Nullification, Secession Webster's Argument and the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions Part 10

A strict construction of the powers granted by the Const.i.tution is a "State's rights" that those who believe in the supremacy of the National Union can well favor. It is beyond human wisdom to enact laws of which there can be no question; the decisions of the Supreme Court show how hard it is to make a law whose const.i.tutionality is not disputed.

Government would have been impossible, if the power had been in each State to decide for itself as to the validity of every law pa.s.sed and every act of the General Government, and to secede at its will whenever it chose. Yet this is the government that the South claimed our forefathers established.

In forming the Confederacy of the Revolution, it was declared in its articles that it was indissoluble; the same declaration is in the Const.i.tution when the States "formed a more perfect Union" than that of the Confederacy "for ourselves and our posterity," and were merged into one Nation. This Const.i.tution and the laws of the United States are declared there, "as the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Const.i.tution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." Supreme over what, if not over the States that should adopt it? Historically that supremacy has been maintained and enforced by the United States Courts and Executive and Legislature.

In resisting the supremacy of this Const.i.tution no State, dismembered Virginia perhaps excepted, has suffered more than South Carolina. It is truly pathetic in pa.s.sing through the streets of Charleston, the home of the great planters and politicians that shaped the destinies of the State, to hear the names of the foreign bankers and merchants that have taken the place and the homes of the old leaders or who have built more pretentious abodes, to see the buildings with walls cracked and fissured by the earthquake mended by contributions cheerfully given by Northern friends, to read the newspapers lamenting the loss of their trade to Savannah and calling on the United States for larger appropriations to deepen the channels of their harbor. Then to look upon their statues of those distinguished at different periods: the mutilated one of the great Earl of Chatham, the friend of American freedom in Colony times; those of the heroes of the Revolution and the war of 1812; and in the square opposite the barracks of her Military Academy, the great glittering bronze of Calhoun,[117] who brought so much misery to them all. But as we go Westward, where the sandy soil of the plains yields to the clay of the foothills, and find the streams turning the wheels of the factory, and hear the whirl of the spindle tended by white operatives, and see the plough, generally followed by a white man, turning over the soil amidst the stumps of trees in fields newly reclaimed; and come at last to Spartanburg and read the inscription there on the monument recently raised to those who fell at Cowpens, by the old thirteen States and Tennessee, bringing to memory the days of Greene and Morgan, we cannot but believe instead of four and forty sovereign States, we shall, in Webster's words, have for all time, "one Nation, one Union, one Destiny."

[117] This was written four years ago: Charleston now shows few signs of the earthquake, and Calhoun's statue has mellowed into a pleasing bronze color.