Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/196

Rh was an essential principle for conserving the government.

The Union men held that if the right to nullify was possessed by one state, it must inhere in all, together with the means of enforcing it. But by what process could Tennessee nullify the tariff acts? She had no ports which she could declare free. The State Rights men answered that, in the first place, South Carolina rights did not depend on whether Tennessee had a seaport or not; and that, secondly, Tennessee could nullify by resolving to support a seaboard state which nullified.

The Union men contended that there was no such potency in state sovereignty as the Nullifiers ascribed to it. It could not, by any action of the legislature or convention, confer on the citizen, any right to resist the legislation of Congress which he did not possess without such action. The federal court might interfere, and citizens resisting the operation of the tariff act might be tried for treason against the United States. To