Nullification to Save the Constitution

[Draggingtree]

Nullification to Save the Constitution

By Henry Laurens Pinckney on

 

Jun 20, 2016

 

Editor’s note: This article is excerpted from an 1833 4th of July Oration delivered by Henry L. Pinckney and is available in its entirety at The James McClellan Library. This feature of our website contains over 100 primary documents on State’s Rights and federalism compiled by one of the founding members of the Abbeville Institute.

 

….But why is it that a day, so peculiarly dedicated to our ancestors, and endeared by the remembrance of their toils and triumphs, should have been made an occasion, in this community, of political contention and party strife? Why is it that on this political sabbath, the people of this city, descended, as they are, from the same illustrious source, and enjoying, as they do, the same glorious inheritance, no longer unite as brothers around the tombs of their fathers, nor offer fraternal and harmonious oblations upon the common altar of their common country? Is this unhappy division imputable to us? Did we denounce our brethren as unworthy of political communion with us? Or is it, as they kindly intimated by their conduct, that the purity of their patriotism would be sullied by continued confraternity with anarchists and rebels? What say you, Whigs? Do we indeed deserve the stigmas that have been cast upon us? Is our escutcheon really tarnished by a stain? Have we abandoned the principles of our fathers, or proved undeserving the proud legacy they bequeathed us? Have we forgotten the price at which they acquired our freedom, or shown ourselves unable to appreciate or unwilling to maintain it? Is there a man in this assembly who, calling himself a Whig, and boasting of the Whig blood which circles in his veins, http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/nullification-to-save-the-constitution/

[Draggingtree]

Nullification vs. Secession?

By John Marquardt on Oct 13, 2016

On the 21st of this June, Americans celebrated the 228th anniversary of the nation’s Constitution, making it the world’s oldest existing governing body of laws. It was then that our founding fathers met in their effort to form a union more perfect than the one under which the thirteen sovereign states had been operating since 1781, the original Articles of Confederation. While the new document was written and ratified in a far different age by men who certainly could not have foreseen what their new nation would become more than two-and-a-quarter centuries in the future, their extraordinary prescience has allowed the basic document to withstand the tests of time and travail. As proof of this, aside from the first ten amendments to the Constitution (eleven, if one counts the latest Congressional salary amendment in 1992 which was ratified over 202 years after its initial submission with the Bill of Rights in 1789), out of the more than 11,500 changes that have been proposed by Congress over the years, our nation has seen fit to actually amend the original document a mere sixteen additional times. http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/nullification-vs-secession/

[Draggingtree]

[Draggingtree]

“The Compact Theory of the Constitution”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tebeF808ZwM