Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/266

Rh great courage, for "some cried out 'enough!' 'what have we to fear; we are right and God and Old Hickory are with us.'"

This Union convention of about 180 delegates adopted an official protest against the ordinance of nullification. It reviewed the objections to the doctrine of nullification and denounced the ordinance as contrary to both the national and the state constitutions, and with special vigor decried the test oath, which would keep out of office all Union men who would not perjure themselves. It declared that as regarded the Union party the ordinance "betrayed all the features of an odious tyranny" and that its progress would be as fatal to liberty as it was to the federal Constitution. But one more step of the dominant party, it said, was wanting to put the 17,000 friends of the Union, so far as the state authorities were concerned, entirely out of the protection of the law. In regard to their own program, the Union men declared they would maintain a peaceable, inactive position as long as possible, asserting their rights by all legal and constitutional means; but if crossed in this by an attempt to enforce the "unconstitutional and tyrannically oppressive"