[inquest]

I am at a disadvantage in offering more on the phrase "several states" because I am on the road and my preferred set of reference works are unavailable until I get home.

When you get the time, I would recommend as a reference the Oxford English Dictionary, the unabridged 20-something volume, which can be found at most public libraries. It's a good reference because the different definitions generally go in order from oldest to most recent, which enables you to trace how the meaning evolves. It also gives dated quotes from various sources to show how the word was used in sentences at different times.

And in the meantime, I suggest looking at the Constition online, here, for example, and doing a find-on-page search for the word "several", which appears "several" times throughout the document. And each time you see it, pretend the word isn't there, and ask yourself how that would possibly affect the meaning of the sentence you're looking at. Remember that the drafters of the document generally didn't waste words unnecessarily.

[Rockingham]

On some questions, for our modern understanding, the meaning of the words of the Constitution and contemporary documents is obscured by changes in usage. By specialized references, I mean references compiled by historians and constitutional scholars.

The OED is of little help because it is about modern usage, not the usage of the late 18th Century. The language of the founding era of our country is closer to Shakespeare and reading by candlelight than to our era of pop culture and television.

Zounds, would not one of the witte of a codfishe alsoe reckone that to be so?