Rawle's writings would have seem to those men to have re-enforced the concept that the individual states were the building block of Government. That the United States was the Union of equally autonomous individual states governed as non intrusively as possible by a legislative body made of elected repersentation.

This government not withstanding, it was felt that the final power rested with the state not the central government. This idea goes back to the Article of Confederation, and before that to the Continental Congress where each of the thirteen Colonies highly prized their independence of the other Colonies.

So Rawle's concepts were not radical for that period of time.