over jealous disposition, such an examination will always prove a wholesome measure.
On the present occasion, it will be unnecessary for me to enter into any particular statement of our private sufferings, or the threatening aspect of our public situation, in relation to the unprecedented acts of our General Government which are accumulating upon us. The individual feelings and experience of the members of this Legislature, now convened from all parts of the State, will speak the private distresses which have been produced by these acts: and your general information will give you, gentlemen, a correct view of the dangers which impend our public interests, liberty, rights and property, arising from the same source. Despairing of substantial relief from any other quarter, the people are now looking with anxious solicitude and hope, to the wisdom and direction of the Legislature of their own choice; and seem confident that some mode may be devised to remove the pressure under which they are at present suffering. To your collected wisdom and prudence they submit the task. And may it not be hoped, that, with our united efforts under a temperate, discreet and firm consideration of our situation and circumstances, we may be able by the influence of divine aid, to fulfil the just and reasonable expectations of our fellow citizens? Whenever our national legislature is led to overleap the prescribed bounds of their constitutional powers, on the State Legislatures, in great emergencies, devolves the arduous task—it is their right—it becomes their duty, to interpose their protecting shield between the right and liberty of the people, and the assumed power of the General Government. *******
21. Resolutions of the General Assembly.
At a special session of the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut, held at Hartford, on the twenty-third day of February, A. D. 1809.
This Assembly have attended with anxious concern, to the several acts of Congress interdicting foreign commerce, and more especially to an act, approved on the 9th day of January last, by the President of the United States, under the title of "An Act, to
