Following up Calhoun’s “inexorable logic,” that each State has a right to pass its judgment on any act and law made by the United States, and to decide whether it is invalid and null, if it be of opinion that it exceeds the delegated authority, every citizen of South Carolina or of any other State has a right to judge whether any law of that State be invalid or null, as exceeding its delegated authority. For the State of South Carolina under its Constitution, like the United States under its Constitution, has only a limited delegated authority, and the sovereignty, according to all the political writers, remains in its people or voting citizens. Why cannot a voting citizen, or one of the people of the State, maintain that, possessing the sovereign right of all power, and being one of the parties who made the compact of the State constitution, he can judge as to whether he has delegated the power to make a certain law; and if he thinks he has not, why cannot he defy the court and the State that undertakes to execute it? This would at once put the State in the happy condition of Poland, and almost allow the freedom claimed by a Chicago anarchist. The answer is evident, the citizens owe an obedience to the laws that they establish over themselves. They have, for the benefit of all, given to the judiciary the right to judge of the extent of the delegated power. That the doctrine of State sovereignty was unknown at the time South Carolina promulgated it, is proved by Jackson’s proclamation. In it he speaks of the hardness and inequality of the excise law in Pennsylvania, the embargo and non-intercourse law in the Eastern States, the carriage tax in Virginia. All these laws and the war of 1812 in the commercial States were, he says, deemed unconstitutional, but yet they were submitted to, and this remedy of nullification and secession was not suggested. “The discovery of this important feature in our Constitution was reserved to the present day. To the statesmen of South Carolina belongs the invention.”[97] Indeed it was a question in South Carolina itself who first discovered this doctrine of nullification. Dr. Thomas Cooper, Jefferson’s old friend, was agreed upon as the author of its revival, and was toasted as the father of nullification at Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, at a Fourth of July dinner[98] in 1833. If the Kentucky resolutions and the doctrine of nullification had not been dead, and buried in oblivion, it is impossible that Chief-Justice Marshall should have announced in the case of McCulloch against the State of Maryland that there was a universal assent to the proposition that the government of the Union, though limited in its powers, was supreme in its sphere; that General Jackson, in a proclamation to the whole country, could have declared its discovery was made by the statesmen of South Carolina of that day; and that the nullifiers of South Carolina should have toasted Cooper as its author. [97] 4 Elliot, 584.