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Show sovereign and his right as "King in Council" to decide controversies between them.9 Their declaration of independence was joint, but in it each asserted its own separate national existence in full sovereignty, with all the powers that any other nation on earth then possessed* In the treaty of peace at the close of the Revolutionary War the British sovereign acknowledged each of the colonies by name to be a free, sovereign and independent State; and that treaty dealt with them, jointly as united states only because of the alliance they had previously contracted by the Articles of Confederation declaring that ". . . the stile of this confederacy shall be The United States of America." The colonies were as independent of each other as the Germanic States after their recognition as sovereignties by the Peace of Westphalia in l648; and as free from, the control of any superior authority as the members of the League of Nations today,10 The independent national existence of each of the thirteen former English colonies after its separation from the British Empire and until its entry into the American Union is, perhaps, the most significant and far- reaching fact in the constitutional history of the United States. For that fact fixed the status of the Union and of each of its members in the creation of a federal sovereignty with supreme power handed up to it in limited amount; from voluntarily submerged sovereign States; reversing the usual course of constitutional history in which delegated sovereignty had always been handed down from above but never before projected up from below striking than the quick acceptance of 'the United States of America as one of the sisterhood of nations. . • . Still greater was the triumph of the treaty of peace in 1782, which was in essence a partition of sovereignty in America between Great Britain, Spain and the United States." Controversies between the colonies, prior to their declaration of inde- pendence in 1776, were subject to determination by the King in Council at the request of one or more of the colonies involved in any such controversy. See Colony of Rhode Island v. Colony of Connecticut, 3 Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial Series, 10 (1727), 3 Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial Series, 436 (1746); Penn v. Lord Baltimore, Ridgeway temp. Hardwicke, 333 27 Eng. Reprint, 847 (1745), 1 Ves. Sr. 444, 27 Eng. Reprint, 1132 (1750), Ves. Sr. Supp. 194., 28 Eng. Reprint, 498 (1750). Under the Articles of Confederation, the decision of such controversies could be made by Congress as then constituted. Pennsylvania v, Connecticut, 131 U.S. (Appendix) 1-lxiii. "in our case, the concurrence of thirteen distinct sovereign wills is recuisite under the Confederation, to the complete execution of every important measure, that proceeds from the Union."--Alexander Hamilton in IJd']s The Fed- eralist, Scott's ed., 87» James Brown Scott, Sovereign States and Suits, c. 2, pp. 35~8O, has collected and arranged the authorities so as to demonstrate, as conclusively as anything can be proven by contemporary history, that the thirteen states were thirteen nations in international la.w from July I4., 177&* until the adoption of the federal constitution in 1789* Under the Articles of Confederation they were only a loose league of nations. The greatest restraint imposed by the Articles of Confederation was the agreement of the States not to contract foreign alliances; and this was no more than the restraint imposed upon the Germanic States which agreed at th« Congress of Westphalia to refrain from forming alliances against the Emperor although they were each expressly recognized as independent sovereignties by |