Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/50

22 not delegated or prohibited, and were intended to remove a suspicion of a tendency in the Constitution toward consolidation which had been vigorously charged by some of those who had opposed the ratification. It cannot be reiterated too often that the people do not derive their rights from government. In England, Magna Charta and other franchises were granted by kings and residuary rights remain in and with the government; here, ungranted rights remain with the grantors and these are the people of the States.

We are now prepared to consider the action of the South which rested upon the relation which the States and the Federal government bore to each other. What the South maintained was that the Union, or general government, emanated from the people of the several States, acting in their separate and sovereign capacity, as distinct political communities; that the Constitution being a compact to which each State was a party for the purpose of good government and the protection of life, liberty and property, the several States had the right to judge of infractions of the Constitution, or of the failure of the common government to subserve its covenanted ends, and to interpose by secession or otherwise for protecting the great residuary mass of undelegated powers, and for maintaining within their respective limits the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them. The third Virginia resolution of 1798, drawn by Madison, puts this very clearly &quot;That this assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare that it views the powers of the Federal government as resulting from the compact to which the States are parties, as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting that compact; as no farther valid than they are authorized by the grants enumerated in the compact; and that