It is a matter of familiar history that from the commencement of this government, there has been a party, {531} particularly in the South, powerful by its talents, its character and the public confidence, who have cherished and propagated, with unwearied efforts, a jealous fear of the power of the general government. They have taught and, I may not doubt, truly believed that this power would swallow the independence of the states, or so depress their influence and strip them of their rights, that they would finally become mere subordinate corporations, living and acting by the will of a master. I do not stop to examine the justice of this apprehension, nor to show that the federal government, _constitutionally administered_, (and no fair argument can be drawn from usurpation and violence,) has more to fear from the power of the states than the states from it. This is not my present purpose. I would show how the doctrine of instructions was introduced among us. It was one of the devices and means resorted to—and invented by the party I have alluded to, to cripple the federal power, and, in this way, to give the states a control over the action of the general government, which they could not exercise directly under any power or rights given or reserved to them in the constitution they had adopted. Thus by binding their representatives in Congress by the obligation of obedience to their instructions, and by limiting and fettering the powers of the federal body by their doctrines of _constitutional construction_, they would acquire an ascendancy over the federal operations which would reduce that body to a bloodless, fleshless skeleton.