Madison knew as well:
Federalist, no. 39
James Madison
16 Jan. 1788
That it will be a federal and not a national act, as these terms are understood by the objectors, the act of the people as forming so many independent States, not as forming one aggregate nation, is obvious from this single consideration that it is to result neither from the decision of a majority of the people of the Union, nor from that of a majority of the States. It must result from the unanimous assent of the several States that are parties to it, differing no other wise from their ordinary assent than in its being expressed, not by the legislative authority, but by that of the people themselves. Were the people regarded in this transaction as forming one nation, the will of the majority of the whole people of the United States, would bind the minority; in the same manner as the majority in each State must bind the minority; and the will of the majority must be determined either by a comparison of the individual votes; or by considering the will of a majority of the States, as evidence of the will of a majority of the people of the United States. Neither of these rules has been adopted. Each State in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation then the new Constitution will, if established, be a federal and not a national Constitution.
But that is precisely the Federalist number I was thinking of, when I said that posting things will get you nowhere with the people who've drunk from the Kool-Aid proferred by Harry Jaffa and the latterday defenders of the myth cobbled up by Lincoln's inner circle after the War.
Whose biographies, no less a partisan than Mark Neely on the other side has ventured to say, have not yet been written.
Now why do you suppose that so many highly influential, even dispositive, personalities as the people who surrounded Lincoln during his campaign for the nomination in 1860 and his years helping organize the Republican Party in the West in the years immediately prior, who bulked tall and wide in Illinois and even national politics during Lincoln's administration and afterward, never got their definitive scholarly biographies written, in the course of 150 years?
Why do you suppose that so stalwart, so thick a pillar of Lincolnism as Salmon P. Chase, whom Lincoln put on the Supreme Court precisely to write the fictitious "opinion" of the Court in the Texas vs. White case that declared the acts of the People null and void during the Recent Unpleasantness, if they ran counter to the will of Lincoln and his faction, never got HIS official, scholarly, detailed and dispositive biography written? And he a Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, author of so many Imperial rescripts -- ah, excuse me, I meant "landmark opinions of the Court"?
Inquiring minds want to know why is there this big void, this hole, this abcess around Lincoln the politician and his political friends and operatives.