“But this is not all. The Supreme Court of the United States may declare null and void any law or any clause of the constitution of a State which happens to be in conflict with the Constitution and laws of the United States. Again, the States appear as plaintiffs and defendants before the Supreme Court of the United States. They may sue each other; and, until the Eleventh Amendment was adopted, a citizen might sue a State. These ‘sovereigns’ may all be summoned before their common superior to be judged. And yet they are endowed with supreme inherent sovereignty! “Again, the government of a State may be absolutely abolished by Congress, in case it is not republican in form. And, finally, to cap the climax of this absurd pretension, every right possessed by one of these ‘sovereign’ States, every inherent sovereign right, except the single right to equal representation in the Senate, may be taken away, without its consent, by the vote of two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the States. But, in spite of all these disabilities, we hear them paraded as independent, sovereign States, the creators of the Union and the dictators of its powers. How inherently ‘sovereign’ must be that State west of the Mississippi which the Nation bought and paid for with the public money, and permitted to come into the Union a half century after the Constitution was adopted! And yet we are told that the States are inherently sovereign and created the National Government. “The dogma of State Sovereignty in alliance with chattel slavery made its appeal to that court of last resort where the laws are silent, and where kings and nations appear in arms for judgment. In that awful court of war two questions were tried: Shall slavery live? And is a State so sovereign that it may nullify the laws and destroy the Union? These two questions were tried on the thousand battle-fields of the war; and if war ever ‘legislates,’ as a leading Democrat of Ohio once wisely affirmed, then our war legislated finally upon those subjects, and determined, beyond all controversy, that slavery should never again live in this Republic, and that there is not sovereignty enough in any State to authorize its people either to destroy the Union or nullify its laws.”