Controversy on this theme was superseded a few years later by more acute sources of irritation--the Embargo and War of 1812. These events fell with great severity on the commerce of the Northern States, and led to the passage by the Massachusetts legislature of anti-Embargo resolutions, declaring that "when the national compact is violated and the citizens are oppressed by cruel and unauthorized law, this legislature is bound to interpose its power and wrest from the oppressor his victim." In this doctrine Daniel Webster concurred. In a speech in the House of Representatives, December 9, 1814, on the Conscription Bill, he said: The operation of measures thus unconstitutional and illegal ought to be prevented by a resort to other measures which are both constitutional and legal. It will be the solemn duty of the State Governments to protect their own authority over their own militia and to interpose between their own citizens and arbitrary power.... With the same earnestness with which I now exhort you to forbear from these measures I shall exhort them to exercise their unquestionable right of providing for the security of their own liberties.[2] The anti-Embargo resolutions were followed by the refusal of both Massachusetts and Connecticut to allow federal officers to take command of their militia and by the call for the Hartford Convention. The latter body recommended to the states represented in it the adoption of measures to protect their citizens against forcible drafts, conscriptions, or impressments not authorized by the Constitution--a phrase which certainly meant that the states were to judge of the constitutionality of the measures referred to. The conclusion of peace with Great Britain put an end to this crisis before it came to blows. On February 26, 1833, Mr. Calhoun, following the Resolutions of '98, affirmed in the Senate the doctrine that the Government of the United States was a compact, by which the separate states delegated to it certain definite powers, reserving the rest; that whenever the general Government should assume the exercise of powers not so delegated, its acts would be void and of no effect; and that the said Government was not the sole judge of the powers delegated to it, but that, as in all other cases of compact among sovereign parties without any common judge, each had an equal right to judge for itself, as well of the infraction as of the mode and measures of redress. This was the stand which South Carolina took in opposition to the Force Bill of President Jackson's administration.[3]