Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/35

Rh new form of government, a federal union of concurrent majorities, under a written constitution. The American colonies have not had sufficient importance ascribed to them for their agency in achieving civil and religious liberty; and, with their rights and powers as separate governments, as the potential forerunners of our constitutional, representative, federal republic. The institutions founded in this western world, in the essential elements of law and freedom, were far in advance of contemporary transatlantic institutions. The relations they sustained to one another and to the controlling English government, their large measure of local administration, must be clearly comprehended to do them justice for what they wrought out and to understand what character and power they preserved as States in the government of their creation under the Federal constitution. Their precise political condition prior to the Revolution cannot be obscured. The colonies were separate in the regulation of domestic concerns, in home affairs, but sustained a common relation to the British empire. The colonists were fellow subjects, owed allegiance to the same crown, had all the rights, privileges and liabilities of every other British subject. The inhabitants of one colony owed no obedience to the laws, were not under the jurisdiction of any other colony; were under no civil obligation to bear arms or pay taxes, or in any wise to contribute to the support or defense of another, and were wholly distinct and separate from all others in political functions, in political rights, and in political duties. In so far as all the colonists were one people and had common rights, it was the result of their mutual relation to the same sovereign, of common dependence on the same head, and not any result of a relation between them-  ---