In 1808 the legislatures of some of the New England States passed resolutions condemning the embargo which the National government had laid upon shipping by an Act of that year. The State judges, emboldened by these resolutions, took an attitude consistently hostile to the embargo, holding it to be unconstitutional; popular resistance broke out in some of the coast towns; and the Federal courts in New England seldom succeeded in finding juries which would convict even for the most flagrant violation of its provisions. At the outbreak of the war of 1812 the governors of Massachusetts and Connecticut refused to allow the State militia to leave their State in pursuance of a requisition made by the President under the authority of an Act of Congress, alleging the requisition to be unconstitutional; and in October 1814 the legislatures of these two States and of Rhode Island, States in which the New England feeling against the war had risen high, sent delegates to a Convention at Hartford, which, after three weeks of secret session, issued a report declaring that "it is as much the duty of the State authorities to watch over the rights reserved as of the United States to exercise the powers delegated," laying down doctrines substantially similar to those of the Kentucky resolutions, and advising certain amendments to the Federal Constitution, with a menace as to further action in case these should be rejected. Massachusetts and Connecticut adopted the report; but before their commissioners reached Washington, peace with Great Britain had been concluded. In 1828-30 Georgia refused to obey an Act of Congress regarding the Cherokee Indians, and to respect the treaties which the United States had made with that tribe and the Creeks. The Georgian legislature passed and enforced Acts in contempt of Federal authority, and disregarded the orders of the Supreme court, President Jackson, who had an old frontiersman's hatred to the Indians, declining to interfere.
action argue, and probably rightly, that what he aimed at was not forcible resistance, but the amendment of the Constitution so as to negative the construction that was being put upon it by the Federalists.
Judge Cooley observes to me, "The most authoritative exponents of the States' Rights creed would probably have said that 'the nullification by the States of all unauthorized acts done under cover of the Constitution' intended by the Resolutions, was a nullification by constitutional means."
