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VII The Problem of Sovereignty T HE FUNDAMENTAL issue in the writing of the Articles of Confederation was the location of ultimate political authority , the problem of sovereignty. Should it reside in Congress or in the states? Many conservatives in 1776-77, as in 1787, believed that Congress should have a "superintending" power over both the states and their individual citizens. They had definite reasons for such a desire. They feared mob action and democratic rule. They saw the advantage of a centralized control over the unsettled Western lands, the chief field of economic opportunity, and over trade and trade regulation, which involved, ultimately, taxation. Not all the conservatives, particularly in the Southern colonies, agreed on all these points, but enough of them did to make their attitude plain at the outbreak of the Revolution. The radicals, on the other hand, were fighting centralization in their attack upon the British Empire and upon the colonial governing classes, whose interests were so closely interwoven with the imperial relationship. Furthermore, the interests of the radicals were essentially local. To them union was merely a means to their end, the independence of the several states. Hence centralization was to be opposed. Finally, the democratic theory of the time was antagonistic to any government with pretensions toward widespread dominion. Theorists believed that democratic government was impossible except within very limited areas. Virginia democrats, for example, were willing to surrender her Western land claims because they believed that their state was too large for democratic government. Thus the conflict was between those who were essentially "nationalists " and those who were the forerunners of the "states rights" school. The solution was not a matter of legal theory nor yet of a constitutional metaphysics whereby the coercive author- 162 The Articles of Confederation ity of the British government was transferred to the Continental Congress. On the contrary, it was a matter of practical politics, arrived at by the political maneuvering of two opposing parties having quite different political aims and ideals. No one realized this more clearly than contemporary politicians who believed that the colonists could choose between "a sovereign state, or a number of confederated sovereign states" when they organized their common government.1 The real significance of this controversy was obscured during the nineteenth century by historians and politicians who sought to justify the demands of rising industrialism on the central government and the Northern attitude toward the South's secession in 1860-61. The Southern contention that the Union was a compact between sovereign states was opposed by the contention that the Union was older than the states. Northern historians insisted that the first Continental Congress was a sovereign body, and that it represented the people of the United States as a whole, not the people of the several states as represented in their state governments . To prove their contentions the Northerners cited such documents as the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution of 1787. Their method of proof was to state their contention, or reiterate it, and by the use of italics to place undue emphasis on the portions of the documents which seemed to prove their arguments! This is essentially the technique of 1 John Adams to Patrick Henry, June 3, 1776, in Burnett, Letters, 1:471. This was also the opinion of James Wilson. See his "Of Man as a Member of a Confederation," in The Works of James Wilson, edited by James D. Andrews (2 vols., Chicago, 181)6), I: 307-308. It is to be noted that this statement of Wilson's was made after the Constitution of 1787 had been adopted. Before this, when he was engaged in efforts to overturn the Articles of Confederation , he used quite different arguments. • Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (5th ed., 2 vols., Boston, 1891), 1:145, 154; Hermann E. Von Holst, The Constitutional arzd Political History of the United States (8 vols., Chicago, 1881-(2), 1:4-22; L. Bradford Prince, The Articles of Confederation arzd the Constitution (New York, 1857),22-25; John W. Burgess, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (2 vols., Boston, 1890), 1:100. Professor Claude H. Van Tyne in his article on "Sovereignty in the American Revolution: An Historical Study," in the American Historical Review, IZ:SZ9-545 (April, 1907), has effectively disposed of the arguments of such writers. He demonstrates conclusively that both psychologically and legally the states were re- [3.145.23.123] Project MUSE (2024...

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