Governor Joseph E. Brown's message to the Legislature of Georgia was long, temperate in language, but very hostile toward the people of the North. After reviewing, at great length, the legislation in several of the Northern States concerning the Fugitive Slave Law, he urged the enactment, as a retaliatory measure, of a law making it a penal offense to introduce any goods, wares, or merchandise into Georgia from any of those States. “In my opinion,” he said, “the time for bold, decided action, has arrived.” He was opposed to secession as a remedy for existing evils, and did not like the project of a Southern Convention of States looking to that end, which had been proposed; yet, he recommended the appropriation of a million of dollars for the purpose of arming the State.
The Legislature discussed the exciting topics presented to them with calmness. It was generally agreed that the State could not remain within the Union excepting on certain conditions, such as the repeal of the Personal Liberty Laws existing in some of the Free-labor States, and the enactment of laws by Congress for the protection of Slave property in the Territories. By a heavy majority they voted that a “Sovereign State” of the Union had a right to secede from it, adopting as their own the doctrine put forth by the Governor in his message, that the States of the Union are not subordinate to the National Government; were not created by it, and do not belong to it; that they created the National Government; from them it derives its powers; to them it is responsible, and, when it abuses the trust reposed in it, they, as equal sovereigns, have a right to resume the powers respectively delegated to it by them.
This is the sum and substance of the doctrine of State supremacy, as defined and inculcated by Calhoun and his followers, for the evident purpose of weakening the attachment of the people to the Union, and so dwarfing their patriotism that narrow State pride should take the place of the lofty sentiment of nationality, and predispose them to acquiescence in the scheme for forming a “Southern Confederacy,” to be composed of the Slave-labor States. That definition of the character of our Government has no real foundation in truth, discoverable in the teachings or actions of the founders of the Republic who framed the National Constitution, nor in the revealments of history.1 It defines, with proximate accuracy, the character
