The question whether the States ever had individual sovereignty arose in the convention chosen for deciding on the ratification of the Constitution, and General Charles C. Pinckney[54] insisted that our independence came from the Declaration of Independence made by the Congress of the Confederacy, wherein in the name of the good people of these colonies we were declared free and independent States. The separate independence and individual sovereignty of the several States was never thought of, not even mentioned by name in any part of it. The same objection in South Carolina as in other States to the Constitution as destructive of liberty was made. James Lincoln, a delegate from Ninety-six, said: “From a democratic you are rushing into an aristocratic government. Liberty! what is liberty? The power of governing yourselves. If you adopt this Constitution have you this power? No; you give it into the hands of a set of men who live one thousand miles distant from you.”[55] [54] 4 Elliot, 301. [55] 4 Elliot, 313. The objections to the Constitution came very generally from the interior western parts of the State. They were so in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York. The words of ratification of the States are also conclusive on these points. We will take the three important States whose acceptance was for a long time doubtful. Massachusetts in her pious and reverential ratification used the word compact, which numerous Southern writers, Davis, Stephens, and others, bring up as proof that Massachusetts considered the Constitution a mere confederacy and not a government. To refute this it is but necessary to give the very words used: “The Convention, acknowledging with grateful hearts the goodness of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe in affording the people of the United States, in the course of his providence, an opportunity deliberately and peaceably without fraud or surprise of entering into an explicit and solemn compact with each other, by assenting to and ratifying a new constitution in order to form a more perfect union, ... do, in the name and behalf of the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, assent to and ratify the said Constitution for the United States of America.” It is _the people of the United States_, not the States, nor the people of the State of Massachusetts, that enter into this explicit and solemn compact with each other for a more perfect union. As we have said before, a compact may be for a national government or for a confederacy. If the convention understood that it was States making a confederacy, they would have said the people of the State, and not the people of the United States. We come next to Virginia’s acceptance of the Constitution, which, to Calhoun’s peculiar mind, was “a conditional one.” “A condition made in the interest of all the States, and of which any State could avail.”