states have never enjoyed nations as sovereign, or were recognized as such. Under the government of England before the Revolution the thirteen commonwealths were independent of one another, and were held together, juxtaposed rather than united, only The several through their allegiance to the British crown. Had that allegiance been complete sov- maintained there is no telling how ereignty long they might have gone on thus disunited; and this, it seems, should be one of our chief reasons for rejoicing that the political connection with England was dissolved when it was. A permanent redress of grievances, and even virtual independence such as Canada now enjoys, we might perhaps have gained had we listened to Lord North's proposals after the surrender of Burgoyne; but the formation of the Federal Union would certainly have been long postponed, and when we realize the grandeur of the work which we are now doing in the world through the simple fact of such a union, we must believe that such an issue would have been unfortunate. However this may be, it is clear that until the connection with England was severed the thirteen commonwealths were not united, nor were they sovereign. It is also clear that in the very act of severing their connection with England these commonwealths entered into some sort of union which was incompatible with their absolute sovereignty taken severally. It was not the people of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and so on through the list, that declared their independence of Great Britain, but it was the representatives of the United States in Congress assembled, and speaking as a single body in the name of the whole. It was not the segments of the snake, but the creature in its integrity, that captured two British armies. Three weeks before the Declaration of Independence was adopted, Congress appointed a committee to draw up the "articles of confederation and perpetual union," by which the sovereignty of the several states was expressly limited and curtailed in many important particulars. This committee had finished its work by the 12th of July, but the articles were not adopted by Congress until the autumn of 1777, and they were not finally put into operation until the spring of 1781. During this inchoate period of union the action of the United States was that of a confederation in which some portion of the several sovereignties was understood to be surrendered to the whole. It was the business of the articles to define the precise nature and extent of this surrendered sovereignty which no state by itself ever exercised. In the mean time this sovereignty, undefined in nature and extent, was exercised, as well as circumstances permitted, by the Continental Congress. The Continental Congress; its A most remarkable body was this Continental Congress. For the vicissitudes through which it passed, there is perhaps no other revolutionary body, save the Long extraordinary Parliament, which can be compared character with it. For its origin we must look back to the committees of correspondence devised by Jonathan Mayhew, Samuel Adams, and Dabney Carr. First assembled in 1774 to meet an emergency which was generally believed to be only temporary, it continued to sit for nearly seven years before its powers were ever clearly defined; and during those seven years it exercised some of the highest functions of sovereignty which are possible to any governing body. It declared the independence of the United States; it contracted an offensive and defensive alliance with France; it raised and organized a Continental army; it borrowed large sums of money, and pledged what the lenders understood to be the national credit for their repayment; it issued an inconvertible paper currency, granted letters of marque, and built a navy. All this it did in the exercise of what in later times would have been called "implied war powers," and its authority rested upon the general acquiescence in the purposes for which it acted and in the measures which it adopted. Under such circumstances its functions were very inefficiently performed. But the articles of confed eration, which in 1781 defined its powers, served at the same time to limit them; so that for the remaining eight years of its existence the Continental Congress grew weaker and weaker, until it was swept away to make room for a more efficient government. The articles John Dickinson is supposed to have been the principal author of the articles of confederation; but as the work of the committee was done in secret and has never been of confederareported, the point cannot be deter- tion mined. In November, 1777, Congress sent the articles to the several state legislatures, with a circular letter recommending them as containing the only plan of union at all likely to be adopted. In the course of the next fifteen months the articles were ratified by all the states except Maryland, which refused to sign until the states laying claim to the northwestern lands, and especially Virginia, should surrender their claims to the confederation. We shall by and by see, when we come to explain this point in detail, that from this action of Maryland there flowed beneficent consequences that were little dreamed of. It was first in the great chain of events which led directly to the formation of the Federal Union. Having carried her point, Maryland ratified the articles on the first day of March, 1781; and thus in the last and most brilliant period of the war, while Greene was leading い Cornwallis on his fatal chase across North Carolina, the confederation proposed at the time of the Declaration of Independence was finally consummated. According to the language of the articles, the states entered into a firm league of friendship with each other; and in order to secure and perpetuate such friendship, the freemen of each state were entitled to all the privileges and immunities of freemen in all the other states. Mutual extradition of criminals was established, and in each state full faith and credit was to be given to the records, acts, and judicial proceedings of every other state. This universal intercitizenship was what gave reality to the nascent and feeble Union. In all the common business. relations of life, the man of New Hampshire could deal with the man of Georgia on an equal footing before the law. But this was almost the only effectively cohesive provision in the whole instrument. Throughout the remainder of the articles its language was largely devoted to reconciling the theory that the states were severally sovereign with the visible fact that they were already merged to some extent in a larger political body. The sovereignty of this larger body was vested in the Congress of delegates appointed yearly by the states. No state was to be represented by less than two or more than seven members; no one could be a dele |