Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/379

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360
Nullification Controversy in South Carolina

to 86, though the State Rights party would have accepted it at any other time; the majority saw no reason to antagonize the Union men further.[1]

The compromise was hailed with satisfaction throughout the Union. The State Rights papers outside of South Carolina were reported to approve, and the opposition papers seemed to think it a great victory because the legislature declared the oath to require only such allegiance as every citizen owed to the state consistently with the Constitution of the United States. The State Rights men considered this strange, when not a word was changed in the oath and it had always required the person taking it to support the Constitution of the United States.[2] As a matter of interpretation as to the extent of this support in case of conflict between the state and the federal governments, however, the Union men believed that before the assurance held out in the report the federal government would have been deserted for the state. In South Carolina the Columbia Times, a State Rights paper, and the Greenville Mountaineer,

  1. Hammond Papers: I. W. Hayne to Hammond, December 8, 1834. Messenger, December 17, 24, 1834; Niles' Register, December 27.
  2. Messenger, January 14, 1835.