It cannot be said, however, that the actors in the history always had a clear perception of the facts as they took place.  In the teeth of the facts, our early history presents a great variety of assertions of State independence by leading men, State Legislatures, or State constitutions, which still form the basis of the argument for State sovereignty.  The State constitutions declared the State to be sovereign and independent, even though the framers knew that the existence of the State depended on the issue of the national struggle against the mother country.  The treaty of 1783 with Great Britain recognized the States separately and by name as “free, sovereign, and independent,” even while it established national boundaries outside of the States, covering a vast western territory in which no State would have ventured to forfeit its interest by setting up a claim to practical freedom, sovereignty, or independence.  All our early history is full of such contradictions between fact and theory.  They are largely obscured by the undiscriminating use of the word “people.”  As used now, it usually means the national people; but many apparently national phrases as to the “sovereignty of the people,” as they were used in 1787-9, would seem far less national if the phraseology could show the feeling of those who then used them that the “people” referred to was the people of the State.  In that case the number of the contradictions would be indefinitely increased; and the phraseology of the Constitution’s preamble, “We, the people of the United States,” would not be offered as a consciously nationalizing phrase of its framers.  It is hardly to be doubted, from the current debates, that the conventions of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, seven of the thirteen States, imagined and assumed that each ratified the Constitution in 1788—­90 by authority of the State’s people alone, by the State’s sovereign will; while the facts show that in each of these conventions a clear majority was coerced into ratification by a strong minority in its own State, backed by the unanimous ratifications of the other States.  If ratification or rejection had really been open to voluntary choice, to sovereign will, the Constitution would never have had a moment’s chance of life; so far from being ratified by nine States as a condition precedent to going into effect, it would have been summarily rejected by a majority of the States.  In the language of John Adams, the Constitution was “extorted from the grinding necessities of a reluctant people.”  The theory of State sovereignty was successfully contradicted by national necessities.