Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/340

Rh paramount allegiance to the state, which no one who believed in the supremacy of the federal Constitution could take with a blameless conscience, because the ordinance had defined allegiance as something distinct from and superior to the obligation to support the constitution and laws of the state and the Union, and declared it to belong exclusively to the state. When to this was added the fact that the party which passed the oath of allegiance in the legislature was the same that defined allegiance in the convention; that nearly every speaker in the legislature in favor of the oath supported it as an oath of paramount allegiance; and that the amendment of Daniel E. Huger in the Senate, proposing that the oath should not be so construed as to impair the allegiance hitherto due to the Union, was defeated; its motive and its construction became too obvious to permit a Union man to take it without being recreant to his principles. The Union party would be ever ready to swear all allegiance and yield all obedience to the state consistent with the federal Constitution, but no lure of office, no fear of martyrdom would induce its adherents to assume an obligation of even doubtful import, exacted by the dominant party as a political test