Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/197

178 this it was replied that individual resistance to the tariff had proved unavailing before the federal court, but that fortunately there was protection furnished the citizens in the sovereign power of the state. If the people of the state had no right in convention to sit in judgment on the tariff and to enforce that judgment within their own limits, then the people were to be pitied and South Carolina was "a mere petty corporation, without power or authority, a mere footstool of the federal government."

The citizens of South Carolina owed no allegiance to any government on earth which was at all incompatible with that which they owed to the state. He who committed treason, therefore, would be he who opposed the state and sided with the government with which she was contending; it would be he who attempted to enforce the acts which the state had solemnly declared should not be executed within her limits. The action of the state would not be confined to authorizing her citizens to resist the tariff law, but would prevent any of them from obeying it. There was potency enough in the sovereignty of the state, not only to protect those who might resist the tariff against the federal court, but to prevent its most devoted