Thursday, December 25, 2014

JQA on Secession

But to quote a still higher authority, that of Mr. John Quincy Adams. This learned and profound statesman, in 1839, admitted the right of the people of a State to secede from the Union, whilst deprecating its exercise. We copy entire the three paragraphs relating to this subject from his "Discourse delivered before the New York Historical Society,"3 on the fiftieth anniversary of General Washington's Inauguration as President of the United States:
"In the calm hours of self-possession, the right of a State to nullify an act of Congress, is too absurd for argument, and too odious for discussion. The right of a State to secede from the Union, is equally disowned by the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Nations acknowledge no judge between them upon earth; and their Governments, from necessity, must in their intercourse with each other decide when the failure of one party to a contract to perform its obligations, absolves the other from the reciprocal fulfilment of his own. But this last of earthly powers is not necessary to the freedom or independence of States, connected together by the immediate action of the people of whom they consist. To the people alone is there reserved as well the dissolving as the constituent power, and that power can be exercised by them only under the tie of conscience, binding them to the retributive justice of Heaven."With these qualifications, we may admit the same right as vested in the people of every State in the Union, with reference to the General Government, which was exercised by the people of the United Colonies, with reference to the supreme head of the British empire, of which they formed a part; and under these limitations have the people of each State in the Union a right to secede from the confederated Union itself.
http://www.mikechurch.com/liberty-institute/founders-corner/john-quincy-adams-northerners-pioneered-the-right-of-secession-first/

We hesitate not to say that annexation of Texas, effected by any act or proceeding of the Federal Government, or any of its departments, would be identical with dissolution. It would be a violation of our national compact, its objects, designs, and the great elementary principles with entered into its formation, of a character so deep and fundamental, and would be an attempt to authorize an institution and a power of a nature so unjust in themselves, so injurious to the interests and abhorrent to the feelings of the people of the Free States, as, in our opinion, not only inevitably to result in a dissolution of the Union, but fully to justify it; and we not only assert that the people of the Free States ‘ought not to submit to it,’ but we say, with confidence, they would not submit to it.1

http://discerninghistory.com/2013/07/john-quincy-adams-on-secession/

"This representative convention of several State legislatures was in itself an incident organization of a new confederacy. The leaders of the party, by whom it had been devised, had been struggling seven years to organize such an assembly. And it was undoubtedly the measure indispensable for effecting the dissolution of the Union. The Hartford Convention was to the Northern confederacy precisely what the Congress of 1774 was to the Declaration of Independence. The Convention itself could not be held but by an agreement between two more more States, which is an express violation of the Constitution, - a violation which would have been still more flagrant, had a second convention been elected according to one of the closing recommendations of that assembly." p. 245

http://civilwartalk.com/threads/john-quincy-adams-on-the-hartford-convention.76146/

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