was sundered they severally assumed the
powers and rights of absolute self-government. The municipal and social
institutions of each, its laws of property and of personal relation,
even its political organization, were such only as each one chose to
establish, wholly without interference from any other. In the language
of the Declaration of Independence, each State had "full power to levy
war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do
all other acts and things which independent states may of right do." The
several colonies differed in climate, in soil, in natural productions,
in religion, in systems of education, in legislation, and in the forms
of political administration, and they continued to differ in these
respects when they voluntarily allied themselves as States to carry
on the War of the Revolution.

The object of that war was to disenthrall the united colonies from
foreign rule, which had proved to be oppressive, and to separate them
permanently from the mother country. The political result was the
foundation of a Federal Republic of the free white men of the colonies,
constituted, as they were, in distinct and reciprocally independent
State governments. As for the subject races, whether Indian or
African, the wise and brave statesmen of that day, being engaged in
no extravagant scheme of social change, left them as they were, and
thus preserved themselves and their posterity from the anarchy and the
ever-recurring civil wars which have prevailed in other revolutionized
European colonies of America.

When the confederated States found it convenient to modify the
conditions of their association by giving to the General Government
direct access in some respects to the people of the States, instead of
confining it to action on the States as such, they proceeded to frame
the existing Constitution, adhering steadily to one guiding thought,
which was to delegate only such power as was necessary and proper to the
execution of specific purposes, or, in other words, to retain as much as
possible consistently with those purposes of the independent powers of
the individual States. For objects of common defense and security, they
intrusted to the General Government certain carefully defined functions,
leaving all others as the undelegated rights of the separate independent
sovereignties.

Such is the constitutional theory of our Government, the practical
observance of which has carried us, and us