American Eloquence, Volume 1: Studies In American Political History (1896)
History
American Eloquence, Volume 1: Studies In American Political History (1896)
Speeches, addresses, etc., American; United States -- History; United States -- Politics and government
left without restraint; but the Constitution has ordered the matter
differently. To make war, for instance, is an exercise of sovereignty;
but the Constitution declares that no State shall make war. To coin
money is another exercise of sovereign power; but no State is at liberty
to coin money. Again, the Constitution says that no sovereign State
shall be so sovereign as to make a treaty. These prohibitions, it must
be confessed, are a control on the State sovereignty of South Carolina,
as well as of the other States, which does not arise "from her own
feelings of honorable justice." The opinion referred to, therefore, is
in defiance of the plainest provisions of the Constitution.
There are other proceedings of public bodies which have already been
alluded to, and to which I refer again, for the purpose of ascertaining
more fully what is the length and breadth of that doctrine denominated
the Carolina doctrine, which the honorable member has now stood up on
this floor to maintain. In one of them I find it resolved, that "the
tariff of 1828, and every other tariff designed to promote one branch of
industry at the expense of others, is contrary to the meaning and
intention of the federal compact, and such a dangerous, palpable, and
deliberate usurpation of power, by a determined majority, wielding the
General Government beyond the limits of its delegated powers, as calls
upon the States which compose the suffering minority, in their sovereign
capacity, to exercise the powers which, as sovereigns, necessarily
devolve upon them when their contract is violated."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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