STATE VETO POWER.

27

seeking no lead, to rush in its defence to the front rank, where the blows fall heaviest and thickest. I admire his gallantry and courage; but I will tell him that he will find in the opposite ranks, under the flag of liberty, spirits as gallant as his own; and that experience will teach him, that it is infinitely easier to carry on a war of legislative exaction, by bills and enactments, than to extort by sword and bayonet from the brave and the free.

We are told, in order to justify the passage of this fatal measure, that it was necessary to present the olive branch with one hand, and the sword with the other. We scorn the alternative. You have no right to present the sword; the Constitution never put the instrument in your hands to be employed against a State; and as to the olive branch, whether we receive it or not, will not depend on your menace, but on our own estimation of what is due to ourselves and the rest of the community, in reference to the difficult subject on which we have taken issue.

XIII-STATE VETO POWER.

DANIEL WEBSTER.

I CANNOT recognize any right in a State to arrest and repeal the legislation of Congress. I could not forget the past, nor shut my eyes to the fact that the present alarming extent and threatening form of a resistance and defiance, have been consequent upon the tolerated practical nullification of the State of Georgia. The gentleman from South Carolina, has assured us that such is the fact; attempts have been vainly made to find a distinction between the two. In principle they are identical. I regret that the gentleman from Georgia, in his endeavor to render his defence of the one, consistent with the condemnation of the other, has deemed it necessary to assail the Supreme Court of the United States-to pronounce the reasoning and argument of one of its most important decisions to be unworthy the lowest county court in any of the States! I can assure the gentleman that the country regards it far otherwise, and that the most vigorous and gifted minds deem it one of the most powerful productions of the wonderful intellect of the revered chief of that august

tribunal. If, in the inscrutable ways of Providence, our institutions are destined to be subverted, and left in ruins by the convulsions of revolution, that decision and other kindred constitutional opinions from the same mind, will remain to after generations, splendid and enduring monuments of intellectual and moral greatness, and, like the broken columns and classic remains of Athens and Palmyra, be the wonder and admiration of successive ages. The time has arrived when the progress of nullification must be arrested, or the hopes of permanent union surrendered. The gentleman assures us that his theory would make this government a beautiful system! Beautiful as would be the proud and polished pillars which surround us, if resolved into their original rude and paltry pebbles; beautiful as the dashed mirror, from whose fragments are reflected twenty-four pigmy portraits, instead of one gigantic and noble original! The triumph of that doctrine dissolves the union. It must be so regarded by foreign nations; it is almost so even now. Already have the exultations of the oppressor, and the laments of the philanthropist, been heard beyond the Atlantic. They have looked with fear and hope, with wonder and delight, upon the brilliant and beautiful constellation in our western hemisphere, moving in majestic harmony, irradiating the earth with its mild and benignant beams. Shall these stars now be severed and scattered, and rushing from their orbits through the troubled air, singly and feebly sink into clouds of murky blackness, leaving the world in rayless night? Shall the flag of our common country, the ensign of our nation, which has waved in honor upon every sea-the guardian of our common rights-the herald of our common glory-be severed and torn into twenty-four fragments; and our ships hereafter display for their protection but a tattered rag of one of its stripes?

XIV.-VINDICATION OF THE SOUTH.

J. CLEMENS.

How stands the account of personal services? It was a Southern man who pointed out the road from bondage to independence; who led you triumphantly through the perils

TIES THAT BIND THE WEST TO US.

29

of a seven years' war, and sternly refused the diadem with which a grateful soldiery would have crowned him. It was a Southern general and Southern soldiers who breasted the British bayonets at New Orleans, and added one of its brightest chapters to the history of the Republic. Southern blood has watered every plain from the St. Lawrence to the capital of the Aztecs. The memorable fields of Palo Alto, and Resaca de la Palma were won by a Southern general. It was before the genius of a Southern leader, that the walls and towers of Monterey crumbled into dust; and two Southern regiments, struggling side by side in a glorious rivalry, snatched from the cannon's mouth the palm of victory. In the narrow gorge of Angostura, Southern valor again stemmed the tide of war, and rolled back the murderous charges of the foe. On the sands of Vera Cruz, another great name which the South has given to history and renown, added to a fame already imperishable, and wrung from the reluctant nations of the Old World, plaudits which they could not withhold. At Cerro Gordo, the story of Southern achievements was re-written in blood; and among the rocks and volcanoes of Contreras, the glorious old Palmetto State vindicated her right to the title of chivalrous, and silenced forever the tongues of her detractors. Sir, I mean to indulge in no disparagement of the North. She has furnished gallant men who have done their duty nobly upon the field. I would not, if I could, tear a single laurel from her brow. But I claim that the record gives to us at least an equality of the common dangers, the common sufferings, and the common triumphs, and I demand an equal participation in the rights they have established.

XV.-TIES THAT BIND THE WEST TO US.

EDWARD EVERETT.

THE states and nations which are springing up in the valley of the Missouri, are bound to us by the dearest ties of a common language, a common government, and a common descent. Before New England can look with coldness on their rising myriads, she must forget that some of her own best blood is beating in their veins; that her hardy children, with

their axes on their shoulders, have been among the pioneers in the march of humanity; that young as she is, she has become the mother of populous states. What generous mind would sacrifice to a selfish preservation of local preponderance the delight of beholding civilized nations rising up in the desert; and the language, the manners, the principles in which he has been reared, carried, with his household gods, to the foot of the Rocky Mountains? Who can forget, that this extension of our territorial limits is the extension of the empire of all we hold dear; of our laws, of our character, of the memory of our ancestors, of the great achievements in our history? Whithersoever the sons of the thirteen States shall wander, to the southern or western climes, they will send back their hearts to the rocky shores, the fertile fields, the infant settlements of the Atlantic coast. These are placed beyond the reach of vicissitude. They have already become matter of history, of poetry, of eloquence.

Divisions may spring up, ill blood may burn, parties be formed, and interests may seem to clash; but the great bonds of the nation are linked to what is past. The deeds of the great men, to whom this country owes its origin and growth, are a patrimony, I know, of which its children will never deprive themselves. As long as the Mississippi and Missouri shall flow, those men, and those deeds, will be remembered on their banks. The sceptre of government may go where it will; but that of patriotic feeling can never depart from Judah. In all that mighty region which is drained by the Missouri and its tributary streams,-the valley coëxtensive, in this country, with the temperate zone,—will there be, as long as the name of America shall last, a father that will not take his children on his knee, and recount to them the events of the twenty-second of December, the nineteenth of April, the seventeenth of June, and the fourth of July?

This then is the theatre on which the intellect of America is to appear, and such the motives to its exertion; such the mass to be influenced by its energies; such the glory to crown its success. If I err in this happy vision of my country's fortunes, I thank Heaven for an error so animating. If this be false, may I never know the truth.

PATRIOTIC APPEAL.

31

XVI-PATRIOTIC APPEAL.

J. M'DOWELL.

GIVE us but a part of that devotion which glowed in the heart of the younger Pitt, and of our own elder Adams, who, in the midst of their agonies, forgot not the countries they had lived for, but mingled with the spasms of their dying hour a last and imploring appeal to the Parent of all Mercies that he would remember, in eternal blessings, the land of their birth: give us their devotion, give us that of the young enthusiast of Paris, who listening to Mirabeau in one of his surpassing vindications of human right, and seeing him fall from his stand, dying, as a physician proclaimed, for the want of blood, rushed to the spot, and as he bent over the expiring man, bared his arm for the lancet, and cried again, and again, with impassioned voice-“ Here, take it—take it— oh! take it from me, let me die, so that Mirabeau and the liberties of my country may not perish " Give us something only of such a spirit as this-something only of such a love of country, and we are safe, forever safe: the troubles which shadow over and oppress us now, will pass away as a summer cloud. No measure of unalienable wrong, no measure of unconquerable disagreement, will be pressed upon us here. The fatal element of all our discord will be taken from amongst us. Let gentlemen be entreated to remove it as the one only and solitary obstacle to our perfect peace. Let them be adjured by the weal of this and coming ages-by our own and our children's good-by all that we love or that we look for in the progress and the glories of our land, to leave the entire subject of slavery, with every accountability it may impose, every remedy it may require, every accumulation of difficulty or pressure it may reach; to leave it all to the interest, to the wisdom, and to the conscience of those upon whom the providence of God and the Constitution of their country have cast it. Leave it to them now and forever, and stop, whilst it is yet possible to stop, the furious and blind headway of that wild and mad philanthropy, which is lighting up for the nation itself the fires of the stake, and which is rushing on, stride after stride, to an intestine struggle that may bring us all under a harder, and wickeder, and more incurable slavery, than any it would extinguish.