And then, in order to mark how complete these provisions are for the security of the States, shows that while the States thus hold the functionaries of the United States to these several responsibilities, the State functionaries, on the other hand, in their appointment and responsibility, are "altogether independent of the agency or authority of the United States."
Of the doctrine of nullification, "the expedient lately advanced," the letter says:
"The distinguished names and high authorities which appear to have asserted and given a practical scope to this doctrine, entitle it to a respect which it might be difficult otherwise to feel for it."
"The resolutions of Virginia, as vindicated in the report on them, will be found entitled to an exposition, showing a consistency in their parts, and an inconsistency of the whole with the doctrine under consideration."
"That the legislature could not have intended to sanction any such doctrine is to be inferred from the debates in the House of Delegates. The tenor of the debates, which were ably conducted, discloses no reference whatever to a constitutional right in an individual State to arrest by force a law of the United States."
"If any further light on the subject could be needed, a very strong one is reflected in the answers to the resolutions, by the States which protested against them.... Had the resolutions been regarded as avowing and maintaining a right, in an individual State, to arrest by force the execution of a law of the United States, it must be presumed that it would have been a conspicuous object of their denunciation."
In a letter to Mr. Joseph C. Cabell, May 31, 1830, Mr. Madison says:
"I received yesterday yours of the 26th. Having never concealed my opinions of the nullifying doctrines of South Carolina, I did not regard the allusion to it in the Whig, especially as the manner of the allusion showed that I did not obtrude it.... I have latterly been drawn into a correspondence with an advocate of the doctrine, which led me to a review of it to some extent, and particularly to a vindication of the proceedings of Virginia in 1798, '99, against the misuse made of them. That you may see the views I have taken of the aberrations of South Carolina, I enclose you an extract."
And in a letter to Mr. Daniel Webster, written a few days previously, he uses nearly the same language; as also in a letter in February, 1830, to Mr. Trist.
To Mr. James Robertson, March 27, 1831, Mr. Madison writes as follows:
"The veil which was originally over the draft of the resolutions offered in 1798 to the Virginia Assembly having been long since removed, I may say, in answer to your inquiries, that it was penned by me."
"With respect to the terms following the term 'unconstitutional,' viz., 'not law, but null, void, and of no force or effect,' which were stricken out of the seventh resolution, my memory cannot say positively whether they were or were not in the original draft, and no copy of it appears to have been retained. On the presumption that they were in the draft as it went from me, I am confident that they must have been regarded only as giving accumulated emphasis to the declaration, that the alien and sedition acts had, in the opinion of the assembly, violated the constitution of the United States, and not that the addition of them could annul the acts or sanction a resistance of them. The resolution was expressly declaratory, and, proceeding from the legislature only, which was not even a party to the constitution, could be declaratory of opinion only."
To Joseph C. Cabell, Sept. 16, 1831: