Page:State Documents on Federal Relations.djvu/84

26 Various are the forms in which these sentiments and feelings have been expressed to the legislature; but the tone and spirit, in all, are the same. They all discover an ardent attachment to the Union of these States, as the true source of security and happiness to all, and a reverence for the national constitution, as calculated in its spirit and principles to insure that Union, and establish that happiness: but they are all stamped with the melancholy conviction that the basis of that Union has been destroyed by a practical neglect of its principles; and that the durability of that Constitution has been endangered by a perversion and abuse of its powers.

The memorialists have then enumerated the causes which have brought them to this unhappy conviction. They have seen a power grow up in the southern and western sections of the Union, by the admission and multiplication of states, not contemplated by the parties to the constitution, and not warranted by its principles; and they foresee an almost infinite progression in this system of creation, which threatens eventually to reduce the voice of New England, once powerful and effectual in the national councils, to the feeble expression of colonial complaints, unattended to and disregarded.

[Here follows an enumeration of the other acts of the Federal Government inimical to New England, from the laying of the embargo to the prohibition of "their shore fishery and coasting trade" "by an act more unfeeling and odious than the Boston port bill, which aroused the colonies into independence."]

This act is denounced by all the memorialists in the warmest and most energetic language as a gross and palpable violation of the principles of the Constitution; and they express decidedly their opinion, that it cannot be submitted to without a pusillanimous surrender of those rights and liberties, which their ancestors brought to these shores, which they fought and bled to maintain, and which we, their descendents, ought to be ready to defend, at the same expense and hazard, or forfeit the character of freemen.

With such a display of grievances, sufferings, and apprehensions before them, couched in terms of affecting eloquence, and breathing a spirit of firmness and resolution to procure by some means