coerce South Carolina into submission, or punish her assertion of her rights, by abolishing the Charleston port of entry.[1]
To the Union men, however, Calhoun was not of unimpeachable authority. His Hamilton letter was picked to pieces and every position he took severely criticized. These writers agreed with Calhoun that the Constitution was a compact between states, who were sovereign and free to accept or reject it. But they held that through its convention each state in accepting the Constitution had bound all its citizens to 'the new obligations of the Union and relinquished all authority to determine whether a certain power exercised by the general government was or was not granted by the Constitution, They denied the analogy which Calhoun set up between the federal Constitution and a treaty between sovereign nations, saying that the ratification of the Constitution had not been a purely international transaction; that its completion had effected an essential change in the political condition of the inhabitants of the states ratifying it; that a transfusion or a mutual interchange of rights and duties had taken place, commingling, in a political
- ↑ Mercury, September 26, 1832; Messenger, September 15.
