with the
letter and the spirit of the Constitution, are constitutional."

Fortified thus, the Constitution became the rock upon which
nationalism was built and by 1833 there were few persons who
questioned the supremacy of the Federal Government, as did South
Carolina with its threats of nullification. Because of the beginning
of the intense slavery agitation not long thereafter, however, and the
division of the Democratic party into a national and a proslavery
group, the latter advocating State's rights to secure the perpetuation
of slavery, there followed a reaction after the death of John Marshall
in 1835, when the court abandoned to some extent the advanced position
of nationalism of this great jurist and drifted toward the localism
long since advocated by Judge Roane of Virginia.

In making the national government the patron of slavery, a new sort of
nationalism as a defence of that institution developed thereafter,
however, and culminated in the Dred Scott decision.[4] To justify the
high-handed methods to protect the master's property right in the
bondman, these jurists not only referred to the doctrines of Marshall
already set forth above but relied also upon the decisions of Justice
Storey, the nationalist surviving Chief Justice Marshall. They
believed with Storey that a constitution of government founded by the
people for themselves and their posterity and for objects of the most
momentous nature--for perpetual union, for the establishment of
justice, for the general welfare and for a perpetuation of the
blessings of liberty--necessarily requires that every interpretation
of its powers have a constant reference to those objects. No
interpretation of the words in which those powers are granted can be a
sound one which narrows down every ordinary import so as to defeat
those objects.

In the decision of _Prigg_ v. _Pennsylvania_, when the effort was to
carry out the fugitive slave law,[5] the court, speaking through
Justice Storey in 1842, believed that the clause of the Constitution
conferring a right should not be so construed as to make it shadowy or
unsubstantial or leave the citizen without the power adequate for its
protection when another construction equally accordant with the words
and the sense in which they were used would enforce and protect the
right granted. The court believed that Congress is not restricted to
legislation for the execution of its expressly granted powers; but for
the protect