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. A constitution for the people, and the
distribution of legislative, executive, and judicial powers was
prepared. It announced itself as the work of the people themselves;
and as this was unquestionably a power assumed by the convention,