Inasmuch as he and others have pointed out elsewhere that the Constitution, and perforce the Union, were created by the People, and that moreover the States are the People in their corporate form, then therefore his point amounts to a distinction without a difference. One suspects that Marshall is playing games here, trying to elevate the Government to sovereignty again -- a favorite preoccupation of all the Hamiltonians from the moment the guns fell silent at Yorktown.
I thought an "opus" meant you were leaving.
But you don't go.
Ah, well ...
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.
In Federalist 45, Madison is talking about how the Constitution requires state participation in some aspects of the operation of the federal government. In those days, State legislatures chose Senators and Presidential Electors. So literally, yes, you needed state input to make the federal government work.
He's not saying that the national interest isn't real or that federal laws and treaties don't have validity or that only states matter. Indeed, look at what he says in the very same number 45 of the Federalist:
[I]f the Union, as has been shown, be essential to the security of the people of America against foreign danger; if it be essential to their security against contentions and wars among the different States; if it be essential to guard them against those violent and oppressive factions which embitter the blessings of liberty, and against those military establishments which must gradually poison its very fountain; if, in a word, the Union be essential to the happiness of the people of America, is it not preposterous, to urge as an objection to a government, without which the objects of the Union cannot be attained, that such a government may derogate from the importance of the governments of the individual States? Was, then, the American Revolution effected, was the American Confederacy formed, was the precious blood of thousands spilt, and the hard-earned substance of millions lavished, not that the people of America should enjoy peace, liberty, and safety, but that the government of the individual States, that particular municipal establishments, might enjoy a certain extent of power, and be arrayed with certain dignities and attributes of sovereignty? We have heard of the impious doctrine in the Old World, that the people were made for kings, not kings for the people. Is the same doctrine to be revived in the New, in another shape that the solid happiness of the people is to be sacrificed to the views of political institutions of a different form?
Madison was pretty passionate about the states not being the whole end and aim of American government.
Inasmuch as he and others have pointed out elsewhere that the Constitution, and perforce the Union, were created by the People, and that moreover the States are the People in their corporate form, then therefore his point amounts to a distinction without a difference.
No, that's not what John Marshall is saying in McCulloch v. Maryland. I've gotten really impatient with the legalese, but here's how Wikipedia breaks his decision down.
1. The Court argued that the Constitution was a social contract created by the people via the Constitutional Convention. The government proceeds from the people and binds the state sovereignties. Therefore, the federal government is supreme, based on the consent of the people. Marshall declares the federal government’s overarching supremacy in his statement:
“If any one proposition could command the universal assent of mankind, we might expect it would be this– that the government of the Union, though limited in its power, is supreme within its sphere of action.”
The people of the United States ratified the Constitution in state conventions. If at some date the people of the United States decide in state conventions that they want to alter or discard the Constitution, that path is open to them. But it doesn't follow that a convention in one state can unilaterally break with the Constitution or rescind that states ratification.
For Marshall, the "People of the United States" most assuredly does exist, not a variety of state peoples. That's what I and others got from the decision, anyway. And it stands to reason, that if colony-peoples could be created by the British Crown, or London companies, or the actions of settlers, that citizens could also form an "American people." Dogmatism aside, what would make that impossible?
And finally, the People of the United States did not give the federal government a threshold or irrevocable grant of power, but a temporally durable, perpetually renewing trust of power that the People have the right and power to revoke at any time, and resume their powers intact. This is what the departing States did in 1861, whereupon they were set upon by Abraham Lincoln and his political machine, wielding the United States Army as their own instrument of revolution.
In the American Civil War, the revolution of secession was overreached by a coup d'etat of the servant against the master, and the whole American People lost both war and coup, not least the men of the Union Army who fought, they thought, to preserve the Union, but actually to end it.
If it's a question of two "revolutions" then it's not much of a choice. I doubt a government can simply pick up its "sovereignty" again after eighty years, all the more so, if like so many states in the union, they'd never had the kind of sovereignty that you attribute to the states. The state of Mississippi or Illinois was in crucial ways a creation of federal authority. The state of Louisiana or Florida or Iowa occupies land acquired for the American people by the US government. Maybe Texas or Hawaii could, but not Tennessee or Arkansas, which never had anything remotely corresponding to independence.
But in any event, I'm not saying that I know for a fact that secession was unconstitutional. That's my interpretation, but interpretations differ. What I am saying is that where interpretations differ, where each side can make a case, one can't simply act on the basis of one's own reading. One has to behave cautiously and submit the matter to the courts for interpretation, rather than to take up arms.
My basic argument has always been that American history has seen the sad playing-out of a destructive tendency which was present at the Philadelphia Convention, at the beginning, and which now threatens American exceptionalism, as unlimited-government, access capitalists and Marxist-collectivist termites labor in tandem to assimilate America to a despotic new world-state.
Then it follows that you would have supported Lincoln over Davis. First, to establish and maintain American independence from European colonial and imperial powers by defending our borders and developing industry. And second, to roll back the collectivist termite slave regime. I salute you, true American.