not only brought the South no
benefit but interfered with its markets and raised the cost of certain
of its staple supplies. They opposed internal improvements at national
expense because of their consolidating tendency, and because few of
the projects carried out were of large advantage to the Southern
people. They regarded the National Bank as at best useless; and they
resisted federal legislation imposing restrictions on slavery as
prejudicial to vested rights in the "peculiar institution."

After 1820 the pendulum swung rapidly back toward particularism. State
rights sentiment was freely expressed by men, both Southern and
Northern, whose views commanded respect; and in more than one
State--notably in Ohio and Georgia--bold actions proclaimed this
sentiment to be no mere matter of academic opinion. Ohio in 1819
forcibly collected a tax on the United States Bank in defiance of the
Supreme Court's decision in the case of M'Culloch _vs._ Maryland; and
in 1821 her Legislature reaffirmed the doctrines of the Virginia and
Kentucky resolutions and persisted in resistance, even after the
Supreme Court had rendered a decision[9] specifically against the
position which the State had taken. Judge Roane of Virginia, in a
series of articles in the _Richmond Enquirer_, argued that the Federal
Union was a compact among the States and that the nationalistic
reasoning of his fellow Virginian, Marshall, in the foregoing
decisions was false; and Jefferson heartily endorsed his views. In
Cohens _vs._ Virginia, in 1821, the Supreme Court held that it had
appellate jurisdiction in a case decided by a state court where the
Constitution and laws of the United States were involved, even though
a State was a party; whereupon the Virginia House of Delegates
declared that the State's lawyers had been right in their contention
that final construction of the Constitution lay with the courts of the
States. Jefferson, also, gave this assertion his support, and
denounced the centralizing tendencies of the Judiciary, "which,
working like gravity without any intermission, is to press us at last
into one consolidated mass."

In 1825 Jefferson actually proposed that the Virginia Legislature
should pass a set of resolutions pronouncing null and void the whole
body of federal laws on the subject of internal improvements. The
Georgia Legislature, aroused by growing antislavery activities in the
North, declared in 1827 that the remedy lay in "a firm and