07-04-2015, 09:47 PM
|
|
Registered Member
|
|
Join Date: Jun 2011
Posts: 10,073
|
|
|
The States are nations
It's amazing what one will find if they crack a book....
It's amazing what one will find when he will pick up a history book...
Quote:
Also, on the international level under the Law of Nations, each nation-State became vested with "territorial sovereignty" (title and dominion) to the lands and waters within its borders. As cited in the arguments of Martin v. Waddell's Lessee, 41 U.S. 367 (1842):
Quote:
|
"The laws of nature and nations establish the following propositions, pertinent to this question: 1. Every nation is the proprietor as well of the rivers and seas as of the lands within its territorial limits. Vattel 120, 266...."
|
As stated by Justice Taney in Martin v. Waddell's Lessee:
Quote:
|
"...For when the revolution took place, the people of each state became themselves sovereign; and in that character hold the absolute right to all their navigable waters, and the soils under them, for their own common use, subject only to the rights since surrendered by the constitution to the general government...."
|
Eventually, in the 1783 "Treaty of Paris," England recognized the separate political and territorial sovereignty of each individual State:
Quote:
|
Article 1: "His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and independent states, that he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs, and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety, and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof.
|
"
The treaty itself was ratified by several states separately from the Congress, and in New Hampshire it was ratified by individual towns. (Ref.: Forrest McDonald, E Pluribus Unum, Liberty Fund, c 1965.)
A later Supreme Court decision in M'Llvaine v. Coxe's Lessee, 4 Cranch 209 (1808), held that this Treaty only had the effect of establishing the recognition of one country to the sovereignty of the States, which had actually existed since their independence in 1776:
Quote:
|
"This opinion is predicated upon a principle which is believed to be undeniable, that the several states which composed this Union, so far at least as regarded their municipal regulations, became entitled, from the time when they declared themselves independent, to all the rights and powers of sovereign states, and that they did not derive them from concessions made by the British King. The treaty of peace contains a recognition of their independence, not a grant of it. From hence it results, that the laws of the several state governments were the laws of sovereign states, and as such were obligatory upon the people of such state, from the time they were enacted." at 212
|
.
|
|
Threaded Mode
