Page:Doctrine of State Rights.djvu/15

 get a revenue?" With continued assurance of peaceful intention the Federal Government made ready for war.

At the call of their States, the people of the South, with unexampled unanimity, volunteered to defend their hearths, their altars, and their inalienable rights. Gray-haired sires and beardless sons were in the same ranks; but preparation had not been made to arm and equip them, and they had little more than their brave breasts to offer, for defence against threatened invasion. Vainly had the South relied on the Constitution as a shield; it was crushed by the mailed hand of a factious majority—the evil which Mr. Madison, in the tenth number of the Federalist, described as that which had covered with opprobrium federation as a form of government.

I make no excusatory plea that the men "thought they were right" when, at the call of their sovereign State, they staked all save honor in defence of the rights their fathers left them. If they were not right, then patriotism is an empty name, and he who looks death in the face under its sacred inspiration may be a traitor. If it be treason for a citizen to defend the State under whose protection he lives, even against the Federal Government, the Constitution has placed him in the cruel dilemma of being, in the event of conflict between his State and the United States, necessarily compelled to commit treason against one or the other. This surely cannot be the condition to which our fathers reduced us when they entered into the compact of union. Allegiance is everywhere due to the sovereign only. That sovereign, under the American system, is the People—the People of the State to which the individual belongs; the People who constitute the State government which he obeys; the People who alone, as far as he is concerned, ordained and established the Federal Constitution; the People who never delegated their sovereignty, and therefore retain the power to revoke all agencies created by them.

If the sovereign abolishes the State government and ordains and establishes a new one, the obligation of obedience requires the citizen to transfer his allegiance accordingly: there may be joint, but cannot be divided, allegiance; and this fact controlled the action of officers of the army and navy of the United States when continuance in the Federal service came in conflict with the ultimate allegiance due from each to the sovereign State to which he belonged.

2em