ABSTRACT
The great historical difficulty in the way of Calhoun's theory of the nature of the Union and the Constitution, once at any rate it is indicated, is obvious enough. It consists in the inversion it effects of the relation between governments and people that is stated by the Declaration of Independence, that all just governments rest on the consent of the governed. This chapter examines the most important evidence bearing on the question of the historical validity of the venerable antithesis: The People of the United States vs. the People of the States. In other words, what is at the outset characterized as the highest political capacity of the people of the States is finally transmuted by verbal legerdemain into the highest political capacity of the States themselves. Government was representative, and until they were unseated, the people's representatives alone had the right to govern, and, therefore, to enact laws.
