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I'd say that in "the several", the word "the" modifies the meaning of "several" to emphasize that they are disjoint and to some degree independent, while not restricting their number.

In this case, 'several' is part of a larger grammatical context: 'the several States'.

It's likely that modern interpretation extends the intent to the obvious meaning 'the collection of States (that are part of the country)'. More modern math and logic terms might not have been in wide use at the time, and a 'group' of states sounds inherently ill defined. 'The States of the United States' just sounds silly.

Several historically and often still legally is closer semantically to “individual” than “a few”.

For example, contracts concluded between multiple parties often include terminology like “jointly and severally”.

The term “several” shares its roots with “sever”, and means essentially “unlinked”.