On March 30, Spencer Roane opened fire in the paper of his cousin Thomas Ritchie, the Enquirer,[865] under the nom de guerre of "Amphictyon." His first article is able, calm, and, considering his intense feelings, fair and moderate. Roane even extols his enemy:
"That this opinion is very able every one must admit. This was to have been expected, proceeding as it does from a man of the most profound legal attainments, and upon a subject which has employed his thoughts, his tongue, and his pen, as a politician, and an historian for more than thirty years. The subject, too, is one which has, perhaps more than any other, heretofore drawn a broad line of distinction between the two great parties in this country, on which line no one has taken a more distinguished and decided rank than the judge who has thus expounded the supreme law of the land. It is not in my power to carry on a contest upon such a subject with a man of his gigantic powers."[866]
Niles had spoken to "the plain people"; Roane is now addressing the lawyers and judges of the country. His essay is almost wholly a legal argument. It is based on the Virginia Resolutions of 1799 and gives the familiar State Rights arguments, applying them to Marshall's opinion.[867] In his second article Roane grows vehement, even fiery, and finally exclaims that Virginia "never will employ force to support her doctrines till other measures have entirely failed."[868]
His attacks had great and immediate response. No sooner had copies of the Enquirer containing the first letters of Amphictyon reached Kentucky than the Republicans of that State declared war on Marshall. On April 20, the Enquirer printed the first Western response to Roane's call to arms. Marshall's principles, said the Kentucky correspondent, "must raise an alarm throughout our widely extended empire.... The people must rouse from the lap of Delilah and prepare to meet the Philistines.... No mind can compass the extent of the encroachments upon State and individual rights which may take place under the principles of this decision."[869]
SPENCER ROANE
Even Marshall, a political and judicial veteran in his sixty-fifth year, was perturbed. "The opinion in the Bank case continues to be denounced by the democracy in Virginia," he writes Story, after the second of Roane's articles appeared. "An effort is certainly making to induce the legislature which will meet in December to take up the subject & to pass resolutions not very unlike those which were called forth by the alien & sedition laws in 1799. Whether the effort will be successful or not may perhaps depend in some measure on the sentiments of our sister states. To excite this ferment the opinion has been grossly misrepresented; and where its argument has been truly stated it has been met by principles one would think too palpably absurd for intelligent men.
"But," he gloomily continues, "prejudice will swallow anything. If the principles which have been advanced on this occasion were to prevail the constitution would be converted into the old confederation."[870]
As yet Roane had struck but lightly. He now renewed the Republican offensive with greater spirit. During June, 1819, the Enquirer published four articles signed "Hampden," from Roane's pen. Ritchie introduced the "Hampden" essays in an editorial in which he urged the careful reading of the exposure "of the alarming errors of the Supreme Court.... Whenever State rights are threatened or invaded, Virginia will not be the last to sound the tocsin."[871]
Are the people prepared "to give carte blanche to our federal rulers"? asked Hampden. Amendment of the Constitution by judicial interpretation is taking the place of amendment by the people. Infamous as the methods of National judges had been during the administration of Adams, "the most abandoned of our rulers," Marshall and his associates have done worse. They have given "a general letter of attorney to the future legislators of the Union.... That man must be a deplorable idiot who does not see that there is no ... difference" between an "unlimited grant of power and a grant limited in its terms, but accompanied with unlimited means of carrying it into execution.... The crisis is one which portends destruction to the liberties of the American people." Hampden scoldingly adds: "If Mason or Henry could lift their patriot heads from the grave, ... they would almost exclaim, with Jugurtha, 'Venal people! you will soon perish if you can find a purchaser.'"[872]