Our Federal Government: Its True Nature and Character

For forty years from the ratification of the Constitution, it was well understood that the American States were united in a political compact in which certain of their powers had been entrusted to a common agent, while their essential sovereignty and its attendant rights were reserved to themselves. One of these rights was that of secession. It was not until 1830 that the theory of a permanently consolidated nation from which withdrawal was unlawful first made an appearance in Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution. Daniel Webster would rely heavily on Story's work in his debates in Congress with South Carolina Senators Robert Hayne and John C. Calhoun. Story and Webster denied that the Constitution was either "a compact between State governments" or that it had been "established by the people of the several States," asserting that it had instead been established by "the people of the United States in the aggregate." As such, the States were creatures of the Union rather than vice versa, rendering secession not only impossible, but treasonous. This book, written in 1840 by a Virginia lawyer who served as Secretary of the Navy in the Tyler Administration, and later re-issued in Philadelphia in 1863 and again in New York in 1868, is a brilliant response to the Story/Webster theory and also serves as a challenge to the modern Leviathan State which is modern America.