[Kalamata]

>>OIFVeteran wrote: "Also did you get a chance to look at this one by Charles Pickney? What do you think he meant? He was one of the signers of the constitution and helped get it ratified at South Carolina’s ratification convention. Thanks for your help! >>OIFVeteran quoting: "Let us, then, consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by maintaining that each state is separately and individually independent, as a species of political heresy, which can never benefit us, but may bring on us the most serious distresses." -- Charles Pickney South Carolina ratification convention 1788

I believe that statement was by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (not Charles Pinckney,) who simply stated that the states had been bound together in a mutual union since the Declaration. The other Charles Pinckney said this:

"In every government there necessarily exists a power from which there is no appeal, and which, for that reason, may be formed absolute and uncontrollable. The person or assembly in whom this power resides is called the sovereign or supreme power of the state. With us, the sovereignty of the Union is in the people."

[Speech of Mr. Charles Pinckney, South Carolina Ratification Convention, May 4, 1788, in Jonathan Elliot, "The Debates in the Several State Conventions Vol IV." 1888, pp.302, 327-328]

Note that the 2nd Pinckney states the ultimate authority resides is the people -- not in the Congress, nor in the President, nor in the Supreme Court, but in the people. If you had said that around Lincoln's thugs, it may have gotten you killed.

Mr. Kalamata

[OIFVeteran]

Yes, exactly what I’ve been saying and what Justice Marshall said. Just as the constitution states also “We the people...” It resides in all of the people not in any subset of the people, not in the states. Thank you for the quote. I will save it for use in the other civil war forums I post at.

[OIFVeteran]

For someone with supposedly six degrees your reading comprehension sucks. What Pickney is referring to here when he says state( singular) is a nation.
State-a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government.

I mean the sentence prior he says “in every government”. Not every government had states(plural) like America did. He is making the distinction that unlike all other governments(a state) that sovereignty of our country resides in the people. When he says people he means we the people as in the people of America as it declares in the constitution. No subset of the people i.e. people in one state.

If he meant what you incorrectly thinks he means his last sentence would have been “With us the sovereignty of the Union resides in the states(plural).”

Your citing ability is by far eclipsed by your cherry picking and twisting ability’s. Your like Bill Clinton with his “depends on what the word is means.”