The founders conceived sovereignty as per-state, not national

Evidence

Even though Adams, Washington, and other patriot leaders believed that only the thirteen united colonies acting together through Congress should declare independence, they nevertheless viewed each colony as a separate political entity under the British Crown that would gain sovereignty with independence. Somewhat like England and Scotland before the Acts of Union in 1707 or a Swiss canton in federal union, they supposed that each colony would become an independent state with the Continental Congress or a successor confederation serving as a league of allied states overseeing such shared matters as foreign policy and the collective defense. Each of these autonomous states would need a republican constitution to replace its old charter, they agreed, because each would pass from having a government directly or indirectly under the Crown to one under the people with officers pledging to defend their constitution rather than the king. As Adams, Jefferson, and others then understood the term, republicanism meant that sovereignty rested in some sense in the people rather than a monarch, aristocracy, or institution, and that some form of representative authority held ultimate power. — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 161

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘republicanism’ exactly as the founders of 1776 used it — sovereignty in the people via representatives.
• XREF: Frames the Confederation-to-Constitution question and state-sovereignty debates that dominate later constitutional law and the course’s own periodization. — connects to: State sovereignty is constituted by the nation-state system, not prior to it — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 172; The word ‘nation’ entered US founding texts only in 1789 — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 283; The debate arose over the fundamental question of the source of federal sovereignty. Did the Union derive its authority from the states, or the people acting through the states, or the people acting directly, or from its predecessor (the Confederation or the British Crown)? Historians have drawn the connection between the Republican and Federalist sides of this debate to the older Country and Court parties of eighteenth-century English politics, but it is Powell who, with characteristic legal insight, links this debate with the choice of constitutional interpretive modes. Republican partisans campaigned for a stringently textual approach to constitutional interpretation, construing grants of congressional authority narrowly vis-à-vis the states and more broadly against the Executive.
• DEEPTHINKING: Shows that ‘united we stand’ and ‘separate sovereign states’ coexisted in the same minds without contradiction — a subtle political-constitutional idea worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• State sovereignty is constituted by the nation-state system, not prior to it #contradicts (0.90) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 172
• The debate arose over the fundamental question of the source of federal sovereignty. Did the Union derive its authority from the states, or the people acting through the states, or the people… #expands (0.85)
• The word ‘nation’ entered US founding texts only in 1789 #expands (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 283