Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 28.djvu/181

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founded, which is that the people have in all '//( oj Augusta against l:arle, 13 Peters, 590- 592, it was decided by the Supreme Court of the United States the same year in which Mr. John Quincy Adams made his speech above quoted from that

" They are sovereign States. * * * We think it well settled that by the law of comity among nations a corporation created by one sovereign is permitted to make contracts in another, and to sue in its courts, and that the same law of comity prevails among the several sovereignties of this Union."

Shortly after the nomination of General Taylor, a petition was actually presented in the Senate of the United States, "asking Con- gress to devise means for the dissolution of the Union." And the votes of Messrs. Seward. Chase and Hale were recorded in favor of its reception.

In 1844, the Legislature of Massachusetts attempted to coerce the President and Congress by the use of this language:

' ' The project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested on the threshold, may tend to drive these States (New England) into a dis- solution of the Union."

THE VIEWS OF WEBSTER.

Daniel Webster (the great " expounder of the Constitution," as he is called), notwithstanding his famous reply to Mr. Hayne, de- livered in 1830, in which he so ingeniously denied the right of a State to determine for itself when its constitutional powers were in- fringed, and also that the Constitution was a compact between sov- ereign States, and contended that the power to determine the con- stitutionality of the laws of Congress was lodged only in the Federal Government, in a speech delivered at Capon Springs, Virginia, in 1851, used this language:

" If the South were to violate any part of the Constitution inten- tionally and systematically, and persist in so doing from year to year, and no remedy could be had, would the North be any longer bound by the rest of it; and if the North were deliberately, habitually and of fixed purpose to disregard one part of it, would the South be bound any longer to observe its other obligations ? :;: How