One people, thirteen states

Reading the Declaration of Independence this July 4th, as I do every July 4th, I noticed something I hadn’t picked up on before:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of nature’s God entitle them … [italics added.]

In the first sentence of the first public act of the United States of America, the Declaration by which the United States came into being, the United States through their representatives in Congress assembled spoke of themselves as one people who were assuming one separate and equal station among the powers of the earth, not as thirteen peoples assuming thirteen separate and equal stations. What this tells me is that the states’ rights view of the Founding, which I’ve been studying lately, particularly the writings of John Taylor and James J. Kilpatrick, is not tenable. The states’ righters are of course correct that the Declaration created, not one sovereign state, but thirteen sovereign states. Yet, contrary to the states’ rights view, the United States wasn’t (or, if you prefer the pre-1865 usage, weren’t) merely thirteen independent states acting together for the limited purpose of declaring independence. They were, from the very start, one people—one people expressing themselves politically through thirteen sovereign yet united states.

The U.S. is a complex, multi-leveled entity. It is not, as John Taylor and Thomas Jefferson would have it, simply a compact in which independent states have delegated some of their powers to a federal government for limited purposes while holding onto the rest of their powers, as though the United States were nothing more than unrelated individual entities who had formed a contract with each other. Nor is it—it goes without saying—simply a single, undifferentiated sovereignty. The United States is both a unity and a plurality, it exists simultaneously in two dimensions. Accurately describing this multidimensional entity is not easy. One must, among other things, separate out the valid and necessary aspects of the states’ rights philosophy from its dangerous ideological simplifications. I’ll have more to say about this subject in the future.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 05, 2005 12:15 AM | Send