Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 40.djvu/19

Rh ; in his old age. and at the time of the Nullification crisis which we are now discussing, he seems to have reverted toward his earlier position. As a centralist, then, at the time he took part in and reported the debates of the general constitutional convention of 1787, whatever Madison noted down of a contrary tendency is deserving of special attention and weight.)

But if not the federal supreme court, then what tribunal, inquired Webster and the North, is to decide these disputed questions of sovereignty and of constitutional powers? The answer was ready to hand: Not to the federal supreme court, itself but a component part of the created central government, where three men (a majority of a quorum of the court), and they political appointees, may have the deciding voice, must a sovereign creator State submit questions affecting her sovereign powers. She herself will decide it pending an appeal, in the true spirit of Magna Charta, to the judgment of her peers, her sister sovereign creator States in general convention assembled. This contention had had the support of Thomas Jefferson in 1821, as quoted by Hayne: (35) "It is a fatal heresy to suppose that either our State governments are superior to the federal, or the federal to the State; neither is authorized literally to decide what belongs to itself, or its co-partner in government, in differences between their different sets of public servants; the appeal is to neither, but to their employers peaceably assembled by their representatives in convention." More than twenty years before this utterance Jefferson had embodied this same principle in his draft of the famous Kentucky Resolutions. (26) Again, Jefferson wrote, (27) "This peaceable and legitimate resource, a general convention of the States, to which we are in the habit of implicit obedience, superseding all appeal to force, and being always within our reach, shows a precious principle of self-preservation in our composition . . ."

Mark this: Jefferson says that in this plan of a general convention of the States to decide such mooted questions of constitutional construction and governmental powers, is found a peaceable settlement of vexing political and sectional problems. This was precisely Carolina's plea in 1830-33.