The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences: Four Periods of American History

by Hilary A. Herbert

The first of the Kentucky resolutions was as follows:

"Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government, but that by compact, under the style and title of a constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for specific purposes, delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no effect: That to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: That the government created by this compact, was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its direction, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has a right to judge for itself as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress."

Undoubtedly it is from the famous resolutions of 1798-9 that the secessionists of a later date drew their arguments. The authors of these celebrated resolutions were, both of them, devoted friends of the Union they had helped to construct. Why should they announce a theory of the Constitution that was so full of dangerous possibilities?

The answer is, they were announcing the theory upon which the States, or at least many of the States, had ten years before ratified the Constitution. A crisis in the life of the new government had now come. Congress had usurped powers not given; it had exercised powers that had been prohibited, and the government was enforcing the obnoxious statutes with a high hand. Dissatisfaction was intense.

Jefferson and Madison were undoubtedly Republican partisans, Jefferson especially; but it is equally certain that they were both friends of the Union, and as such they concluded, with the lights before them, that the wise course would be to submit to the people, in ample time for full consideration, before the then coming presidential election, a full, clear, and comprehensive exposition of the Constitution precisely as they, and as the people, then understood it. This they did in the resolutions of 1798 and 1799, and the very same voters who had created the Constitution of 1789, now, with their sons to aid them, endorsed these resolutions in the election of 1800, which had been laid before them by the legislatures of two Republican States as a correct construction of that instrument.

The Republicans under Jefferson came into power with an immense majority. The people were satisfied with the Constitution as it had been construed in the election of 1800, and the country under control of the Republicans was happy and prosperous for three decades. Then the party in power began to split into National Republicans and Democratic Republicans. The National Republicans favored a liberal construction of the Constitution and became Whigs; the Democratic Republicans dropped the name Republican and became Democrats.

The foregoing sketch has been given with no intent to write a political history, but only to show with what emphasis the American people condemned all violations of the Constitution up to the time when, in 1831, our story of the Abolitionists is to begin. The sketch has also served to explain the theory of State-rights, as it was held in early days, and later, by the Southern people.

Whether the union of the States under the Constitution as expounded by the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions would survive every trial that was to come, remained to be seen. The question was destined to perplex Mr. Jefferson himself, more than once.

Indeed, even while Washington was President there had been disunion sentiment in Congress. In 1794 the celebrated Virginian, John Taylor, of Caroline, shortly after he had expressed an intention of publicly resigning from the United States Senate, was approached in the privacy of a committee room by Rufus King, senator from New York, and Oliver Ellsworth, a senator from Massachusetts, both Federalists, with a proposition for a dissolution of the Union by mutual consent, the line of division to be somewhere from the Potomac to the Hudson. This was on the ground "that it was utterly impossible for the Union to continue. That the Southern and the Eastern people thought quite differently," etc. Taylor contended for the Union, and nothing came of the conference, the story of which remained a secret for over a hundred years.[3]

"In the winter of 1803-4, immediately after, and as a consequence of, the acquisition of Louisiana, certain leaders of the Federal party conceived the project of the dissolution of the Union and the establishment of a Northern Confederacy, the justifying causes to those who entertained it, that the acquisition of Louisiana to the Union transcended the constitutional powers of the government of the United States; that it created, in fact, a new confederacy to which the States, united by the former compact, were not bound to adhere; that it was oppressive of the interests and destructive of the influence of the northern section of the Confederacy, whose right and duty it was therefore to secede from the new body politic, and to constitute one of their own."[4]