II.
Who constitute that great Corporation and body politic I have called The People, which all in these now United States concur in freely acknowledging as their liege Lord and only earthly sovereign by whose fiat all our governments have been created and endowed, and at whose will they may at any time be rightfully dissolved and annihilated? This is the question, which in my last number I promised to examine in this; and I now will proceed to redeem my pledge.
No American is so ignorant of the history of his own country, as not to know, that prior to the commencement of our Revolution, there did not exist anywhere on this vast continent, such a body politic as The People. Then whoever dwelt in America, was either a savage Indian, or the liege subject of some European Sovereign. None of the various savage Tribes who wandered over the surface of much of this continent, had then ever regarded themselves, or been regarded by any others as constituting a fixed Society acknowledging allegiance to any Sovereign, or as constituting that moral and accountable being called a State. Had any civilized man or set of men presumed, at that time, to assert his or their sovereignty here, the assertion would have been considered by all as sedition and the attempt to maintain it by force, as an overt act of treason against his European master; for all white men in America then claimed to be the loyal subjects of some such Lord.
It is true, that in British America, there existed sundry tracts of country delineated upon the geographical charts as British Colonies, the inhabitants of each of which regions were formed into separate and fixed Societies, whose affairs were regulated by long-established governments, the power of each of which gov-
