ride over State sovereignties, and that it will be idle for any
advocates hereafter to talk of State rights. The Senator from
Virginia (Mr. Rives) says that he is the advocate of State
rights; but he must permit me to tell him that, although he may
differ in premises from the other gentlemen with whom he acts on
this occasion, yet, in supporting this bill, he obliterates every
vestige of distinction between him and them, saving only that,
professing the principles of '98, his example will be more
pernicious than that of the most open and bitter opponent of the
rights of the States. I will also add, what I am compelled to
say, that I must consider him (Mr. Rives) as less consistent than
our old opponents, whose conclusions were fairly drawn from their
premises, while his premises ought to have led him to opposite
conclusions. The gentleman has told us that the new-fangled
doctrines, as he chooses to call them, have brought State rights
into disrepute. I must tell him, in reply, that what he calls
new- fangled are but the doctrines of '98; and that it is he (Mr.
Rives), and others with him, who, professing these doctrines,
have degraded them by explaining away their meaning and efficacy.
He (Mr. R.) has disclaimed, in behalf of Virginia, the
authorship of nullification. I will not dispute that point. If
Virginia chooses to throw away one of her brightest ornaments,
she must not hereafter complain that it has become the property
of another. But while I have, as a representatives of Carolina,
no right to complain of the disavowal of the Senator from
Virginia, I must believe that he (Mr. R.) has done his native
State great injustice by declaring on this floor, that when she
gravely resolved, in '98, that "in cases of deliberate and
dangerous infractions of the Constitution, the States, as parties
to the compact, have the right, and are in duty bound, to