ng of
Great Britain acknowledge the "independence and sovereignty" of
the thirteen individual and separate States. The Treaty of peace
declares that "His Majesty acknowledges the said United States
[naming them] to be free, sovereign, and independent States."--not
separately and individually, but the "said _United_ States." The
King then agrees that "the following are and shall be the boundaries
of the said United States,"--proceeding to give, not the boundaries
of each State, but the boundaries of the whole as one unit, one
sovereignty, one nationality. Last of all, the commissioners who
signed the treaty with the King's commissioner were not acting for
the individual States, but for the _United_ States. Three of them,
John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay, were from the North,
and Henry Laurens from the South. The separate sovereignties whose
existence was so persistently alleged by Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Toombs
were not represented when independence was conceded. Mr. Benjamin's
conclusion, therefore, was not only illogical, but was completely
disproved by plain historical facts.

It seems never to have occurred to Mr. Benjamin, or to Mr. Yulee,
or to the Texas senators, or to the Arkansas senators, that the
money paid from a common treasury of the nation gave any claim to
National sovereignty. Their philosophy seems to have been that
the General Government had been paid in full by the privilege of
nurturing new States, of improving their rivers and harbors, of
building their fortifications, of protecting them in peace, of
defending them in war. The privilege of leading the new communities
through the condition of Territorial existence up to the full
majesty of States, was, according to secession argument, sufficient
compensation, and removed all shadow of the title or the sovereignty
of the National Government, the moment the inhabitants thus benefitted
announced their desire to form new connections. Louisiana had cost
fifteen millions of dollars at a time when that was a vast sum of
money. It had cost five millions of money and the surrender of a
province, to purchase Florida, and nearly a hundred millions more
to extinguish the Indian title, and make the State habitable for
white men. Texas cost the National Treasury ninety millions of
dollars in the war which was precipitated by her annexation, and
ten millions more paid to her in 1850, in adjustment of her boundary
trouble. All these States appa