"I congratulate you on the event which restores you to the public councils, where your services will be valuable, particularly in defending the constitution and Union against the false doctrines which assail them. That of nullification seems to be generally abandoned in Virginia, by those who had most leaning towards it. But it still flourishes in the hot-bed where it sprung up."
"I know not whence the idea could proceed that I concurred in the doctrine, that although a State could not nullify a law of the Union, it had a right to secede from the Union. Both spring from the same poisonous root."
To Mr. N. P. Trist, December, 1831:
"I cannot see the advantage of this perseverance of South Carolina in claiming the authority of the Virginia proceedings in 1798, '99, as asserting a right in a single State to nullify an act of the United States. Where, indeed, is the fairness of attempting to palm on Virginia an intention which is contradicted by such a variety of contradictory proofs; which has at no intervening period, received the slightest countenance from her, and which with one voice she now disclaims?"
"To view the doctrine in its true character, it must be recollected that it asserts a right in a single State to stop the execution of a federal law, until a convention of the States could be brought about by a process requiring an uncertain time; and, finally, in the convention, when formed, a vote of seven States, if in favor of the veto, to give it a prevalence over the vast majority of seventeen States. For this preposterous and anarchical pretension there is not a shadow of countenance in the constitution; and well that there is not, for it is certain that, with such a deadly poison in it, no constitution could be sure of lasting a year."
To Mr. C. E. Haynes, August 26, 1832:
"In the very crippled and feeble state of my health, I cannot undertake an extended answer to your inquiries, nor should I suppose it necessary if you have seen my letter to Mr. Everett, in August, 1830, in which the proceedings of Virginia, in 1798-'99, were explained, and the novel doctrine of nullification adverted to.
"The distinction is obvious between such interpositions on the part of the States against unjustifiable acts of the federal government as are within the provisions and forms of the constitution. These provisions and forms certainly do not embrace the nullifying process proclaimed in South Carolina, which begins with a single State, and ends with the ascendency of a minority of States over a majority; of seven over seventeen; a federal law, during the process, being arrested within the nullifying State; and, if a revenue law, frustrated through all the States."
To Mr. Trist, December 23, 1832:
"If one State can, at will, withdraw from the others, the others can, at will, withdraw from her, and turn her nolentem volentem out of the Union. Until of late, there is not a State that would have abhorred such a doctrine more than South Carolina, or more dreaded an application of it to herself. The same may be said of the doctrine of nullification which she now preaches as the only faith by which the Union can be saved."
In a letter to Mr. Joseph C. Cabell, December 28, 1832:
"It is not probable that (in the adoption of the resolutions of 1798), such an idea as the South Carolina nullification had ever entered the thoughts of a single member, or even that of a citizen of South Carolina herself."
To Andrew Stevenson, February 4, 1833: