Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/81

 Clearly, however, there was no strong demand for nullification, and secession was far from the thoughts of all but a few.

At Charleston on July 1 a "public dinner" was given in honor of William Drayton and Robert Y. Hayne, "exclusively by Friends of the Southern States," About six hundred banqueters were accommodated at the city hall. Hayne had before been the spokesman for the Nullifiers and he did not disappoint them this time. Drayton, however, spoke against nullification, and upheld the federal judiciary in a way that long rankled in the minds of the Nullifiers and called forth many an article and editorial to show that there were cases in which a state might throw itself upon its sovereignty and protect its citizens from an unconstitutional law, in spite of a decision of the Supreme Court that the law was constitutional; the Constitution itself, indeed, needed the protecting shield of state sovereignty against Congress and the Supreme Court. To Drayton's assertion that a government whose acts were not obligatory on its citizens would be a strange anomaly, it