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Was the United States a National or a Federal Government.

There is little doubt that the self-styled Republican party will sustain their chief, or rather their supple instrument, Abraham Lincoln, in the avowed purpose of obliterating State lines as far as his power extends, and making this a consolidated Government.--Nationalism is now the cuckoo note which is sounded by the Usurper at home and by his facile representatives abroad. Mr. Clay, of Alabama, well observed in a speech during the last Presidential canvass that there was the such word as nationalism in the political vocabulary of the United States. It was foisted into it by men who intended thereby to impress upon the public mind certain political principles at variance with the true republican, State-rights theory of the Government, which was not national, but federal, as designed by its framers in the Federal Constitution. In support of this position, the secret journals of the Convention that framed the Constitution, and Madison's and Yates' notes of the secret debates therein, afford the most abundant evidence. Notwithstanding Congress recommended the formation of a national government by the States, each of the States rejected a national government, and instructed their delegates to form a federal government.--Edmund Randolph introduced fifteen resolutions, each and all proposing to form a national government, by which, Mr. Randolph said he meant a strong consolidated Union, in which the idea of States would be nearly annihilated," All the large States advocated a national government, and the weaker States, opposed it and favored a federal government. Mr. Pinckney, of South Carolina, offered a resolution to call the new government the ‘"United States of America,"’ but it was voted down, and Mr. Randolph's resolutions in favor of a national government were adopted and referred to a committee of details to form a constitution for a national government.-- Patterson, of New Jersey, Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, advocated striking out national and inserting federal. It was ultimately done, and to them we were indebted for the late Federal Union.--The nationalists proposed to annihilate the rights of the States, as incompatible with a national government. The advocates of a federal government, on the contrary, were for preserving State sovereignty, independence and equality, and their plan, the Federal Constitution, was finally adopted in committee, reported back, and carried in Convention, referred to the States; and the State Legislatures severally referred it to their sovereign people, and thus it became the supreme law.

The destination between the two characters of government proposed soon gave rise to two parties, the Nationalists and Federalists, during the session of the Convention. After the ratification of the Federal Constitution, the name Federalist became popular, and the Nationalists dropped their name and assumed that of Federalists, under the lead of Hamilton while their opponents, the original advocates of the Federal theory, called themselves. Republicans, a name afterwards assumed by the Black Republicans, who are in fact the avowed Nationalists of the present day. Mr. Jefferson always called himself a Republican, in its original acceptation, and Mr. Calhoun preferred it. The Republicans of old advocated State-rights, the Sovereignty of the People of the States, the limitation of the Federal Government to the specific grants of the Constitution, and opposed Government Banks, Protective Tariffs, Land Distribution, bounties to Cod fisheries, and shipping interests and other monopolies, all of which were favored by their opponents. It is important to bear these facts in mind at this time, when our enemies base their whole cause on the theory that the United States was a National Consolidated Government.

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