It is very much to be regretted that Mr. Henry Adams, in his very able and interesting history of the United States, should have added his great authority to this construction of the resolves. He says the Republican and the Federalist parties “were divided by a bottomless gulf in their theories of constitutional powers.” “The Union was a question of expediency, not of obligation: this was the conviction of the true Virginian school and of Jefferson’s opponents as well as of his supporters, of Patrick Henry as well as of John Taylor of Carolina and of John Randolph of Roanoke”; and “The essence of Virginian republicanism lay in a single maxim--the Government shall not be the final judge of its own powers.” The resolutions of Virginia were understood by the other States as a denunciation of the laws of Congress, not as an assertion of a right of a State to interpose in their execution. Of the sixteen States, ten--Hildreth informs us, a fact that seems to be now overlooked, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont--answered and condemned them.[73] The resolutions of seven of these ten are in Elliot’s _Debates_.[74] None of the other States supported them; indeed, from Jefferson’s and Madison’s correspondence, they were afraid North Carolina would also oppose them. The purport of the opposing resolutions is well stated in the report of a Committee of the Legislature of New York made in February, 1833, in the following words: “These resolutions were met by several of the State Legislatures to whom they had been communicated by counter resolutions protesting against them with much warmth, chiefly on the ground that the act of a State Legislature declaring a law of the United States unconstitutional was in itself an unconstitutional assumption of authority, and an unreasonable interference with the exclusive jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States; accompanied in some instances, with severe denunciation against their disorganizing tendency.” [73] Hildreth’s _History of U. S._, vol. v., p. 296. [74] 4 Elliot, pp. 532-9. Some of the States argued the question of the constitutionality and expediency of the Alien and Sedition Laws, and one State approved of the able advocacy and demonstration of their validity and expediency by the minority of the General Assembly of Virginia. Of the States, whose resolutions are in Elliot’s _Debates_, two only, New York and New Hampshire, mention the name of Kentucky. Apparently the extreme viciousness of her doctrine escaped notice. In fact the nullification doctrine, the right of each State to resist the execution of United States laws, though asserted at the time by Kentucky, was unnoticed or forgotten until brought to life again by South Carolina thirty years afterwards. The right of secession was not suggested in the resolutions of either Virginia or Kentucky.