Page:Kentucky Resolutions of 1798.djvu/13

 PREFACE

little work was first suggested several years ago by a sense of the inadequacy of the historical accounts of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. This feeling has steadily increased ever since, and its correctness must be apparent to every one who has remarked the great influence these Resolutions have had upon our constitutional and political history. While they have been the cause and occasion of much debate and transitory discussion, there is no connected account of the causes and circumstances of their adoption, and their relation to the subsequent history of this country, except such as under many limitations is to be found in the histories of the United States under the Constitution. None of these are calculated to make the subject plain to the average reader, and there is scarcely one that is not positively in error as to some important fact.

The original documents, many of which have always been accessible, have been singularly neglected, and misstatements that at first crept in by inadvertence or unwarranted assumptions, not only have never been corrected by recourse to the sources, Rh