Nay, it used to be then contended, by either party, that the jealous retainer by the States of their primitive rights of sovereignty, had caused the necessity for the then new Federal Constitution.
But, like Moliere's mock doctor, "nous avons changé tout cela," and the new College of Politicians, having younger, and of course wiser heads, have of late discovered, that all this was a mistake. The fashionable doctrine of the present day seems to be, that these States never were Sovereign; that there was, from the beginning, some great Central Sovereign power, abiding somewhere else than in the several States, of which they were subjects, and all their people lieges. In illustration of this new doctrine, the Proclamation says, that "in our colonial state, although dependent upon another power, we very early considered ourselves as connected by common interest with each other.—Leagues were formed for common defence; and before the Declaration of Independence, we were known in our aggregate character as The United Colonies of America. That decisive and important step was taken jointly. We declared ourselves a nation by a joint, not by several acts."
The exceeding caution in which this passage is penned, its intended assertions of doctrine, while seeming to narrate facts, merely, and the opening it obviously and designedly leaves, for escape from these doctrines, under the fog and smoke of verbal criticism, should the doctrines be thereafter controverted, may perhaps excite the admiration of minds trained or training in the mazes of diplomacy.
But when found in a State paper, uttered by the Chief Magistrate, and announced by him, as being intended for the edification and instruction of those to whom it is addressed, it can never meet the approbation of the candid and ingenuous.
Its obvious purpose is to assert, as a political dogma, that the revolted Colonies became one Sovereign Nation, before they severally assumed sovereignty upon themselves as individual States; and so to prove, that the States never were sovereign. But as this new doctrine was in direct conflict with all our past opinions, and in seeming opposition to much of our past history, it would not do to blurt it in the public face at once, as doctrine, therefore
