Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

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[126] functions of the government of the United States were strictly limited to the exercise of such powers as were expressly delegated, and that the people of the several states retained all others.

Is it compatible with reason to suppose that people so chary of the delegation of specific powers or functions could have meant to surrender or transfer the very basis and origin of all power—their inherent sovereignty—and this, not by express grant, but by implication?

Everett, following, whether consciously or not, in the line of Webster's ill-considered objection to the term “compact,” takes exception to the sovereignty of the states on the ground that “the word ‘sovereignty’ does not occur” in the Constitution. He admits that the states were sovereign under the Articles of Confederation. How could they relinquish or be deprived of their sovereignty without even a mention of it—when the tenth amendment confronts us with the declaration that nothing was surrendered by implication—that everything was reserved unless expressly delegated to the United States or prohibited to the states? Here is an attribute which they certainly possessed—which nobody denies, or can deny, that they did possess—and of which Everett says no mention is made in the Constitution. In what conceivable way, then, was it lost or alienated?

Much has been said of the “prohibition” of the exercise by the states of certain functions of sovereignty, such as making treaties, declaring war, coining money, etc. This is only a part of the general compact, by which the contracting parties covenant, one with another, to abstain from the separate exercise of certain powers, which they agree to entrust to the management and control of the union or general agency of the parties associated. It is not a prohibition imposed upon them from without, or from above, by any external or superior power, but is self-imposed by their free consent. The case is strictly analogous to that of individuals forming a mercantile or manufacturing copartnership, who voluntarily agree to refrain, as individuals, from engaging in other pursuits or speculations, from lending their individual credit, or from the exercise of any other right of a citizen, which they may think proper to subject to the consent, or entrust to the management of the firm.

The prohibitory clauses of the Constitution referred to are not at all a denial of the full sovereignty of the states, but are merely an agreement among them to exercise certain powers of sovereignty in concert, and not separately and apart.

There is one other provision of the Constitution, which is generally