates to the federal government the power to compel a state to remain in the Union, nor prohibits to the states the power to withdraw from the Union, the right of secession, that 1 See A. Lincoln, Special Message to Congress, July 4, 1861. This statement is not literally true, though true in substance, for North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Texas have been temporarily states outside of the Union. The first two were out of the Union because they delayed the ratification of the Constitution of 1787 until after the "more perfect union" had been established in 1789. The last two were out of the Union because Congress could not agree sooner to their admission. Each was admitted, however, not by means of a treaty between the government of the Union and that of an independent state, but by means of an ordinary act or resolution of Congress. None of the thirteen original states was ever an independent state before the formation of the Union, and all other states upon admission acquired the same constitutional status. 2 See Constitution of the United States, art. x of the Amendments. |