1861, said that the States who think their peculiar institutions require a separate Government, "have a right to decide that question without appealing to you or to me." A convention in Ohio in 1859, declared the Constitution a compact to which each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, and that each State had the right to judge for itself of infractions, and of the mode and measure of redress, and to this declaration Giddings, Wade, Chase, and Denison assented.

CHAPTER IX.

IN the earlier years of the Government, it was viewed as a doubtful experiment by many good men in America, and regarded with aversion and hostility by the rulers and the Governments of the old world. Our free institutions were adjudged and disparaged as a protest against tyranny and absolutism, a defiant declaration of the personal and civil rights of the people, and a challenge to all the world to show cause why a few families should usurp the prerogative of dominion. The feeling which ultimately led to the Holy Alliance and the league of reigning dynasties in Europe against popular liberties, and the covenant for mutual support against popular revolution, showed insulting and unrelenting hatred of the principles of our representative Government. Our claim to equality among the nations of the earth was disregarded and denied. The United States was contemptuously ignored and habitually maltreated. The ocean was not free to us. Our flag was not respected. The laws of nations were construed as inapplicable to us. Great Britain, sore and mortified at her loss of Colonies, and at their rapid growth in wealth and power, took the lead in measures resentful

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and disdainful, and studiously sought to reduce the United States to inequality, and to make us feel and acknowledge inferiority. Our commerce was crippled, our vessels were visited and searched, our sailors were impressed. Claims for indemnity, demands for reparation, protests against national wrongs, were unheeded or causelessly procrastinated, and every injury seemed only a provocation and a license to greater wrongs and outrages. Our Embargo and Non-Intercourse acts, punitive of our enemies and protective of ourselves, failed of their purpose abroad and encountered bitterest opposition in New England. A struggle for supremacy between France and England, a fierce and mighty war, commanding all their passions and energies, made these belligerents disregard our rights and interests as a neutral and peaceable power and our independence as one of the nations of the earth. England, having the largest navy and the immunity of her island home, was especially conspicuous, wilful and insolent in violating neutral rights and prosecuting a quasi war, subjecting our maritime rights to the arbitrary rule of her will. Vessels were seized in our own ports and confiscated, sailors were torn from ships floating the Stars and Stripes, and coerced into service on English men-of-war. At that period, Calhoun came into the House of Representatives, and he and Clay and Crawford and Cheves and Lowndes and Forsyth and Grundy and Troup and R. M.

Johnson, in burning words of indignant patriotism,' aroused the country by showing England's purpose to drive our flag from the seas and reduce us again to colonial vassalage. They made the people see that the only alternative was war or degradation. The opposition this resistance to English wrong encountered gave the contest in Congress somewhat of a sectional aspect. "The war of 1812," says Adams, "was chiefly remarkable for the vehemence with which, from beginning to end, it was resisted and thwarted by a very large number of citizens, .. who considered themselves by no means the least respectable, intelligent, or patriotic part of the nation.” 2

As early as 1793, when peace with Europe was endangered by Genet's machinations, there were those in New England who, in no dubious language, urged that a dissolution of the Union was preferable to a war with Great Britain. Timothy Dwight wrote: "A war with Great Britain we, at least in New England, will not enter into. Sooner would ninety-nine out of one hundred of our inhabitants separate from the Union than plunge themselves into an abyss of misery." The inconsistent attitude of New England was a little remarkable. In 1748, resistance to a press-gang resulted in a riot in the

16 Hildreth's U. S., 259, 260.

26 Adams's Hist. of the U. S., 224, 229.

3 4 Hildreth, 412, 440, 477-8. I Von Holst, 112-118. Butler's Effect of the War of 1812, 10.

streets of Boston. In 1768, the frigate Romney, guarding the harbor of Boston, seized several of the citizens and impressed them as seamen. The insolence was then stigmatized as wanton cruelty and violative of natural right. As a rule the Eastern States were opposed to the war, but President Madison of Virginia recommended a declaration. His message complained that British cruisers had violated the American flag on the ocean, and seized and carried off persons sailing under it, that they had violated the peace of the coasts and harassed entering and departing commerce; that the British Government had established fictitious blockades without the presence of an adequate force, and sometimes without the practicability of applying one, by means of all which American commerce had been plundered on every sea, and that it had perpetrated this wrong most flagrantly by a system of blockades known as the Orders in Council. Mr. Calhoun, of South Carolina, reported from the Committee on Foreign Affairs a bill recognizing war. All the Senators and Representatives from South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Louisiana, and the most of them from Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, supported the declaration, which had the concurrence of such cities as Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans.

Governor Strong of Massachusetts issued a Proclamation for a public fast in consequence of the war just declared "against the nation