If we again turn our minds upon those later days of 1776, we find that the Americans, through the direct action of the people in each independent nation, had become respectively citizens of what we now know as their respective states, each of which was then a free nation. Those thirteen nations were then allied in war. There did not yet exist even that political entity, later created and known as a federation of those nations. At that time and until quite some years after the Revolution had ended, there was no such thing as a “citizen” of America, because the America we know, the organized human membership society which is the American nation, did not yet exist. At that time and until the American nation did actually exist, as a political entity, there was no government in the world and no collection of governments in the world, which, on any subject or to any extent, could interfere _generally_ with the individual freedom of Americans, _as_ Americans. In each of the thirteen American nations, the citizens of that nation had vested their own government with some ability _of that kind_. At this point, it is well to digress for a moment in order that we may well understand that in none of these thirteen nations did its citizens vest in its government an _unlimited_ ability to interfere with individual freedom. All the citizens of those respective nations were then battling with a mighty Government which claimed such unlimited ability over all of them, as subjects, and they were battling to establish forever in America the basic doctrine that no government of free men could ever have unlimited ability of that kind. In each of the thirteen nations, its citizens vested its government with ability _of that kind only_ to a limited extent. They did this in strict conformity to republican principles.