be amenable to the suit of an individual without its own consent. This is the general sense, and the general practice of mankind; and the exemption, as one of the attributes of sovereignty, is now enjoyed by the government of every State in the Union." That the Constitution was adopted with the understanding that a sovereign State cannot be sued in a Federal Court is evident, but it was not until 1792 that Alexander Chisholm, a citizen of South Carolina, brought suit against the State of Georgia in the Supreme Court of the United States and the question received its first judicial interpretation. James Wilson, one of the associate justices of the court, and one of the framers of the Constitution, handed down the decision, his opinion being an elaborate discussion of the question, Do the People of the United States form a Nation? His conclusion was that sovereignty vested in the United States and that by the Constitution the Supreme Court had jurisdiction over every State in the Union; in which opinion John Jay, the chief justice, in an equally elaborate opinion, coincided. But the alarming doctrine was not suffered to pass without protest from Mr. Justice Iredell, who in a lengthy and very learned opinion declared, "Every State in the Union in every instance where its sovereignty has not been delegated to the United States, I consider to be as completely sovereign as the United States are in respect to the powers surrendered. The United States are sovereign as to all the powers of government actually surrendered; each State in the Union is sovereign as to all the powers reserved. It must necessarily be so because the United States have no claim to any authority but such as the States have surrendered to them." His conclusion was that the United States had no jurisdiction and that a sovereign State cannot be sued. It is interesting to note that the doctrine of national sovereignty was interpreted by Northern members of the Supreme Court: Jay, of New York; Wilson, of Pennsylvania; and that the doctrine of State sovereignty was interpreted by a Southern member, Iredell, of North Carolina. In the ratifying convention of his State, Iredell had supported the Constitution, and it was chiefly because of that support that Washington appointed him an associate justice of the Supreme Court. The decision in the Chisholm case was handed down February 8, 1793. On the following day Sedgwick, of Massachusetts, gave notice in the House of Representatives that he proposed introducing a resolution for amending the Constitution so that the States should be protected from being sued in Federal courts. It passed Congress on the fourth of March, the following year, and after being before the State Legislatures nearly three years, was ratified by them and became a part of the Constitution, as the Eleventh Amendment, January 8, 1798. It was a triumph of the State sovereignty party and was supposed to put to perpetual silence all doubts on the point which it was enacted to cover. It was this decision of Mr. Justice Iredell which became the constitutional foundation of the Democratic party as a States Rights (State Sovereignty) party. It was the constitutional basis, which was strengthened and completed by the Eleventh Amendment, of the conviction of the South, as declared by South Carolina in its Declaration of 1860, that the States were sovereign. Yet Chief Justice Jay and Mr. Justice Wilson, whose opinions were the opinion of the Court, made the interpretation of national sovereignty to which the slowly developing national sentiment responded. From the time of Wilson's decision till the Civil War the debate on sovereignty ran on and no piece of legislation escaped classification as either supporting or tending to weaken the doctrine of State sovereignty. In proof of state sovereignty, South Carolina, in her Declaration of Causes for Secession, cited the cases of Rhode Island and North Carolina after the ratification of the Constitution by the remaining States, and its inauguration as a working government. The Declaration asserts that these two States "during that interval each exercised the functions of an independent nation." The assertion is not warranted by the facts. Contemporary evidence fails to show that either State contemplated exercising any such functions; on the contrary it proves conclusively that refusal to ratify was due to no purpose of North Carolina to remain out of the Union but to secure amendments to the Constitution compatible with local politics; the delay of the State to ratify was due more to hostility between factions within the State than to hostility of either faction to the Constitution. In Rhode Island opposition to ratification was among the State officials and not among the people: the case was of the officeholders refusing to do what the voters wanted done; the State was in much the same situation as North Carolina, divided into hostile factions. "We cannot know," says Alexander Johnston, "how far Rhode Island was influenced by unofficial propositions to carve up her territory between Massachusetts and Connecticut, or how far North Carolina was influenced by official propositions in Congress to suppress or restrain her commerce with the neighboring States." That the United States forbore to exercise its sovereign authority toward Rhode Island and North Carolina is not evidence that they were "each an independent nation;" and the fact that both States ratified the Constitution without amendment tends to establish the proposition that their delay in ratifying was not due in either case to a conviction that each was an independent nation. The case of these States goes far to establish the proposition that the claims of the States to sovereignty, in the eighteenth century, were bits of verbiage rather than governmental facts. The use of the word "sovereign" is very loose with speakers and writers in the early days of the United States, and it accords closely with the facts of civil development in the United States if we accept the term "sovereign," as thus applied, as a synonym for any of that group of words now commonly used to describe the authority of a State to execute its laws. Madison uses the term "residuary sovereignty," a phrase impossible to conceive in thought and yet a phrase which still lingers in the decisions of the Supreme |