The states under the Confederation, during the Revolutionary period and later, were actually sovereign. The Articles of Confederation declared them to be so. When the Constitution was formed, the habit of state sovereignty was so strong that it was only with the greatest difficulty that its ratification by the requisite number of states could be obtained. John Quincy Adams said that it was "extorted from the grinding necessity of a reluctant people." The instrument itself provided a common tribunal (the Supreme Court) as arbiter for the decision of all disputed questions arising under the Constitution and laws of the United States. But it was not generally supposed that the jurisdiction of the court included the power to extinguish state sovereignty.[1] The first division of political parties under the new government was the outgrowth of emotions stirred by the French Revolution. The Republicans of the period, led by Jefferson, were ardent sympathizers with the uprising in France. The Federalists, who counted Washington, Hamilton, and John Adams as their representative men, were opposed to any connection with European strife, or to any fresh embroilment with England, growing out of it. The Alien and Sedition Laws were passed in order to suppress agitation tending to produce such embroilment. Jefferson met these laws with the "Resolutions of '98," which were adopted by the legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky. These resolutions affirmed the right of the separate states to judge of any infraction of the Constitution by the Federal Government and also of the mode and measure of redress--a claim which necessarily included the right to secede from the Union if milder measures failed. The Alien and Sedition Laws expired by their own limitation before any actual test of their validity took place. The next assertion of the right of the states to nullify the acts of the Federal Government came from a more northern latitude as a consequence of the purchase of Louisiana. This act alarmed the New England States. The Federalists feared lest the acquisition of this vast domain should give the South a perpetual preponderance and control of the Government. Since there was no clause in the Constitution providing for the acquisition of new territory (as President Jefferson himself conceded), they affirmed that the Union was a partnership and that a new partner could not be taken in without the consent of all the old ones, and that the taking in of a new one without such consent would release the old ones.