Book Description

"[...]implied that their delegates were to meet and act with the delegations of such other States as might see fit to be represented. The communication of the minority party in Rhode Island was received and read, and the interests of that State were attended to throughout the proceedings. We are now carefully to observe the position of the States when thus assembled in Convention. Their meeting was purely voluntary; they met as equals; and they were sovereign political communities, whom no power could rightfully coerce into a change of their condition, and with whom such a change must be the result of their own free and intelligent choice, governed by no other than the force of circumstances. That they were independent of foreign control was ascertained by the Declaration of Independence, by the war, and by the Treaty of Peace. That they were independent of each other, except so far as they had made certain mutual stipulations in the Articles of Confederation, was the necessary result of the events which had made the people of each State its rightful and exclusive sovereigns. We must recur, therefore, to the Articles of Confederation[...]".