Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/315

296 Before the convention met, the Mercury recommended a provision for an oath of paramount allegiance to the state to be taken by all state officers and, as part of the condition of citizenship, by all persons thereafter to be naturalized. The Nullifiers maintained that such an oath was not at all different from the oaths of office required by several other states. For example, those of Vermont and Massachusetts, because they contained no reservation of paramount allegiance to the United States in so many words, were said to require the positive and direct allegiance of the officer, in the event of conflict with federal laws, to the laws of the state. This the Nullifiers would put in direct terms instead of leaving it to implication.

The Union editors at once attacked this contention with arguments which they thought conclusive. How anyone who had read the emphatic language of the federal Constitution on this very subject could seriously entertain such a proposition, they said, was not easy to imagine. They quoted from the federal instrument: "This Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof shall be the supreme law of the land, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the