These resolutions and the explanation--Virginians always put them together--were nominally the political creed of the republican party that so long ruled the United States. They were a denunciation--perhaps a partisan one--of alleged unconstitutional laws made by the federal party in the administrations of Washington and Adams, and expressed a belief, which few to-day will say was warranted, that there was a design in them to transform the government into an absolute or at best a mixed monarchy. The methods to arrest the evils of these alleged unconstitutional assumptions of undelegated powers were stated to be authorized by the Constitution itself. And by the concurrence with Virginia of the other States to whom the resolutions were submitted, they, the States, might remedy the alleged evils by their representatives in Congress or by the choice of Senators of different opinions; there were to be, the Virginia explanation said, no less than two Congresses before the laws expired by their limitation; or if necessary, the explanation further said, the States by a convention could alter the Constitution. The resolutions are those of strict constructionists of the powers granted by the Constitution; they in no way assert the nullification doctrines of Kentucky, which some thirty years afterwards were revived and developed to their logical result of secession by Calhoun and South Carolina. The prosecutions under the Sedition law, the arresting and carrying through the country and the fining and imprisoning as criminals, for the expression of opinions, of men whom the Republicans held as eminent and respectable, such as Thomas Cooper, Jefferson’s dear friend, had very great influence in the defeat of the federal party under the elder Adams and of the triumph of Jefferson and the Republicans.