Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

7. That, in forming and adopting the Constitution, the states, or the people of the states—terms which, when used with reference to acts performed in a sovereign capacity, are precisely equivalent to each other —formed a new government, but no new people; that, consequently, no new sovereignty was created—for sovereignty in an American republic can belong only to a people, never to a government—and that the federal government is entitled to exercise only the powers delegated to it by the people of the respective states.

8. That the term “people,” in the preamble to the Constitution and in the tenth amendment, is used distributively; that the only “people of the United States” known to the Constitution are the people of each state in the Union; that no such political community or corporate unit as one people of the United States then existed, has ever been organized, or yet exists; that no political action by the people of the United States in the aggregate has ever taken place, or ever can take place, under the Constitution.

The fictitious idea of one people of the United States, contradicted in the last paragraph, has been so impressed upon the popular mind by false teaching, by careless and vicious phraseology, and by the ever-present spectacle of a great government, with its army and navy, its customhouses and post offices, its multitude of officeholders, and the splendid prizes which it offers to political ambition, that the tearing away of these illusions and presentation of the original fabric, which they have overgrown and hidden from view, have no doubt been unwelcome, distasteful, and even repellent to some of my readers. The artificial splendor which makes the deception attractive is even employed as an argument to prove its reality.

The glitter of the powers delegated to the agent serves to obscure the perception of the sovereign power of the principal by whom they are conferred, as, by the unpracticed eye, the showy costume and conspicuous functions of the drum major are mistaken for emblems of chieftaincy— while the misuse or ambiguous use of the term “union” and its congeners contributes to increase the confusion.

So much the more need for insisting upon the elementary truths which have been obscured by these specious sophistries. The reader really desirous of ascertaining truth is, therefore, again cautioned against confounding two ideas so essentially distinct as that of government, which is derivative, dependent, and subordinate, with that of the people, as an organized political community, which is sovereign, without any other