Source; Chet McAteer
“If the State Legislatures Think Proper, the Government Must Be Destroyed”: William Davie and the Founding Compact’s Lethal Check on Federal Ambition
[Prior to Vile 17th Amendment-Nationalization Perversion- Continued]
William Richardson Davie, Revolutionary cavalry officer, founder of the University of North Carolina, governor, and North Carolina delegate to the Constitutional Convention, stood in the Hillsborough ratifying convention in late July 1788 and delivered a blunt assessment of the new Constitution’s architecture.
Speaking of the State governments as the indispensable supports of the federal edifice, he declared:
“They considered them as the great massy pillars on which this political fabric was to be extended and supported; and were fully persuaded that, when they were removed, or should moulder down by time, the general government must tumble into ruin. A very little reflection will show that no department of it can exist without the State governments. The next department is the Senate. How is it formed? By the States themselves. Do they not choose them? Are they not created by them? And will they not have the interest of the states particularly at heart? The States, sir, can put a final period to the government, as was observed by a gentleman who thought this power over elections unnecessary. If the state legislatures think proper, they may refuse to choose senators, and the government must be destroyed.”
That is the full force of the partial quotation by Davie. It is not rhetorical flourish. It is a cold statement of structural reality under the original Constitution. The Senate was elected by the State legislatures. Without senators the Senate cannot sit; without a Senate no legislation can pass, no treaties can be ratified, no Presidential appointments confirmed. A determined refusal by even a sufficient number of State legislatures to send Senators would paralyze and ultimately dissolve the federal government. Davie was not inventing a radical theory; he was describing the machine as designed by the Founders purposefully.
This was no isolated outburst from an anti-federalist. Davie was a Federalist who had helped broker the Great Compromise at Philadelphia and who worked for ratification. His point was the same point James Madison made in Federalist No. 45 while defending the Constitution to the People of New York:
“The State governments may be regarded as constituent and essential parts of the federal government; whilst the latter is no wise essential to the operation or organisation of the former. Without the intervention of the State legislatures, the President of the United States cannot be elected at all. They must in all cases have a great share in his appointment, and will perhaps in most cases of themselves determine it. The Senate will be elected absolutely and exclusively by the State legislatures.Thus, each of the principal branches of the federal government will owe its existence more or less to the favor of the State governments, and must consequently feel a dependence, which is much more likely to beget a disposition too obsequious, than too overbearing towards them.”
Madison repeated the dependence theme throughout the ratification debates: the federal government was deliberately left dependent upon the States for its very personnel. The States were not administrative districts; they were the parties that created the Compact and retained the Sovereignty necessary to keep their creature in check.
Thomas Jefferson sharpened the same logic into the doctrine of nullification in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 (and the clearer 1799 version). The States, he insisted, “are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government; but that, by a Compact … they constituted a general Government for special purposes,—delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of Right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”
In the more explicit draft language Jefferson affirmed that “a nullification of the act is the rightful remedy.” The Virginia Resolutions of the same year, drafted by Madison, declared that the States “have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them.”
These were not later Southern inventions. They were the logical outgrowth of the understanding that prevailed in 1787–88: the Constitution was a Compact among Sovereign States. The federal government possessed only delegated powers. The States retained the residual Sovereignty, including the practical ability through the election of senators, the appointment of electors, and the ultimate Right of Interposition, to starve or dismantle an overreaching central authority.
Davie’s remark simply made the most extreme practical consequence explicit: if the States choose not to staff the Senate, the government ceases to function.
The Seventeenth Amendment (1913) destroyed the most obvious of these structural checks by removing the election of senators from the State legislatures and placing it in popular vote.
That change was sold as “democracy,” but its deeper effect was to sever the institutional dependence of the federal government upon the States that Davie and Madison had regarded as essential.
Once senators answered to statewide electorates rather than to the legislatures that created them, the most direct mechanism by which the States could refuse to continue the federal government disappeared.
The remaining remedies: interposition, nullification, and, in the last extremity, the reserved Right of a People to alter or abolish a government that has become destructive of the ends for which it was instituted became correspondingly more difficult and more contested.
Yet the original understanding remains. The federal government was never designed as a consolidated national sovereignty of which the States are mere provinces. It was a limited agent created by compact among sovereign principals.
Davie’s stark warning: "If the State legislatures think proper … the government must be destroyed”—was simply the most candid acknowledgment of that hierarchy.
When the Creature forgets its Creators, the Creators retain the means, under the original design, to remind it of its subordinate place. The pillars can still be withdrawn. The edifice still depends upon them. That is not secessionist rhetoric; it is the architecture the Framers themselves described.
Final Declaration:
Nationalists today remain unchanged in their unyielding hunger for an all-powerful federal regime. They will contend for their centralizing perversions with the same relentless vigor that has marked them from the beginning. Our Founders, fully aware of this enduring danger, deliberately embedded safeguards within the Constitutional structure to frustrate every such distortion and to preserve inviolate the Rights and Sovereignty of the People.
In Liberty and Eternal Vigilance Against All Enemies Foreign and Domestic,
C.M.McAteer
September 18, 2014
References
North Carolina Ratifying Convention - William R. Davie
Davie, William R. Debates in the North Carolina Convention, July 25, 1788. In The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, edited by Jonathan Elliot, Vol. 4, pp. 60-68. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1836 [2nd ed. 1876].
"If the State legislatures think proper, they may refuse to choose Senators, and the government must be destroyed."
Davie's extended argument on the same page, verified in the contemporary report:
“The Federal Convention were as well convinced as the members of this house, that the State governments were absolutely necessary to the existence of the federal government. They considered them as the great massy pillars on which this political fabric was to be extended and supported; and were fully persuaded that, when they were removed, or should moulder down by time, the general government must tumble into ruin. A very little reflection will show that no department of it can exist without the State governments."
William R. Davie in the North Carolina Convention (July 25, 1788)
Federalist No. 59 - Alexander Hamilton
Hamilton, Alexander. The Federalist No. 59. New York Packet, February 22, 1788. In The Federalist Papers.
"Nothing can be more evident, than that an exclusive power of regulating elections for the National Government, in the hands of the State Legislatures, would leave the existence of the Union entirely at their mercy. They could at any moment annihilate it, by neglecting to provide for the choice of persons to administer its affairs."
"It is certainly true, that the State Legislatures, by forbearing the appointment of Senators, may destroy the National Government."
Founders Online, National Archives - Federalist No. 59 and University of Chicago Press - Founders' Constitution
Federalist No. 45 - James Madison
Madison, James. The Federalist No. 45. New York Packet, January 26, 1788.
Key passage:
"The State governments may be regarded as constituent and essential parts of the federal government; whilst the latter is nowise essential to the operation or organization of the former."
William Rawle - A View of the Constitution of the United States of America
Rawle, William. A View of the Constitution of the United States of America. Philadelphia: Philip H. Nicklin, 1825; 2nd ed., 1829. viii, 349 pp.
Rawle, William. A View of the Constitution of the United States of America, 295-304, 305-307 (2d ed. 1829). Reprinted in The Founders' Constitution, Vol. 4, Document 13. University of Chicago Press.
Residual Sovereignty passage:
Rawle's Chapter I-II formulation:
"In all other respects the sovereignty of the States is unaltered... In this relation every state must be viewed as entirely Sovereign in all points not transferred by the People who compose it, to the government of the Union..."
Rawle (1825) pp. 31-32; (1829) pp. 28-30.
Senate as remnant of federative character:
Rawle describes the appointment of Senators by State legislatures as "the only material remnant of the federative character of the late congress" and that it preserves "such an agency in the formation of the general government as preserves the authority of the former, and contributes to render them living members of the great body."
Rawle (1829) pp. 57-60.
Procedural power to Withdraw:
"The States, then, may wholly withdraw from the Union, but while they continue, they must retain the character of representative republics."
"It depends on the Stateitself to retain or abolish the principle of representation, because it depends on itself whether it will continue a member of the Union."
"The Secession of a State from the Union depends on the will of the people of such State ... To withdraw from the Union comes not within the general scope of their Delegated Authority."
"If it is ever done indirectly, the People must refuse to elect representatives, as well as to suffer their legislature to re-appoint Senators. The Senator whose time had not yet expired, must be forbidden to continue in the exercise of his functions."
Full chapter: Constitution.org - William Rawle: A View of the Constitution: Chapter XXXII and Founders' Constitution - Article 4, Section 4
5. Seventeenth Amendment
U.S. Const. amend. XVII (1913) - Direct election of senators, superseding Art. I, Sec. 3, cl. 1.
Where do you stand on this?
The Tradesman
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