Alexander Hill Everett

“ Thus the Supreme Being is the highest of all beings: the Supreme Court is the highest of all the Courts: the Sovereign power in a State is the highest political authority. But States, being as such politically independent of each other, cannot in the nature of things stand towards each other in the relation of superiority or inferiority, and can of course be neither sovereign nor subject. ”

“ Now, the right of the States to annul at discretion the acts of the General Government is not only not anarchy itself, but is the simplest and most beautiful part of the whole machinery of our political institutions. ”

“ What is the business of every body is the business of nobody. Shall it be the President? The Constitution makes it the duty of the President to recommend from time to time to the consideration of Congress such measures, as he shall judge necessary and expedient. But the President, by the supposition, believes that the General Government already possess the power in question. It is impossible, therefore, that he should recommend to Congress to propose an amendment conferring this power. For the same reason, the proposition cannot be made in Congress by a member of the majority of either House. ”

“ Is it not obvious that the agent, who is supposed to be in fault, is the very last person who can be depended on to bring the question before the tribunal which is to decide upon it? Is it reasonable to expect that he will intermeddle in a matter in which he has really no concern, for the mere purpose of denouncing himself as a usurper of power, not granted by his commission? ”

“ The question, therefore, is not whether we shall maintain the Union, which must at all events exist, but whether we shall maintain our present republican institutions, or exchange them, after an intervening period of anarchy and civil war, for a Government of a different, probably an arbitrary character. The crisis, we repeat, though as little alarming as any one of the kind that could well be imagined, is nevertheless fraught with painful interest. ”

“ The precise problem, as we understand it, is not whether the Union shall be preserved, but whether the Union shall be preserved under our present mild and beneficent system of polity, or whether, after a temporary dissolution of the bonds that now unite us,—we shall be brought together again into a new body politic, consolidated by the iron bands of military power. ”

“ But admitting even that, in private affairs, a principal has an unlimited right to construe the powers and disavow the acts of his agent, we cannot agree with the Vice-President, that it is impossible to assign a reason why any single State has not an equally good right to annul at discretion the acts of the General Government. ”

“ The repeal of a law is as much an exercise of legislative power as the enactment of it, and from its very nature cannot be performed, unless by some person or persons invested with that power, in other words, by the Government. To assert the contrary, is in substance to assert that the same person can be sovereign and subject, or in a free State, in and out of office, at one and the same time. ”

“ The author,—no less a person than the Vice-President of the United States,—has placed himself at the head of an enterprise, which, according to the degree of purity and singleness of heart with which he engages in it, must be regarded as in him the noblest exercise of patriotism, or the highest offence known to the law. Such is the individual, whom we find under such circumstances resorting for his justification to a sort of language, which, in ordinary cases, would be received as the obvious resource and undoubted evidence of insincerity. ”

“ Why, at the same period, and under nearly similar circumstances, some communities should be active, virtuous, civilized, prosperous and free, while others are roaming through the woods in the untamed wildness of barbarism, or bowing down like beasts of burden under the yoke of a taskmaster,—why the metropolis of civilization is to be found in one age upon the banks of the Ganges, the Euphrates or the Nile, and in another upon those of the Tiber, the Thames, or the Potomac; are questions, which philosophy has not yet brought to a quite satisfactory solution. ”

“ Before the adoption of the Constitution no power could be exercised over a State without its own consent. Now, by the admission of Mr. Calhoun, the United States can exercise unlimited power over a State without its own consent. This is indeed a most important modification of the sovereignty of the State. ”

“ But a proposition to amend the Constitution or any act performed in the ordinary exercise of the Legislative power, must be, from its nature, the result of the free and conscientious judgment of the President and a majority of the two Houses of Congress upon its merits; and it is impossible that it can be their duty, in any case, to decide in favor of a particular measure without reference to its merits, when their own free and conscientious judgment upon its merits is the precise and only rule which they are bound to follow, in the decision of every question that is brought before them. ”

“ The nullifiers, we repeat, scarcely attempt to reconcile their full and express admissions, that the Constitution is a social compact, by which the States have formed themselves into a body politic under a common Government, which body politic possesses, under the amending clause, an unlimited power over the political condition of its members, with the assertion, openly and obviously inconsistent with these admissions, that each State still retains its independence and sovereignty entire and unimpaired. ”

“ We find, accordingly, that in the Declaration of Independence,—a document remarkable throughout for great propriety in the use of language,—although it was once quoted by Governor Hamilton, on some public occasion, as saying that the United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free, sovereign and independent States, the word sovereign is not employed. The language used is that the colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States. As applied to States, the word sovereign, if it have any meaning at all, can only mean independent. ”

“ The European nations have all arrived through centuries of carnage and confusion at their present condition; they are still tending violently to a more complete union, which, after other centuries of carnage and confusion, they will ultimately reach. It has been our blessed fortune to begin where they have ended or are likely to end; to grow up from the hour of our political birth, in those happy bonds of fraternal kindness, which have been forced upon all other great nations by a long experience of the sorest evils. ”

“ Not content with obtaining for each of and all the States a full representation, on the principle both of the absolute and concurring majorities,—the very thing which he professes to wish for,—he insists that each shall have in addition for itself a right to break the law, which it has itself concurred in making:—that each State, after co-operating by its presence in imposing upon the other States the obligations resulting from a law, has a right to exempt itself by its own separate act from bearing its own share of these burdens ”

“ When we look back to the handful of obscure adventurers and persecuted outcasts who formed our small beginnings, and compare their humble dwellings, scattered thinly along the coast, with the great and flourishing empire that now stretches in pride and beauty far and wide over half the continent, we cannot but feel that the history of the world offers no example, in any way parallel, of a rapid and extensive development of all the elements of national prosperity. ”

“ But when the crisis is actually upon us,—when the hour of danger has come, and many good and wise men are perhaps too prone to despond, and even despair of the Republic, it may then be well to remind them and ourselves, that if the trial is likely to be severe, our political Constitution, as we have reason to hope, is strong enough to enable us, with the favor of Providence, to go through this and many other trials of equal severity, should it be our fortune to encounter them, with safety. ”

“ The abandonment by the General Government of the power to pass the act complained of by the nullifying State is therefore a thing in itself entirely impracticable. Even the omnipotent Parliament of England, which, according to Lord Coke, can do any thing but convert a man into a woman, could not repeal a law which was sustained by a majority of its members; nor could even the hereditary executive power of England or any other constitutional monarchy suspend for a moment the execution of a law, which is still in force. ”

“ If, with taxes as light and as little felt as those which we now pay, we are able to defray the ordinary charges of the Government,—sustain the public credit,—meet the exigencies of foreign and civil war when they occur, and pay off the debts they impose upon us in time of peace, we shall do more,—far more,—than any other nation of ancient or modern times has done before us. ”

“ The duty, such as it is, of making the proposition, might no doubt be performed by some member of the minority of one of the two branches. But how are the majority to vote for a proposition which they do not approve? How is the President to approve a law which he does not approve? Individuals occasionally support or oppose measures for particular reasons, which have no reference to their own [Pg 11] opinion upon their merits; but in arguing on general principles, it must of course be assumed that the members of the Government can only act on principle. ”

“ Calhoun, that of the two heresies to which he alludes, the greater includes and supposes the less:—that it would be inconsistent for any one, who admits the right of nullifying at once, by secession, the Constitution and all the laws, to deny the right of nullifying one; but we utterly deny that either can be reconciled with the letter or spirit of the Constitution. The social compact,—like the contract of marriage,—is one in which the parties take each other for better or worse, for sickness or health, for life and for death. ”

“ Is it in fact to be endured, that men of talents, reputation, commanding stations in society, shall denounce as inexpedient, unconstitutional, intolerably oppressive, as furnishing legitimate motives for resistance, measures, which not ten years ago they openly supported, nay, themselves originated and pressed upon the country? That they shall claim and insist upon, as their dearest and most essential rights, pretensions, which not ten years ago they denounced as chimerical, unconstitutional, anarchical, involving in practice the destruction of all government? ”

“ Before an abstract principle, however plausible it may appear, can be safely adopted as a basis of action in important matters, whether public or private, it must for a long time be canvassed, examined, opposed and defended, until it is finally admitted into the number of acknowledged and popular truths. We find, accordingly, that in the British Parliament, which affords the most illustrious example of deliberative legislation, no appeal is ever made to abstract principles, even such as are generally admitted. The argument turns entirely upon precedent and plain common sense. ”

“ The ports of Carolina would be free, and the country would be deluged through them, with foreign goods imported without duties. The revenue would fall off to nothing; the manufactures would all be destroyed; the public credit would cease, and the public service come to a stand for want of funds; a general bankruptcy of private fortunes would overspread the country, and the body politic would fall into a state of complete dissolution. ”

“ Indeed the supposition that it can in any case be the duty of one or more individuals to do an act which, if done by them at all, must be done in pursuance of their own free and unbiased belief in its expediency, is so obviously incongruous, that we really wonder how an acute logician, as the Vice-President unquestionably is, could have been led by any prepossession or political hallucination to admit it for a moment. ”

“ If forced to meet it, he makes no vain attempt to reconcile his conduct with the rule which he violates; no pretension to obey and break the law at one and the same time:—he boldly avows that his act is unconstitutional, and appeals for its justification to the Supreme Governor of the Universe, who has engraved upon the heart of man a law which, in some extreme cases, he is permitted to regard as paramount to every other. ”

“ Under these circumstances, it is obvious, that the States, though holding, not by law, but by an original right recognised in the Constitution, the legislative power which they are entitled to exercise, have yet no pretensions to sovereignty or absolute political independence, and that, the only sovereign power, recognised in our institutions is that of the people or body politic of the United States. ”

“ It follows from the view which we have taken of the subject, that the controversy respecting the origin of the Constitution, which has been often agitated in connexion with this question, is in a great measure foreign to it. Whether the General Government had its origin in the will of the State Governments, of the people of the States, or of the people of the United States is a point of no importance in the present inquiry, for those who admit that it is the real and rightful Government of the country. ”

“ In the cases which justify resistance, the principle upon which the citizen proceeds, is not that he has a legal or constitutional right to annul or repeal the offensive law,—which is the doctrine of the nullifiers,—but that he has a right, which he admits to be illegal and unconstitutional, but which he claims as a natural one, to make a violent opposition to its execution. ”

“ No one has ever questioned them; no one has ever undertaken to maintain that the members of a political society have a right to withdraw from it at discretion, or that the laws of the land are not in ordinary cases binding on the citizens. The principle is equally true under all forms of government, as the Vice-President himself very correctly intimates, when he states that the relation between the General Government and the States is the same with that between the States [Pg 26] and their own Governments, or in general between all Governments and the societies in which they are established. ”

“ If, in some cases, juries, under the influence of the popular excitement, should undertake to judge of the law for themselves, and give verdicts in clear cases against the Government, there would be, no doubt, some practical inconvenience, but in theory the law would still have its course. There would be no collision between the authority of the General and State Governments, and no occasion for any interposition of force by the former. ”