We do not find, in the history of the formation and adoption of the Constitution, that any man speaks of a general concurrent power, in the regulation of foreign and domestic trade, as still residing in the States.  The very object intended, more than any other, was to take away such power.  If it had not so provided, the Constitution would not have been worth accepting.

I contend, therefore, that the people intended, in establishing the Constitution, to transfer from the several States to a general government those high and important powers over commerce, which, in their exercise, were to maintain a uniform and general system.  From the very nature of the case, these powers must be exclusive; that is, the higher branches of commercial regulation must be exclusively committed to a single hand.  What is it that is to be regulated?  Not the commerce of the several States, respectively, but the commerce of the United States.  Henceforth, the commerce of the States was to be a unit, and the system by which it was to exist and be governed must necessarily be complete, entire, and uniform.  Its character was to be described in the flag which waved over it, E PLURIBUS UNUM.  Now, how could individual States assert a right of concurrent legislation, in a case of this sort, without manifest encroachment and confusion?  It should be repeated, that the words used in the Constitution, “to regulate commerce,” are so very general and extensive, that they may be construed to cover a vast field of legislation, part of which has always been occupied by State laws; and therefore the words must have a reasonable construction, and the power should be considered as exclusively vested in Congress so far, and so far only, as the nature of the power requires.  And I insist, that the nature of the case, and of the power, did imperiously require, that such important authority as that of granting monopolies of trade and navigation should not be considered as still retained by the States.

It is apparent from the prohibitions on the power of the States, that the general concurrent power was not supposed to be left with them.  And the exception out of these prohibitions of the inspection laws proves this still more clearly.  Which most concerns the commerce of this country, that New York and Virginia should have an uncontrolled power to establish their inspection of flour and tobacco, or that they should have an uncontrolled power of granting either a monopoly of trade in their own ports, or a monopoly of navigation over all the waters leading to those ports?  Yet the argument on the other side must be, that, although the Constitution has sedulously guarded and limited the first of these powers, it has left the last wholly unlimited and uncontrolled.