Today, remember the forgotten sentence in the Declaration of Independence.

There are some words in the Declaration that are essential to understanding American history and the nature of the United States, but they're not the words everyone has in mind.

We all of course recall the opening of the Declaration. (Well, not quite all: most of my students thought the Declaration began with "We the People," though of course they were thinking of the Constitution.)

What people remember is "all men are created equal" and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain rights, and the rest of that section.

But the truly significant sentence in terms of the nature of the American Union is this one, which you'll find toward the end:

That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have 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.

Here's why this matters.

In the early decades of American history, a question arose: is the United States a single, indivisible whole (the nationalist theory), or instead a compact among sovereign states (the compact theory)?

As I argue in chapter 4 of my book Nullification, all of the evidence is on the side of the compact theory -- which is why Professor Brion McClanahan calls it not the compact theory but "the compact fact."

In fact, I don't think a systematic presentation of the nationalist theory can even be found until the 1830s.

The compact theorists, as Thomas Jefferson himself put it in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, said the peoples of the states created the federal government when they separately ratified the Constitution. There was no single, national vote on the Constitution by an undifferentiated "American people." The constituent parts of the Union are the states.

By contrast, the nationalists tried to claim that from the beginning Americans had been "one people." They would further claim that this "one people" created the federal government, and that the states, far from being sovereign bodies with liberties of their own, were instead merely administrative units of the central government and should be treated as such. (And since the nationalists were eventually victorious, despite having the much weaker argument, that is precisely how the states are treated today.)

The sentence I'm highlighting from the Declaration makes clear that the colonies, now states, were not an undifferentiated mass of individuals, but discrete entities with existences of their own. They were "Free and Independent States" that 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."

Remember, too, the meaning of "state" in this context: it refers to a sovereign entity like France or Spain. That's how the former colonies now thought of themselves.

So the states, being the creators of the federal government as opposed to subordinate units of it, were not intended to be the doormats of Washington, D.C. Instead, they can and must assert themselves whenever that government exercises powers that the peoples of the states never granted it.

So on this Independence Day let us remember the American polity as it was originally intended: a decentralized republic in which its constituent parts, the states, have a crucial constitutional role to play, and that role can and must take the form of resistance when necessary.

Such resistance is of course not "treason" -- a foolish and juvenile word in this context -- but the highest expression of the true American spirit.

Happy Independence Day!

Tom Woods

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