In May, before the decision of the court of appeals had been rendered, the Nullifiers made a great clamor over a discovery they claimed to have made, that the Union party was organizing a military force to resist the enforcement of the oath. Even before this there were rumors that the Union men were preparing a military organization to oppose the decision, which the Nullifiers expected would uphold the oath in spite of the fact that two of the three judges were Union
to oontiol their agents, whether legislative, executive, or judicial, but it must be a control exercised in legal form, and he distinguishes very properly between the power of the people, as exhibited in the final right of revolution, and their power as exercised under the constitutional limitations and restrictions which they themselves have imposed. "Now, conceding to the Mercury all that it contends for; granting that allegiance is something different from obedience (and not, as Judge Harper argues, merely the highest species of obedience); that allegiance is due to nothing but sovereignty; we ask, conceding all this, if the government of the United States is not an agency of the people of South Carolina, precisely as their state government is; if the Constitution of the United States is not their Constitution exactly as the state constitution is; if the oaths in that Constitution are not as binding on their agents, judicial, legislative, and executive, in the same degree and manner as the oaths in the state constitution? Well, none of this being disputed, we ask the Mercury at what time did the sovereignty of South Carolina annul the oath in the Constitution of the United States by which it bound all its agents to observe that fundamental law, anything in the laws and constitution of a state to the contrary notwithstanding. It being not disputed that
