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 The Southern Cause Vindicated. 333

wars which are got up in Congress. Conflicts in which the State will never yield ; for the more you undertake to load them with acts like this, the greater will be their resistance."

"I said there were States in this Union whose -highest tribunals had adjudged that bill to be unconstitutional, and I was one of those who believed it unconstitutional, and that under the old resolutions of 1798 and 1799 a State must not only be the judge of that, but of the remedy in such case." There was no menacing there, no string- ing together of words for sound's sake, but a solid shot straight to the mark from anti-slavery quarters.

In his address in 1839 before the Historical Society of New York, Mr. John Quincy Adams said : " With these qualifications we may admit the same right as vested in the people of every State in the Union with reference to the general government, which was exer- cised by the people of the united colonies with reference to the supreme head of the British Empire, of which they formed a part, and under these limitations have the people of each State in the Union a right to secede from the Confederate Union itself. Here stands the right. But the indissoluble union between the several States of this confederate nation is, after all, not in the right but in the heart. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other; when the paternal spirit shall give way to cold indiffer- ence, or collision of interest shall fester into hatred, the bonds of political association will not long hold together parties no longer at- tached by the magnetism of conciliated interest and kindly sympa- thies; and far better would it be for the people of these dis- United States to part in friendship than to be held together by constraint. Then will be time for reverting to the precedents which occurred at the formation and adoption of the Constitution, to form a more per- fect union by dissolving that which could no longer bind, and to leave the separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravi- tation to the centre." Acting upon this principle, the Legislature of Massachusetts, the home of Mr. Adams, in 1844, resolved " that the project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested on the threshold, may drive these States into a dissolution of the Union." On the same subject on February 22, 1845, it resolved, * * * "and as the powers of legislation granted in the Constitution of the United States to Congress do not embrace the case of the admission of a foreign State or foreign territory by legislation into the Union, such