Chauncey Samuel Boucher

“ The Mercury denounced this as a mean artifice to help John Quincy Adams, and, after disavowing disunion, gave Jackson warm praise, in sharp contrast with its bitter censures a few years later.
If there is a man in the United States whose whole soul is devoted to his country, and who would esteem no sacrifice too great for the preservation of her liberty, that man is Andrew Jackson. ... If any individual can preserve the Union; if any one man can compose the agitated waves which threaten to engulf us, he is that man. To him the people look emphatically as their last, sole hope. ”

“ If a one-fourth vote could be obtained against a law, it would be void. Thus the power of legislation as well as that of making and construing the Constitution would be vested in no less a number than three-fourths of the states. If this ever came to pass, the Union men cared not how soon a dissolution of the Union might follow, for they too held it to be the right of a people to revolutionize their government when evils were insufferable. ”

“ We propose to fight against them both in all constitutional ways and with all constitutional energy. We propose to urge against them every argument that can be mustered. We propose to give every vote against them which the Constitution allows us to send into the national legislature. And finally, we propose when this kind of opposition proves unavailing, to ask the people of South Carolina whether they prefer secession to a longer continuance in the confederacy, and if they answer in the affirmative, to go with them and die in the last ditch! ”

“ And yet the State Rights men continually argued that the cry of war and bloodshed as a result of nullification was all beside the mark, for nullification as a remedy had been contemplated and purposely left available by the framers of the Constitution, and it was one that would procure the redress of grievances easily and peaceably. The use of force to bring a nullifying state into subjection to the general government seemed to them a usurpation too flagrant to be worthy of contemplation. ”

“ It was no argument to say that some laws could not be called unconstitutional; for men when prompted by passion and interest would see everything through jaundiced eyes. The plainest and most positive gifts of power would be doubted and misunderstood. It seemed to the Union men beyond the possibility of a doubt that this power of nullification would make for an infinitely weaker government than that which had existed under the Articles of Confederation. The only parallel for such a union was to be found in this country during the Revolutionary war. ”

“ Must their judges take it for granted when anything be done in convention of the people repugnant to the Constitution of the United States, that the declaration of the supremacy of that instrument over state laws and constitutions, and the oath in confirmation of it, are impliedly annulled? Until this be shown, all that is contended for may be safely granted without bringing the advocates of state sovereignty any nearer to the conclusion that, holding allegiance to that sovereignity, they may not set aside an ordinance of a convention equally with an act of the legislature. ”

“ If the people of the state had no right in convention to sit in judgment on the tariff and to enforce that judgment within their own limits, then the people were to be pitied and South Carolina was "a mere petty corporation, without power or authority, a mere footstool of the federal government."
The citizens of South Carolina owed no allegiance to any government on earth which was at all incompatible with that which they owed to the state. He who committed treason, therefore, would be he who opposed the state and sided with the government with which she was contending ”

“ We have shaken the tariff system more than a thousand remonstrances and petitions and protests. Their columns are giving way, there is confusion in their lines; and if we are now true to ourselves, they will be scattered to the winds. The vigorous proceedings of our constituted authorities has struck terror into our oppressors, and the spirit of the people bursting out in all quarters has written their destiny on the wall in characters too plain to require a Daniel for their interpretation. ”

“ No one denied the right of a state to require of its citizens an oath of fidelity, and there was not a Union man in South Carolina who woidd not readily swear or affirm, after the form of the Massachusetts oath, "I, A. B., do solemnly swear, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the commonwealth of South Carolina, and will support the constitution thereof, so help me God." If this state, even after the passage of her ordinance of nullification, had required such an oath from her citizens, the Union editors saw no reason why it should not have been cheerfully taken by all. ”

“ The tariff was not an arbitrary, uncalled-for interference of the government, but an institution arising from a combination of circumstances which could not be well overlooked by a vigilant and paternal government striving to assist the laudable aims of one part of the community without imposing any sacrifice upon another. Neither would it in its remote, any more than in its immediate, effects result in injustice or oppression to the consumers of the South. There were certain classes in the North whom it would affect indeed far more than it would the South. ”

“ Congress have power to admit new states into the Union; under territorial governments these [are] bound by the laws of the Union; new states cannot force themselves into the Union; but the moment they are admitted, they have a right to secede and destroy the confederation and the Union with it. The Virginia doctrine brings me in mind of a bag of sand with both ends opened; the moment the least pressure is upon it, the sand flows out at each end. The absurdity is too great to be dwelt on. The people of Virginia are sound. ”

“ The purchase of Louisiana and the establishment of the National Bank were more glaring infractions of the Constitution than the encouragement of manufactures by protective duties. The Alien and Sedition laws were infinitely more alarming and more odious to the feelings of freemen than any measures Congress had passed before or since. And yet these oppressive and unconstitutional acts of the general government had been submitted to by the people of South Carolina with no thought of disunion or nullification. ”

“ But by far the greater number of those opposed to a convention were men who hated the tariff but loved the Union and South Carolina enough to wish to avoid any measure which might endanger either. They believed that if a convention were called, it must, as Judge William Harper said, if it acted at all, nullify the laws of Congress; they quoted Colonel William Drayton to the effect that nullification meant disunion, and Langdon Cheves's opinion that a convention must assume "revolutionary vigor." All this, they said, meant that South Carolina was to revolt alone against the United States ”

“ The friends of nullification might say what they pleased, but the exercise of this veto power by the states, with the right of an appeal to a federal convention, was nothing more nor less than taking all power out of the hands of the majority and putting it into those of the minority. It was in fact the establishment of an aristocracy of the very worst kind. The majority, indeed almost three-fourths of the people, would be governed by one-fourth. ”

“ The Nullifiers were warned that the Union men would no longer tamely submit to the tyranny of being excluded from office because they would not swear to the truth of nullification. The Union men continually endeavored to make it clear that they did not object to a mere oath of allegiance to the state, but only to an oath of allegiance clothed in language which amounted to a denial of their federal obligations. ”

“ The governor recommended that the legislature raise an army of 12,000 men, to be called the "State Guard." This the Union men said would be a standing army, dangerous to the liberties of the people—the first step toward the establishment of a military despotism. The governor would go even farther than the proscription of Union men from office by the "test oath," for he recommended a "bill of pains and penalties" to be enforced upon those who should disobey the ordinance, and an "act of treason" to apply to those who should raise their hands in defense of the Union. ”

“ The Union editors pointed out that such statements meant either that the leading Nullifiers were to keep up the excitement and "the fudge and flummery" of military display for petty party reasons and to keep themselves prominent, or that they contemplated secession at a later date. The entire program of the Nullification party seemed to the Union men to be one displaying the most insolent tyranny—"outrageous, bare-faced, premeditated and insupportable tyranny" of a "gang of desperadoes." ”

“ In fact, the weight of authority seemed to be in favor of the constitutionality of the tariff acts; yet it was solely upon the ground of their being palpably unconstitutional that the right to nullify them was maintained in South Carolina. Surely the question of constitutionality must be admitted to be open to debate; then the State Rights party was wrong in asserting the right of nullification, since it based its contention on the construction of a doubtful clause. Such were the arguments of the Union party. ”

“ During January the President was often informed of the trend of affairs in South Carolina, and he became ever more convinced of the necessity of prompt and effective measures. "The modern doctrine of nullification and secession [must be] put down forever, for we have yet to learn whether some of the eastern states may not secede or nullify if the tariff is reduced. I have to look at both ends of the Union to preserve it." He must, he declared, at once ask Congress to give the United States officers power sufficient to thwart the Nullifiers. ”

“ The editor repeated the usual story of South Carolina's wrongs and sufferings in the Union, [20] and added:
Such is the gloomy picture which is artfully drawn to excite popular frenzy to an act of irretrievable desperation. A measure of the general government (to say the worst of it) of doubtful policy is thus worked up into the most horrid phantom which can disturb the vision of freemen; and over their terrified imagination a demoniac sorcery is thus exercised to lead them into crime and to tempt them to their destruction. ”

“ To Drayton's assertion that a government whose acts were not obligatory on its citizens would be a strange anomaly, it was answered that a government whose every act was obligatory on its citizens would be much more dangerous, if not equally anomalous; the peculiarly happy feature of our government was, it was said, that to resist the unconstitutional and oppressive abuses of power was not rebellion nor revolution, as in other governments, because of the possible intervention of the state veto. ”

“ The Union party would be ever ready to swear all allegiance and yield all obedience to the state consistent with the federal Constitution, but no lure of office, no fear of martyrdom would induce its adherents to assume an obligation of even doubtful import, exacted by the dominant party as a political test which might bring suspicion upon their motives and principles. ”

“ It appeared to him that many members of the legislature who voted against the calling of a convention were not against that measure upon principle, but were merely averse to it at that time, and that the addition of their group to those who favored the immediate call would have made a constitutional majority. [16] The Union presses, however, continuing to keep up a bold front, answered the Nullifiers now with argument, now with irony and sarcasm. Each party, thinking that nothing succeeds like success, claimed that it was in the ascendant and that the other was dead or dying. ”

“ He tried to show that the South and South Carolina were not subjected to all the intolerable load of injury and injustice which had been urged as the motive for separation. The subject of the tariff had unfortunately become very much involved; what with pamphlets, speeches, memorials, reports, and resolutions, the mass of argument had become so enormous that men were taking their opinions at second hand; they would rather expose themselves to error and imposition than undertake the intolerable work of wading through such oceans of ink. ”

“ A leading Union editor said that the howlings of many of the publications, in different parts of the state, about the American system, internal improvements, tariff, and northern manufactures ought to be regarded as a mere hoax, trumped up by a few artful, designing, though disappointed politicians, who were willing to sacrifice the interests of their fellow-citizens and to jeopardize the state for the sake of their own personal aggrandizement, "to gratify an unhallowed ambition, a fiendish lust of power." ”

“ Among the convention supporters there came to be quite a number of Union men who thought that a convention might be beneficial in showing the North that the opposition was not a mere factious one, and that it could protest against the tariff more effectively than could the legislature, even though its only weapon should be the same — resolutions. ”