Here is a law of the United States, not even pretended to be unconstitutional, repealed by the authority of a small majority of the voters of a single State. Here is a provision of the constitution, which is solemnly abrogated by the same authority.
On such expositions and reasonings, the ordinance grounds not only an assertion of the right to annul the laws, of which it complains, but to enforce it by a threat of seceding from the Union, if any attempt is made to execute them.
This right to secede is deduced from the nature of the constitution, which they say is a compact between sovereign States, who have preserved their whole sovereignty, and therefore are subject to no superior; that because they made the compact, they can break it, when, in their opinion, it has been departed from by the other States. Fallacious as this course of reasoning is, it enlists State pride, and finds advocates in the honest prejudices of those, who have not studied the nature of our government sufficiently to see the radical error, on which it rests.
The people of the United States formed the constitution, acting through the State legislatures in making the compact, to meet and discuss its provisions, and acting in separate conventions, when they ratified those provisions; but the terms used in its construction, show it to be a government, in which the people of all the States collectively are represented. We are _one people_ in the choice of president and vice president. Here the States have no other agency, than to direct the mode in which the votes shall be given. The candidates having a majority of all the votes are chosen. The electors of a majority of States may have given their votes for one candidate, and yet another may be chosen. The people, then, and not the States, are represented in the executive branch.
In the house of representatives there is this difference, that the people of one State do not, as in the case of president and vice president, all vote for the same officers. The people of all the States do not vote for all the members, each State electing only its own representatives. But this creates no material distinction. When chosen, they are all representatives of the United States, not representatives of the particular State from whence they come. They are paid by the United States, not by the State; nor are they accountable to it for any act done in the performance of their legislative functions; and however they may in practice, as it is their duty to do, consult and prefer the interests of their particular constituents, when they come in conflict with any other partial or local interest, yet it is their first and highest duty, as a representative of the United States, to promote the general good.
