The session was one
of peculiar interest. Great questions agitated the public mind, and were
treated greatly. Two great parties, springing from the very foundations
of our civil polity, strove for supremacy in our legislative halls. The
one, looking into the depths of our colonial history, took its stand on
the unquestionable truth, that each state of the Union was sovereign
over herself, from which was drawn the corollary, that she was as free
to leave as she had been to enter the Union. The other contended that
the present constitution of these United States defined the boundary of
the powers of each state, as well as of the great whole into which they
had been voluntarily fused; that to look behind that, was such a resort
to first principles or natural rights, as is involved in revolution, and
must be decided as revolution ever is, by the relative strength of the
ruling and the revolting forces.
On neither side was there any trickery, any bullying, any flimsy display
of rhetorical power. All was grand as the subject for which they
contended, solemn as the doom to which they seemed, approaching. In the
chief magistrate of that time all saw the unflinching executor of the
nation's will--a man whose words were the sure prefigurements of his
deeds.
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