23

At the session of the next Congress the same Senator spoke
as follows:

"But Southern gentlemen stand here and in almost all
their speeches speak of the dissolution of the Union as an
element of every argument, as though it were a peculiar
condescension on their part that they permitted the Union to
stand at all. If they do not feel interested in upholding this
Union, if it really trenches on their rights, if it endangers
their institutions to such an extent that they do not feel
secure under it, if their interests are violently assailed by
means of this Union, I am not one of those who expect that
they will continue long under it. I am not of those who
would ask them to continue in such a Union. It would be
doing violence to the platform of the party to which I belong.
We have adopted the old Declaration of Independence as the
basis of our political movement, which declares that any
people, when the government ceases to protect their rights,
when it is so subverted from the true purposes of government
as to oppress them, have a right to recur to fundamental
principles, and if need be to -destroy the government under
which they live, and to erect on its ruins another more con-
ducive to their welfare. I hold that they have this right.—
I will not blame any people for exercising it whenever they
think the contingency has come. You cannot forcibly hold
men in this Union for the attempt to do so, it seems to me
would subvert the first principles of the government under
which we live."

In 1859, a large political meeting of the "Sons of Liberty"
in Ohio, adopted the following ressolution.

"Resolved, That the several States comprising the United
States of America are not united on the principle of unlimit-
ed submission to their General Government, but that by com-
pact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United
States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a Gen-
eral Government for special purposess delegated to that gov-
ernment certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself
the residuary mass of right to their own self-government, and
that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegat-
ed powers, its acts are unathorative, void and of no force;
and, being void, can derive no validity from mere judicial
interpretation; that in this compact each State acceded as a
State, and is an integral party; that this Government created
by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of
the extent of the powers delegated to itself since that would
have made ita discretion and not the Constitution the measure
of its powers, but that, as in all other cases of compact among
parties having no common judge, each party has an equal
right to judge tor itselt as well of infractions as of the mode
and measure of redress."

The resolution is an exact copy of the Kentucky resolution