Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

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Chapter 7:

• Verbal Cavils and criticisms
-- “compact,” “Confederacy,” “accession,” etc. -- the “New vocabulary” -- the Federal Constitution a compact, and the States acceded to it -- evidence of the Constitution itself and of contemporary records.

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I have habitually spoken of the federal Constitution as a compact, and of the parties to it as sovereign states. These terms should not, and in earlier times would not, have required explanation or vindication. But they have been called in question by the modern school of consolidation. These gentlemen admit that the government under the Articles of Confederation was a compact. Webster, in his rejoinder to Hayne on January 27, 1830, said:

When the gentleman says the Constitution is a compact between the States, he uses language exactly applicable to the old Confederation. He speaks as if he were in Congress before 1789. He describes fully that old state of things then existing. The Confederation was, in strictness, a compact; the States, as States, were parties to it. We had no other General Government. But that was found insufficient and inadequate to the public exigencies. The people were not satisfied with it, and undertook to establish a better. They undertook to form a General Government, which should stand on a new basis—not a confederacy, not a league, not a compact between States, but a Constitution.¹

Again, in his discussion with Calhoun, three years afterward, he vehemently reiterates the same denial. Of the Constitution he says: “Does it call itself a compact? Certainly not. It uses the word ‘compact’ but once, and that when it declares that the States shall enter into no compact.² Does it call itself a league, a confederacy, a subsisting treaty between the States? Certainly not. There is not a particle of such language in all its pages.”³

The artist who wrote under his picture the legend, “This is a horse,” made effectual provision against any such cavil as that preferred by Webster and his followers, that the Constitution is not a compact, because it is not “so nominated in the bond.” As well as I can recollect, there is no passage in the Iliad or the Aeneid in which either of those great works “calls itself,” or is called by its author, an epic poem, yet this would scarcely be accepted as evidence that they are not epic poems. In an examination of Webster's remarks, I do not find that he announces