Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 4.djvu/428

418 State sovereignties, and subversive of the rights, privileges, and immunities of the citizens of the United States,. . . my mind has been led to a serious and decided determination to decline a compliance with your request, and to have no agency in the appointments which the President has been pleased to refer to me."

In calling together the legislature of Connecticut, Governor Trumbull's concert with Massachusetts was evident, and his object of resisting the embargo was avowed. So bluntly did the Federalists proclaim their purpose, that when the Connecticut legislature met, February 23, the governor in his opening speech explained his action as though it were a matter of course that he should call upon the State to nullify an Act of Congress.


 * "Whenever our national legislature," he said, "is led to overleap the prescribed bounds of their constitutional powers, on the State legislatures in great emergencies devolves the arduous task,—it is their right, it becomes their duty,—to interpose their protecting shield between the rights and liberties of the people and the assumed power of the general government."

If Madison was not by that time weary of his own words,—if the Resolutions of 1798 and the fatal "interpose" of Virginia had not become hateful to his ears,—he might have found some amusement in the irony with which Trumbull flung the familiar phrases of Virginia back into her face; but serious as such conduct was, the mere defiance carried less alarm than was warranted by the signs of secret