Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/317

298 all. But the Nullifiers' test oath did not conform to this model. It did not merely require the citizen generally to pledge his fealty to the state; it commanded him, under pain of proscription and disfranchisement, to swear that he would enforce a particular measure or set of measures; that he would obey and execute the nullification edict and the laws passed in pursuance of it, although convinced that they were in direct collision with the federal Constitution, which he was already bound to obey as the supreme law of the land. The object of this device, as openly avowed by its advocates, was to constitute the ordinance of nullification, instead of the federal Constitution, the paramount law of the land. The Union men especially objected to the clause requiring jurors to take the test oath.

The Union men protested also that such an oath of paramount allegiance to the state would set aside, not only the ordinary obligation to obey the laws of the United States, but that part of the state constitution itself known as the "declaration of supremacy" of the federal Constitution and the oath connected with it. An oath of paramount allegiance to the state would be an