In the Declaration of Independence they declared themselves independent states indeed, but not severally independent.The declaration was not made by the states severally, but by the states jointly, as the United States.They unitedly declared their independence; they carried on the war for independence, won it, and were acknowledged by foreign powers and by the mother country as the United States, not as severally independent sovereign states.Severally they have never exercised the full powers of sovereign states; they have had no flag--symbol of sovereignty--recognized by foreign powers, have made no foreign treaties, held no foreign relations, had no commerce foreign or interstate, coined no money, entered into no alliances or confederacies with foreign states or with one another, and in several respects have been more restricted in their powers in the Union than they were as British colonies.
Colonies are initial or inchoate states, and become complete states by declaring and winning their independence; and if the English colonies, now the United States, had separately declared and won their independence, they would unquestionably have become separately independent states, each invested by the law of nature with all the rights and powers of a sovereign nation.But they did not do this.They declared and won their independence jointly, and have since existed and exercised sovereignty only as states united, or the United States, that is, states sovereign in their union, but not in their separation.This is of itself decisive of the whole question.
But the colonists have not only never exercised the full powers of sovereignty save as citizens of states united, therefore as one people, but they were, so far as a people at all, one people even before independence.The colonies were all erected and endowed with their rights and powers by one and the same national authority, and the colonists were subjects of one and the same national sovereign.Mr.Quincy Adams, who almost alone among our prominent statesmen maintains the unity of the colonial people, adds indeed to their subjection to the same sovereign authority, community of origin, of language, manners, customs, and law.All these, except the last, or common law, may exist without national unity in the modern political sense of the term nation.The English common law was recognized by the colonial courts, and in force in all the colonies, not by virtue of colonial legislation, but by virtue of English authority, as expressed in English jurisprudence.The colonists were under the Common Law, because they were Englishmen, and subjects of the English sovereign.
This proves that they were really one people with the English people, though existing in a state of colonial dependence, and not a separate people having nothing politically in common with them but in the accident of having the same royal person for their king.The union with the mother country was national, not personal, as was the union existing between England and Hanover, or that still existing between the empire of Austria, formerly Germany, and the kingdom of Hungary; and hence the British parliament claimed, and not illegally, the right to tax the colonies for the support of the empire, and to bind them in all cases whatsoever--a claim the colonies themselves admitted in principle by recognizing and observing the British navigation laws.The people of the several colonies being really one people before independence, in the sovereignty of the mother country, must be so still, unless they have since, by some valid act, divided themselves or been divided into separate and independent states.
The king, say the jurists, never dies, and the heralds cry, "The king is dead! Live the king!" Sovereignty never lapses, is never in abeyance, and the moment it ceases in one people it is renewed in another.The British sovereignty ceased in the colonies with independence, and the American took its place.Did the sovereignty, which before independence was in Great Britain, pass from Great Britain to the States severally, or to the States united? It might have passed to them severally, but did it?
There is no question of law or antecedent right in the case, but a simple question of fact, and the fact is determined by determining who it was that assumed it, exercised it, and has continued to exercise it.As to this there is no doubt.The sovereignty as a fact has been assumed and exercised by the United States, the States united, and never by the States separately or severally.Then as a fact the sovereignty that before independence was in Great Britain, passed, on independence to the States united, and reappears in all its vigor in the United States, the only successor to Great Britain known to or recognized by the civilized world.
As the colonial people were, though distributed in distinct colonies, still one people, the people of the United States, though distributed into distinct and mutually independent States, are yet one sovereign people, therefore a sovereign state or nation, and not a simple league or confederacy of nations.
