Articles of this Confederation shall be inviolably observed by every State, and the Union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them, unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress of the United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the Legislature of every State." Yet did eleven only of the thirteen States, in opposition to the will of the two others, alter that solemn Covenant by the present Constitution of the United States; and according to the provisions of this latter Instrument, nine States only might have done so, as to themselves, as legitimately, as did the eleven.
From whence was such a power, which all concede to have been rightfully exercised, derived?
Certainly not from the Articles of Confederation themselves, for by this very article, the consent of "every State" was necessary, to make any alteration whatever in that instrument, nor from the fact that nine States then constituted a majority of all the States. If so, seven States would have been sufficient; and moreover, the old Articles of Confederation might have been put into operation in the year 1778, when they were agreed to by a majority of the States, three years before they went into actual operation by the agreement of all the States.—The power was derived in this way. The old Articles of Confederation had been violated in various modes, by the refusal or neglect of several of the States, to comply with the requisitions and recommendations of Congress, made in pursuance of that Covenant. These repeated violations of it, had given every party to it, the perfect right to declare that it was no longer obligatory upon them. But although this was their clear right, prudence and policy dictated, that they should not exert this right, until they had provided a substitute for the old Covenant; and until this substitute should have received the concurrence of at least nine of the States. This being done, their right of vacating the old instrument, which had been perfect before, was then prudently exercised. So that this very Federal Constitution, grows out of the conceded right of a State, to declare the obligations of a covenant no longer obligatory upon itself, when that covenant has been broken by other parties to it.
It must not be said, that the Articles of Confederation were the act of the State legislatures, and the new Constitution the act of
