the channel of intercourse reopened by which
the produce of Europe was transmitted to the New World, the Americans
thought fit to establish a system of import duties, for the twofold
purpose of protecting their incipient manufactures and of paying off the
amount of the debt contracted during the war. The Southern States,
which have no manufactures to encourage, and which are exclusively
agricultural, soon complained of this measure. Such were the simple
facts, and I do not pretend to examine in this place whether their
complaints were well founded or unjust.

[Footnote a: See principally for the details of this affair, the
Legislative Documents, 22d Congress, 2d Session, No. 30.]

As early as the year 1820, South Carolina declared, in a petition
to Congress, that the tariff was "unconstitutional, oppressive, and
unjust." And the States of Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama,
and Mississippi subsequently remonstrated against it with more or less
vigor. But Congress, far from lending an ear to these complaints, raised
the scale of tariff duties in the years 1824 and 1828, and recognized
anew the principle on which it was founded. A doctrine was then
proclaimed, or rather revived, in the South, which took the name of
Nullification.

I have shown in the proper place that the object of the Federal
Constitution was not to form a league, but to create a national
government. The Americans of the United States form a sole and undivided
people, in all the cases which are specified by that Constitution; and
upon these points the will of the nation is expressed, as it is in all
constitutional nations, by the voice of the majority. When the majority
has pronounced its decision, it is the duty of the minority to submit.
Such is the sound legal doctrine, and the only one which agrees with the
text of the Constitution, and the known intention of those who framed
it.

The partisans of Nullification in the South maintain, on the contrary,
that the intention of the Americans in uniting was not to reduce
themselves to the condition of one and the same people; that they meant
to constitute a league of independent States; and that each State,
consequently retains its entire sovereignty, if not de facto, at least
de jure; and has the right of putting its own construction upon the laws
of Congress, and of suspending their execution within the limits of its
own territory, if they are held to be unconstitutional and unjust.

The e