as members of the Union," and, according to Mr. Lodge, Josiah Quincy was not made a delegate by reason of his extreme views. The convention neither asserted nor suggested nullification or secession, but proposed amendments to the Constitution. Its recommendations were of no particular importance. The only persons who were affected by its doings were the members, who ever afterwards suffered politically from a taint of disloyalty. Peace soon came and terminated the oppressive grievances and removed the discontent.

Not only as stated in the beginning of this article is the Hartford convention with the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions brought forward by Mr. Lodge in proof of the weakness of the Union, but Southern orators and writers delight in referring to that convention in justification. of nullification and secession. We have the journal of the proceedings, of the motions made and votes passed. Is it not the strongest proof possible of the universal belief in the nationality of our government that nobody, in that body of malcontents, suggested that any right existed to refuse an obedience to the laws and policy of the administration they deemed so oppressive?

After the purchase of Louisiana came that of Florida, also enlarging the territory of the Union and curtailing the relative power in it

1 Lodge's Life of George Cabot, p. 518.

2 History of Hartford Convention, by Theo. Dwight.

of each of the old States. The charter of a second United States Bank was granted by the party that in the first Congress had opposed it and claimed to be strict constructionists of the Constitution. Madison justified his assent on the ground of the general approval and the opinion of the Supreme Court establishing its constitutionality.' Historically there is no attempt to maintain, no assertion of, the doctrine of the Kentucky resolutions from the time they were passed until the debate in the Congress of 1830. The only trace of them is in the resolutions frequently passed by the Legislatures of States, which are mere opinions beyond their legislative powers, that certain laws of the government were unconstitutional and therefore null and void. If unconstitutional, they were and are null and void, but no State ever treated them as null and void. The United States Government, by its judiciary, however, took cognizance of all State laws in conflict with. its laws and authority, and maintained uniformly its national supremacy.

1 Madison's letter, 4 Elliot's Debates, 615.

CHAPTER VI.

CALHOUN, JACKSON, AND NATIONAL GOVERNMENT.

IN 1811, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a young man not of the age of thirty years, took his seat as a member of the national House of Representatives, and at once became a leader in public affairs. He was one of the Committee on Foreign Relations. On the 12th of December he said what was the road the nation should tread "to make it great and to produce in this country not the form but the real spirit of union." In March, 1815, he voted for a high tariff and said: “He believed the policy of the country required protection to our manufacturing establishments." " He also reported the bill to incorporate a United States Bank, and supported it in a speech on its constitutionality. Webster, on the contrary, opposed the tariff bills, not however on the ground of their unconstitutionality. In December, 1816, Calhoun

1

1 H. Adams, vol. vi., p. 143.

2 H. Adams, vol. ix., p. 115. Annals of Congress, 18151816, p. 1272.

3 H. Adams, vol. ix., p. 116.

3

moved "that a committee be appointed to inquire into the expediency of setting apart a permanent fund for internal improvement "; on December 23d, he reported a bill setting aside the bonus paid by the United States Bank, $1,500,000 and future dividends from bank stock, "as a fund for constructing roads and canals.' In his speech supporting it he said: "that the extent of our republic exposes us to the greatest of all calamities, next to the loss of liberty, and even to that in its consequences, disunion." "Probably not more than twenty-five or thirty members, in the total number of one hundred. and seventy, regarded the constitutional difficulty as fatal to the bill. " Madison, however, consistent and persistent in his strict construction of the Constitution, vetoed it.

2

In 1819 and 1820 came the admission of Missouri and the struggle over the extension or restriction of slavery. The Southern statesmen feared that the South was losing its relative importance in the Union. Even those of Virginia, who had formerly been opposed to slavery, now took the opposite view, and the Legislature of that State passed resolutions for the admission of Missouri with slavery. The increase in the production of cotton had made the raising. of slaves profitable. The controversy was settled by the bill called the Missouri Compromise,

1 H. Adams, vol. ix., p. 148.

2 See H. Adams, vol. ix, pp. 149 to 153, for debate and Calhoun's views.

admitting Missouri with slavery, and excluding slavery from all the rest of the country west of that State and north of 36° 30', the southern boundary of Missouri. This was the first important controversy dividing the States geographically. It was the division that Mason, Madison, and others foresaw in the convention that made the Constitution; not a combination of the great States against the small, but geographical, between the South and the North, the planting and commercial States, and, underlying this and more potent, the institution of slavery repugnant to the North and existing only in the South.

It was this difference of interest between the two sections that brought Calhoun to a change of opinion on the great industrial, commercial, and moral questions that had arisen. His convictions followed what he wished to believe: not an unusual temperament. From a protectionist he became the zealous advocate of extreme free trade, from a nationalist to the belief that the Union was nothing but a league any State could break at its will, from holding slavery to be a moral evil to the support of it as a divine institution. In 1837, after the nullification controversy, when he introduced resolutions in the Senate as to slavery, he said:

"This question has produced one happy effect, at least it has compelled us of the South to look into the nature and character of this great institution (slavery), and to correct many false impressions that even we had entertained in relation to it.