from them, that the General Government may place any act they think proper on the list of crimes, and punish it themselves, whether enumerated or not enumerated by the Constitution as cognizable by them; that they may transfer its cognizance to the President, or any other person, who may himself be the accuser, counsel, judge, and jury, whose suspicions may be the evidence, his order the sentence, his officer the executioner, and his breast the sole record of the transactions; that a very numerous and valuable description of the inhabitants of these States being, by this precedent, reduced as outlaws to the absolute dominion of one man, and the barrier of the Constitution thus swept away for us all, no rampart now remains against the passions, and the power of a majority in Congress to protect from a like exportation, or other more grievous punishment, the minority of the same body, the legislatures, judges, governors, and counsellors of the States, nor their other peaceable inhabitants, who may venture to reclaim the constitutional rights and liberties of the States and people, or who for other causes, good or bad, may be obnoxious to the views, or marked by the suspicion of the President or be thought dangerous to his or their elections, or other interests, public or personal; that the friendless alien has indeed been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment, but the citizen will soon follow; rather, has already followed; for already has a sedition act marked him as its prey; that these and successive acts of the same character, unless arrested at the threshold, necessarily drive these States into revolution and blood, and will furnish new calumnies against republican governments, and new pretexts for those who wish it to be believed that man can

not be governed but by a rod of iron; that it would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights; that confidence is every where the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power; that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go. And let the honest advocate of confidence read the alien and sedition acts, and say if the Constitution has not been wise in fixing limits to the Government it created, and whether we should be wise in destroying those limits. Let him say what the Government is, if it be not a tyranny, which the men of our choice have conferred on our President, and the President of our choice has assented to and accepted, over the friendly strangers to whom the mild spirit of our country and its laws had pledged hospitality and protection; that the men of our choice have more respected the bare suspicions of the President, than the solid rights of innocence, the claims of justification, the sacred force of truth, and the forms and substance of law and justice; in questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution; that this commonwealth does therefore, call on its co-States for an expression of their sentiments on the acts concerning aliens, and for the punishment of certain crimes hereinbefore specified; plainly declaring whether these acts are, or are not, authorized by the federal compact.

And it doubts not that their sense will be so enounced

as to prove their attachment unaltered to limited government, whether general or particular; and that the rights and liberties of their co-States will be exposed to no dangers by remaining embarked in a common bottom with their own; that they will concur with this commonwealth in considering the said acts so palpably against the Constitution as to amount to an undisguised declaration that that compact is not meant to be the measure of the powers of the general government; but that it will proceed in the exercise over these States of all powers whatsoever; that they will view this as seizing the rights of the States, and consolidating them in the hands of the general government, with a power assumed to bind the States [not merely in the cases made federal, (casus fœderis)] but in all cases whatsoever, by laws made, not with their consent, but by others against their consent; that this would be to surrender the form of government we have chosen, and to live under one deriving its powers from its own will and not from our authority; and that the co-States recurring to their natural right, in cases not made federal, will concur in declaring these acts void and of no force, and will each take measures of its own for providing that neither these acts, nor any others of the general government, not plainly and intentionally authorized by the Constitution, shall be exercised within their respective terri

tories.

9th. Resolved, That the said committee be authorized to communicate, by writing or personal conferences, at any times or places whatever, with any person or persons who may be appointed by any one or more of the co-States to correspond or confer with them; and that they lay their proceedings before the next session of assembly.

RICHMOND, March 21, 1832. I have carefully compared this copy with the MSS. of these resolutions in the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, and find it a correct and full copy.

TH. JEFFERSON RANDOLPH.

Armed with these resolutions, Breckinridge returned to his home and, early in November, 1798, appeared at Frankfort for the meeting of the Legislature.

In his opening message of November 7th, Governor Garrard struck squarely at the hated Federal statutes; quite as if he were familiar with what had transpired at the recent Monticello conference.

"Constituting, as this State does," he said, "a branch of the Federal Union, it necessarily becomes a sharer in the general prosperity or adversity: and, being deeply interested in the conduct of the National Government, must have a right to applaud or to censure that Government, when applause or censure becomes its due.

"It cannot, therefore, be improper to draw your attention to sundry acts of the Federal Legislature, which having violated the Constitution of the United Stateswhich having vested the President with high and dangerous powers, and intrenched upon the prerogatives of the individual States, have created an uncommon agitation of mind in different parts of the Union, and particularly among the citizens of this Commonwealth.

"The Act concerning Aliens is calculated to produce effects most strongly marked with injustice and oppression; because the exercise of the power given therein, depends upon the discretion, or, I may say, the caprice of an individual.

"Nothing but a general prevalence of hypocrisy, among

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that numerous class of persons on whom this law is meant to operate can prevent consequences so much deprecated: for they must affect an approbation of all the measures of Government, whatever be their genuine sentiments concerning them, or, by an honest disclosure of their real opinion, expose themselves to be ruined by banishment, on the secret representations of some interested and officious informer, and without enjoying even the shadow of that trial by jury so dear to freemen.

"Nor can the same law be regarded as anything less than an artful, though effectual evasion of the provisions of that article of the Federal Constitution which withholds from Congress the power of prohibiting the migration as well as importation of such persons as the States then existing should think proper to admit, a provision of the highest importance to those States whose population is not full, and who have a strong interest in welcoming the industrious stranger from every part of the world.

"Another law the operation of which is more extensive . . . is entitled, 'An Act in Addition to the Act Entitled "An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes Against the United States;"' which by fencing round the different branches of Government, in their official capacity, with penal terrors, in a manner before unknown, hath created a new crime against the United States, in a case where an interference on the part of the Legislature was rendered unconstitutional, by that clause which forbids the enacting of any law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.

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Any violation of the Constitution once acquiesced in, subverts the great palladium of our rights, and no barrier remains to oppose the introduction of despotism."