f the above-listed salient features of the
American Federal System are the ones which at the outset marked it off
most sharply from all preceding systems, in which the member states
generally agreed to obey the mandates of a common government for certain
stipulated purposes, but retained to themselves the right of ordaining
and enforcing the laws of the union. This, indeed, was the system
provided in the Articles of Confederation. The Convention of 1787 was
well aware, of course, that if the inanities and futilities of the
Confederation were to be avoided in the new system, the latter must
incorporate "a coercive principle"; and as Ellsworth of Connecticut
expressed it, the only question was whether it should be "a coercion of
law, or a coercion of arms," that "coercion which acts only upon
delinquent individuals" or that which is applicable to "sovereign
bodies, states, in their political capacity."[10] In Judicial Review the
former principle was established, albeit without entirely discarding
the latter, as the War between the States was to demonstrate.

The sheer fact of Federalism enters the purview of Constitutional Law,
that is, becomes a judicial concept, in consequence of the conflicts
which have at times arisen between the idea of State Autonomy ("State
Sovereignty") and the principle of National Supremacy. Exaltation of the
latter principle, as it is recognized in the Supremacy Clause (Article
VI, paragraph 2) of the Constitution, was the very keystone of Chief
Justice Marshall's constitutional jurisprudence. It was Marshall's
position that the supremacy clause was intended to be applied literally,
so that if an unforced reading of the terms in which legislative power
was granted to Congress confirmed its right to enact a particular
statute, the circumstance that the statute projected national power into
a hitherto accustomed field of state power with unavoidable curtailment
of the latter was a matter of indifference. State power, as Madison in
his early nationalistic days phrased it, was "no criterion of national
power," and hence no independent limitation thereof.

Quite different was the outlook of the Court over which Marshall's
successor, Taney, presided. That Court took as its point of departure
the Tenth Amendment, which reads, "The powers not delegated to the
United States by this Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States,
are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." In
construin