Although it was quite clear that the States, when they adopted the Constitution of the United States, reserved, by implication, all the sovereign power, rights, and privileges that had not been granted away—as a power not given is necessarily withheld—yet so jealous were they of the new government they were forming, that several of them insisted, in their acts of ratification, that the Constitution should be so amended as explicitly to declare this truth, and thus put it beyond cavil in the future. Massachusetts expressed herself as follows, in connection with her ratification of the Constitution: ‘As it is the opinion of this Convention, that certain amendments and alterations in said Constitution would remove the fears, and quiet the apprehensions of the good people of the Commonwealth, and more effectually guard against an undue administration of the Federal Government, the Convention do, therefore, recommend that the following alteration and provisions be introduced in said Constitution: First, that it be explicitly declared, that all powers not delegated by the aforesaid Constitution are reserved to the several States, to be by them exercised.’
Webster and Story had not yet arisen in Massachusetts, to teach the new doctrine that the Constitution had been formed by the ‘People of the United-States,’ in contra-distinction to the people of the States. Massachusetts did not speak in the name of any such people, but in her own name. She was not jealous of the remaining people of the United States, as fractional parts of a whole, of which she was herself a fraction, but she was jealous of them as States; as so many foreign peoples, with whom she was contracting. The powers not delegated were to be reserved to those delegating them, to wit: the ‘several States;’ that is to say, to each and every one of the States.
Virginia fought long and sturdily against adopting the Constitution at all. Henry, Mason, Tyler, and a host of other
