All I see in those extracts is what we already know. That Vattel had some influence and that we shouldn’t overestimate the influence of Blackstone. Yawn. Doesn’t say Vattel was more influential than Blackstone. I will never believe otherwise.
That reference to Vattel inspiring the confederacy of states is thin. He was not the only commentator on international law, and there were far more important examples of confederacy, I’d think, from the Founders’ wide reading of ancient literature. We see this pop up a lot in the Federalist.
Once the seperate states amalgamated, by the way, they stopped being foreign to eachother. and the laws of nations no longer applied. We are a republic, not a confederacy. The states very clearly surrendered part of their sovereignty to the central government, which regulated commerce and other things between them according to its constitution. As we know, the relationship ended being, for better or worse, more one-sided and less apt to be compared to relations between quasi-foreign nations than the states’ relationship to the crown. Because of the altered nature of the relationship, if Vattel was an influence on their uniting, he ceased to matter the second they were united.
When it says the only English laws validly received into America came in the pre-revolutionary period, well, that’s a long period. Also, if Blackstone came too late to directly impact the actual development of English law in America, he tells us a lot about those laws. Certainly he had enough of an impact to warp Americans’ subsequent opinion of said laws, and furthermore, to impact the future development of distinctly American law.