The Nullifiers Capture the Legislature
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power?[1] The Union men insisted that their opponents were forced to admit that a state convention could not go counter to the federal Constitution, and yet that these same opponents tried, in a most amusing manner, to justify the incompatible power of a state convention to violate the federal Constitution and bind the citizens of the state to acquiesce in the violation. The Union men pronounced the contradiction "too palpable for the subtlest power of sophistry to gloss over or disguise."[2]
- ↑ Patriot, September 18, 1832.
- ↑ Courier, November 15, 1832. The Mercury and the Courier debated this question back and forth until the Courier said: "The Mercury very prudently declines the further prosecution of a controversy in which it had involved itself in an inexplicable paradox. A Constitution paramount to a convention and yet that convention paramount over the citizen in contravention of the Constitution, is not a matter of every day comprehension; it can only be understood in certain phases of the moon. If we now understand the Mercury aright, a state in convention is only amenable for her misdeeds to the law of nations. This is a denial, instead of an admission of the paramount authority of the federal Constitution, and is merely the assertion of the right of revolution or secession. If the convention should place the state out of the pale of the Union, there would be great reason in the argument of the Mercury, that every citizen would be bound to adhere to the state in opposition to every other power. But not until then. If that is the intention of the Mercury party, then was the Columbia writer very near the truth when he proclaimed that the Union was already dissolved" (Courier, November 17, 1832).
