<P> Others have taken the position that the federal government is not a compact among the states, but instead was formed directly by the people, in their exercise of their sovereign power . The people determined that the federal government should be superior to the states . Under this view, the states, which are not parties to the Constitution, do not have the right to determine for themselves the proper scope of federal authority, but instead are bound by the determinations of the federal government . The state of Vermont took this position in response to the Kentucky Resolutions . Daniel Webster advocated this view in his debate with Robert Hayne in the Senate in 1830: </P> <P> (I) t cannot be shown, that the Constitution is a compact between State governments . The Constitution itself, in its very front, refutes that idea; it, declares that it is ordained and established by the people of the United States . So far from saying that it is established by the governments of the several States, it does not even say that it is established by the people of the several States; but it pronounces that it is established by the people of the United States, in the aggregate...When the gentleman says the Constitution is a compact between the States, he uses language exactly applicable to the old Confederation . He speaks as if he were in Congress before 1789 . He describes fully that old state of things then existing . The Confederation was, in strictness, a compact; the States, as States, were parties to it . We had no other general government . But that was found insufficient, and inadequate to the public exigencies . The people were not satisfied with it, and undertook to establish a better . They undertook to form a general government, which should stand on a new basis; not a confederacy, not a league, not a compact between States, but a Constitution; a popular government, founded in popular election, directly responsible to the people themselves, and divided into branches with prescribed limits of power, and prescribed duties . They ordained such a government, they gave it the name of a Constitution, therein they established a distribution of powers between this, their general government, and their several State governments . </P> <P> The leading nineteenth century commentary on the Constitution, Justice Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833), likewise rejected the compact theory, concluding that the Constitution was established directly by the people, not by the states, and that it constitutes supreme law, not a mere compact . </P> <P> In the years before the Civil War, the compact theory was used by southern states to argue that they had a right to nullify federal law and to secede from the union . For example, during the Nullification Crisis of 1828 - 1832, John C. Calhoun argued in his South Carolina Exposition and Protest that the states, as the parties to a compact, had the right to judge for themselves whether the terms of the compact were being honored . Calhoun described this "right of judging" as "an essential attribute of sovereignty," which the states retained when the Constitution was formed . Calhoun said the states had the right to nullify, or veto, any laws that were inconsistent with the compact . </P>

Was the compact as is often claimed the first american constitution