State

• Author: Dennis J. Mahoney
• Pages: 2478-2482

Page 2478

The DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE declares that the "united colonies" are, as they ought MK MM to be, "free and independent states." The term "states" was chosen to indicate their status as autonomous political communities. The state was the result of the SOCIAL COMPACT, binding man to man and subjecting all to rule by some part of the community. The term also carried a connotation, already obsolescent in England, of a republican form of government; the seventeenth-century British political writers with whose works the Americans were familiar had generally contrasted "state" with "monarchy" or "principality."

But the Declaration of Independence was, after all, the unanimous declaration of the united states. Although the Declaration proclaims that the states are "free and independent," they were not thereby made independent of one another. By the Declaration, the one American people assumes among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which it is entitled by natural and divine law. Thus is the American people declared to possess SOVEREIGNTY, and not the several states, although in the common usage, of the eighteenth as well as of the twentieth century, the term "state" refers to a sovereign entity.

Page 2479

The central paradox of American politics has always been, from the time of the Declaration and of the Constitution, the existence of ineradicable states within an indissoluble Union. The sovereignty of the people, from whom both the national and the state governments derive their just powers, is the basis for the distinctively American form of FEDERALISM. Neither is the central government the creature of the states nor do the states exist at the mercy of the central government, but both exercise those limited and delegate powers that are assigned them by the sovereign people.

Each of the original thirteen states had been founded and administered as a British colony prior to 1776. They had, therefore, established forms of government under their COLONIAL CHARTERS. During the Revolution, most of them adopted CONSTITUTIONS providing for government of the same persons and territory as the colonies had comprised. The fourteenth and fifteenth states, Vermont and Kentucky, had experienced provisional self-government before they were admitted to the Union. Before the ANNEXATION OF TEXAS, that state had revolted against Mexico and governed itself as an independent republic. California's brief existence as the "Bear Flag Republic" (1846) scarcely qualifies as independence or self-government; but, when the controversy over slavery prevented Congress from organizing the lands won in the Mexican War, California proceeded to adopt a constitution (1849) and to govern its own affairs until its admission to the Union (1850). Hawaii was an independent kingdom for centuries before American immigrants revolted against the native monarchy and engineered the annexation of those islands by the United States.

All of the rest of the states?thirty-two to date?have been formed out of the national dominion of the United States and have been admitted to the Union as states following a probationary period as TERRITORIES. The process by which the national dominion was to be settled and transformed into states was devised by THOMAS JEFFERSON and adopted by the CONTINENTAL CONGRESS as the ORDINANCE OF 1784, although that ordinance was never actually enforced. Essentially the same scheme was enacted in the NORTHWEST ORDINANCE (1787), which was the model for all subsequent treatment of the territories of the United States. At the CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION OF 1787 the delegates rejected GOUVERNEUR MORRIS'S proposal that states formed from the western territories should have a status inferior to the original states, and they provided instead that new states should be admitted to the Union on terms of full equality with the existing states.

Under the ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION the national government was entirely the creature of the state governments. The confederation derived its formal existence from a compact among the states, and the members of Congress were chosen by the state legislatures. Most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were convinced of the necessity of creating a national government directly responsible to the people of the nation. JAMES MADISON, for one, arrived in Philadelphia prepared to argue for a pure separation of state from national government, according to which the two tiers of government would be separately elected and separately responsible to the people in their respective spheres. But the Convention chose instead to give the institutions of the states a share in the government of the nation, and to provide, in the national constitution, for certain guarantees to the people of the states, including guarantees against their state governments.

In the Constitution, representatives in Congress are allocated to the states on the basis...