Before the American Revolution, European political thought held that sovreignty — ie ultimate power to rule — was believed to always rest with one individual or body. In France, that was the king. In Great Britain, with Parliament. Even after the revolution in America, final sovreignty was believed to reside in the state legislatures. Americans did not believe sovreignty rested with the state governor, distrusted as every executive was after the tyrannies of King George III, and certainty not with the deliberately weak Congress created under the Articles of Confederation.
The Federalist and Anti-Federalist debates after 1787 over the newly proposed constitution changed the conception of sovreignty. Anti-Federalists argued that the newly created Congress would become tyrannical to control the heterogenous American population. Inevitably the United States would become a single, consolidated state because sovreignty would rest with the federal government. It was impossible for states and the federal government to share sovreignty. The Anti-Federalists eloquently summed it up: “We will find it impossible to serve two masters.” The Federalists disagreed. Sovreignty could not be taken from the states, they said, because it did not come from the states. Sovreignty rested with the people. As historian Gordon S. Wood put it, “It marked one of the most creative moments in the history of political thought.”
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