The Constitution of the United States was the work of this convention.  But in its construction the convention immediately perceived that they must retrace their steps, and fall back from a league of friendship between sovereign States to the constituent sovereignty of the people; from power to right—­from the irresponsible despotism of State sovereignty to the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence.  In that instrument, the right to institute and to alter governments among men was ascribed exclusively to the people—­the ends of government were declared to be to secure the natural rights of man; and that when the government degenerates from the promotion to the destruction of that end, the right and the duty accrues to the people to dissolve this degenerate government and to institute another.  The signers of the Declaration further averred, that the one people of the United Colonies were then precisely in that situation—­with a government degenerated into tyranny, and called upon by the laws of nature and of nature’s God to dissolve that government and to institute another.  Then, in the name and by the authority of the good people of the colonies, they pronounced the dissolution of their allegiance to the king, and their eternal separation from the nation of Great Britain—­and declared the United Colonies independent States.  And here as the representatives of the one people they had stopped.  They did not require the confirmation of this act, for the power to make the declaration had already been conferred upon them by the people, delegating the power, indeed, separately in the separate colonies, not by colonial authority, but by the spontaneous revolutionary movement of the people in them all.

From the day of that Declaration, the constituent power of the people had never been called into action.  A confederacy had been substituted in the place of a government, and State sovereignty had usurped the constituent sovereignty of the people.

The convention assembled at Philadelphia had themselves no direct authority from the people.  Their authority was all derived from the State legislatures.  But they had the articles of confederation before them, and they saw and felt the wretched condition into which they had brought the whole people, and that the Union itself was in the agonies of death.  They soon perceived that the indispensably needed powers were such as no State government, no combination of them, was by the principles of the Declaration of Independence competent to bestow.  They could emanate only from the people.  A highly respectable portion of the assembly, still clinging to the confederacy of States, proposed, as a substitute for the Constitution, a mere revival of the articles of confederation, with a grant of additional powers to the Congress.  Their plan was respectfully and thoroughly discussed, but the want of a government and of the sanction of the people to the delegation of powers happily prevailed.