Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/344

Rh would suffer martyrdom, it was true, but it would be that kind of martyrdom which a censorious world termed base submission. They would be marshaled in the ranks where they were held unworthy to share the command; they would be marched to and fro, be exhibited, sneered at, and despised by every upstart whose "only patent for sense or capacity" was "his diploma from the Jacobin Club." Would "the brave mountaineers of Carolina submit to it? They must change their nature first." If they migrated, then "they must take up their household gods and with all the world before them where to choose, and Providence their guide, seek in other climes a resting place where a free man could deign to live. Aye, they must leave the scenes of their childhood and the graves of their fathers and wander abroad from the inhospitable boundaries of a once generous and high minded state, like the exiled Poles, 'a caravan of woe.'" The last course, resistance, would "plunge the steel into the bosoms of sons, fathers, and brothers.'

Some of the Union men argued that the convention had no right to authorize the legislature to enact new oaths to supersede or modify those