Community Independence

Here is part of a speech Jefferson Davis gave while serving Mississippi in the United States Senate. I never really understood how important 'States rights' or a State's soveriegnty was to the Constitution. The whole union hinges on that one thing, that the several states have the right to run themselves, not a coercive Federal Government in Washington that doesn't even know what the people need being so disconnected from them. These words of Davis have great weight, especially today with the huge and out of control Federal Government in Washington right now. Davis writes:

"In the beginning the founders of this Government were true democratic State-rights men. Democracy was State-rights, and State-rights was democracy, and it is so to-day. Your resolutions breathe it. The Declaration of Independence embodied the sentiments which had lived in the hearts of the country for many years before its formal assertion. Our fathers asserted the great principle- the right of the people to choose their own government- and that government rested upon the consent of the governed. In every form of expression it uttered the same idea, community independence and the dependence of the Union upon the communities of which it consisted. It was an American declaration of the unalienable rights of man; it was a general truth, and I wish it were accepted by all men. But I have said that this State sovereignty- this community independence- has never been surrendered, and that there is no power in the Federal Government to coerce a State. Will anyone ask me, then, how a State is to be held to the fulfilment of its obligations? My answer is, by its honor. The obligation is the more sacred to observe every feature of the compact, because there is no power to enforce it. The great error of the Confederation(Articles of Confederation) was, that it attempted to act upon the States. It was found impracticable, and our present form of government was adopted, which acts upon individuals, and is not designed to act upon States. The question of State coercion was raised in the Convention which framed the Constitution, and , after discussion, the proposition to give power to the General Government to enforce against any State obedience to the Laws was rejected. It is upon the ground that a State cannot be coerced that observance of the compact is a sacred obligation. It was upon this principle that our fathers depended for the perpetuity of a fraternal Union, and for the security of the rights that the Constitution was designed to preserve.....

"And among the things most odious to my mind is to find a man who enters upon a public office under the sanction of the Constitution, and taking an oath to support the Constitution- the compact between the States binding each for the common defence and general welfare of the other- and retaining to himself a mental reservation that he will war upon the institutions and the property of any of the States of the Union. It is a crime too low to characterize as it deserves before this assembly. It is one which would disgrace a gentleman- one which a man with self-respect would never commit. To swear that he will support the Constitution, to take an office which belongs in many of its relations to all the States, and to use it as a means of injuring a portion of the States of whom he is thus an agent, is treason to everything that is honorable in man. It is the base and cowardly attack of him who gains the confidence of another in order that he may wound him."