Put simply, Madison recognized that the Constitution would have stood no chance whatsoever of being ratified if his radical vision of unequivocal federal sovereignty had prevailed. And this recognition then led him to a counterintuitive insight every bit as provocative as his argument for the greater stability of a large or extended republic; namely, there was no single source of sovereignty in the new Constitution. What he had initially regarded as the great failure at the Constitutional Convention—the coexistence of federal and state claims to authority—was, albeit inadvertently, in fact the
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