trine of internal improvements, and had vigorously attacked that doctrine. Anti-consolidation was the flag under which this party fought, and its supporters inveighed against internal improvements, much after the same manner in which the honorable gentleman has now inveighed against them, as part and parcel of the system of consolidation.
Whether this party arose in South Carolina herself, or in her neighborhood, is more than I know. I think the latter. However that may have been, there were those found in South Carolina ready to make war upon it, and who did make intrepid war upon it. Names being regarded as things, in such controversies, they bestowed on the anti-improvement gentlemen the appellation of radicals. Yes, sir, the name of radicals, as a term of distinction, applicable and applied to those who denied the liberal doctrines of internal improvements, originated, according to the best of my recollection, somewhere between North Carolina and Georgia. Well, sir, those mischievous radicals were to be put down, and the strong arm of South Carolina was stretched out to put them down. About this time, sir, I returned to Congress. The battle with the radicals had been fought, and our South Carolina champions of the doctrines of internal improvement had nobly maintained their ground, and were understood to have achieved a victory. They had driven back the enemy with discomfiture; a thing, by the way, sir, which is not always performed when it is promised. A gentleman, to whom I have already referred in this debate, had come into Congress, during my absence from it, from South Carolina, and had brought with him a high reputation for ability. He came from a school with which we had been acquainted, et noscitur a sociis. I hold in my hand, sir, a printed speech of this distinguished gentleman, (Mr. McDuffie,) “on internal improvements,” delivered about the period to which I now refer, and printed with a few introductory remarks upon consolidation; in which, sir, I think he quite consolidated the arguments of his opponents, the radicals, if to crush be to consolidate. I give you a short but substantive quotation from these remarks. He is speaking of a pamphlet, then recently published, entitled “Consolidation;” and having alluded to the question of rechartering the former Bank of the United States, he says, “Moreover, in the early history of parties, and when Mr. Crawford advocated the renewal of the old charter, it was considered a federal measure; which internal improvement never was, as this author erroneously states. This latter measure originated in the administration of Mr. Jefferson, with the appropriation tor the Cumberland road; and was first proposed, as a system, by Mr. Calhoun, and carried through the House of Representatives by a large majority of the republicans, including almost every one of the leading men who carried us through the late war.”
So then, internal improvement is not one of the federal heresies.
One paragraph more, sir.
“The author in question, not content with denouncing as federalists General Jackson, Mr. Adams, Mr. Calhoun, and the majority of the South Carolina delegation in Congress, modestly extends the denunciation to Mr. Monroe and the whole republican party. Here are his words. ‘During the administration of Mr. Monroe, much has passed which the republican party would be glad to approve, if they could!! But the principal feature, and that which has chiefly elicited these observations, is the renewal of the system of internal improvements.’ Now, this measure was adopted by a vote of 115 to 86, of a republican Congress,
