Whether or not the Constitution was ratified by a consolidated American people in aggregate or by the people of the several states has been a point of contention for a considerable time. The nationalist theory of Webster-Story-Lincoln contended that an elusive amalgamated American people in the abstract ratified the Constitution, and not the States as sovereign political societies. Nonetheless, most of the founding generation took it for granted that it was the peoples in their corporate capacities of their respective states that ratified the Constitution.