Browbeaten, as Jefferson explained later, by a bold and overwhelming majority in Congress, the Republicans resolved to retire from that field, and to take a stand in their State Legislatures. The legislative, rather than the executive or judicial branch of the States, represented the people of the United States dwelling in the various States. The State Legislatures had sent delegates to form the Constitution, and the State Legislatures had called the State conventions which adopted it. In the State Legislatures the true friends of the Union, as the Jeffersonians called themselves, would endeavour to find an agency for protection against the unwarranted attack of the National Government. Four members of Congress at this time actually withdrew, forming a striking precedent for sixty years later. Although sometimes charged with planning a forcible resistance to the central power, the Republicans as a whole contemplated nothing more than concerted action in resolutions to be adopted by the State Legislatures. "I would not do anything at this moment," advised Jefferson, who naturally assumed the leadership, "which should commit us further, but reserve ourselves to shape our future measures, or no measures, by the events which may happen." Selecting North Carolina as a strong Republican State to take the lead, Jefferson drew up a set of resolutions setting forth the doctrine of protest. However, chancing to meet some Kentucky politicians visiting in Virginia, he gave the paper to them. Their State offered advantages superior to North Carolina for inaugurating the movement. Her history from infancy had been one continued struggle for political rights. "Kentucky," said her governor in his message at the opening of the session of the State Legislature following the passage of the Alien and Sedition acts, "remote from the contaminating influences of European politics, is steady to the principles of pure Republicanism and will ever be the asylum of her persecuted votaries." The customary reply of the House took the shape of nine lengthy resolutions, rewritten from the set drawn up by Jefferson. They were adopted by both Houses of the State Legislature, signed by the governor, and sent as an appeal to the "co-states in the federal Union." Assuming that the States and the Union had made a compact whereby the latter had been given certain limited powers for definite purposes, the remaining powers being reserved to the States, the resolutions declared that whenever the General Government assumed undelegated powers, its acts were unauthoritative, void, and of no force; and that, as in all cases of compact having no common judge, each party had a right to judge of infractions and redress. This hypothesis being assumed, the remainder of the resolutions supports it with arguments, using generally the ones employed by the opposition speakers in Congress to prove that the Alien and Sedition laws were unconstitutional.