The New England Weekly Review

NULLIFICATION.

The spirit of nullification is certainly dominant at the present time in South Carolina. Where it will end we know not, but it casts a dark and evil shadow before it. It has enlisted in its cause men from whom we might have expected different things—some of South Carolina's most talented sons—men who have boasted of their republican principles and their devoted attachment to the best interests of the nation.—The remarks in the message of the President—a document very exceptionable in most respects—on the subject of the preservation of the Federal Union, are deserving of commendation, containing as they do, a merited rebuke of the factionists of the South. They constitute a single good feature in the midst of general deformity.

In the same spirit that we have ever condemned the principles which resulted in the far-famed "Hartford Convention," we now condemn the anti republican movements of the South. They are both deserving of severe censure: and we know not how to account for the fact, that those who once denounced the members of the New England Convention as 'traitors, should adopt the very principles which were advocated by those members. Still less are we able to furnish the shadow of a reason for the course pursued by some of our New England brethren. The very men who established the Hartford Convention, and defended its disunion doctrines, are now loud and bitter in their denunciations of Southern Nullification. We dislike this inconsistency. Let the doctrines of the Hartford Convention fall under the same ban of execration which is cast upon the dangerous and revolutionary doctrines of the Disunionists of South Carolina.

The resolution of the Hartford Convention, which called down the execrations of the united South upon the heads of those who adopted it, is as follows:-

"When emergencies occur which are either beyond the reach of the judicial tribunals, or too pressing to admit of the delay incident to their forms, States which have no Common Umpire, must be their own judges and execute their own decisions."

Now let us look at the doctrine of South Carolina, as expressed by her Legislature:-

"The Constitution of the United States being a federal compact between sovereign states, in construing which no COMMON ARBITER is known, each State has the right to construe the compact for itself."

Who now are traitors? For our own part, we frankly confess we can see no difference in the doctrines of the two resolutions. They are the same—in letter and spirit—equally dangerous, anti republican, and fallacious.