1850-eo] The States and the Union. 411 But what if a single State should act? What if South Carolina should act alone, how far might she go ? What was it her right to do ? This question the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions had not answered ; but Calhoun answered it very explicitly. It was her right, he said, when all reasonable hope of redress through any other channel had failed, to call upon her electors to choose a convention, such a con- vention as might amend her constitution and shape her exercise of sovereignty in other matters ; and that convention might declare the Acts complained of null and void, because contrary to the federal pact, and therefore not binding upon her citizens. Such a thing should not be done as an act of revolution. It should be so planned and executed, with such deliberations, delays, and postponements, and such ample opportunities for conciliation, compromise, and adjustment, that it would operate merely as a check upon the national government and give both time and motive for a final settlement. The escape from the crisis must be, not the revolt or permanent recalcitrancy of a single State, but an appeal to the power which had made the Constitution and which had the final right to interpret its intent and meaning, to the association of sovereign States. If the general government was not willing to yield in the matter in controversy, it must call a constitutional convention, such as that " for proposing amendments," which the Constitution itself provided for. With that convention, in which the States as principals to the federal compact would be present in the persons of their delegates, it would rest to determine, by a majority representing two-thirds of the sovereign commonwealths, the merits of the controversy. If these sovereign principals, by the constitutional majority of two-thirds, should declare the powers complained of to have been rightly exercised by the Federal government, it would be as if the Constitution had been amended and those powers explicitly added; and the State, or States, whose protests had brought the convention together would be in duty bound either to submit or to quit the Union. Calhoun was too sane a thinker, too sincere a lover of the Union and of the ideals which it had set before the world, too much of a statesman and master in affairs to be guilty of so great a solecism as to maintain what some who had not examined his argument supposed him to maintain, that a State could permanently "nullify" a law of the United States and yet remain a member of the Union. Nullification was in his doctrine but a means of bringing federal action to a standstill in respect of some single matter of critical controversy until a power higher than Congress that power which he conceived to be the real and only sovereign power under the Constitution had acted, and a final determination had been made of the question of right. He deemed the Supreme Court of the United States an unsuitable forum in which to determine such matters of sovereign right, because it was but an agency of the very government whose powers in the case supposed were in dispute. Arbitrament must CH. XIII.
