Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/797

Chief Justice ]Iars]iall and Virginia 787 had, however, served their day ; they were not disposed to embark on another campaign of agitation like that of 1798. Jefferson ad- vised that, since the ■Missouri question had so divided the states ' and given occasion for such outspoken threats on the part of ^ir- ginia leaders, any attempt now to force the issue with the Supreme Court would cause a re-alignment of the states after the manner of the recent dispute and thus defeat their designs. " She [Mrginia] had better lie by therefore until the shoe shall pinch an Eastern state. Let the cry be first raised from that quarter and we may fall into it with effect."^ He then advised the Virginia delegation in Con- gress to press for a change in the method of choosing judges, ap- pointment for terms of six years instead of for life, the House of Representatives also to have the right of confirmation. This he thought would bring the court into closer touch with the people. = He had never ceased to be alarmed by the decisions of ^Marshall and thought Roane's position impregnable. He said, " This doc- trine [of ^Marshall] was so completely refuted by Roane, that if he can be answered, I surrender human reason as a vain and use- less faculty, given to bewilder, and not to guide us."' Roane had solemnly warned Virginia in these replies to ilarshall that slavery would be doomed under such a constitution as his opponent expounded ; he spoke of secession as a lawful alternative to submission to the Supreme Court ; and yet admitted that forcible resistance would be revolution. But Virginia was not then ready to cross the Rubicon, and Roane died six months after the in- glorious close of his "movement", thinking that his work had all been in vain. The " shoe pinched " in South Carolina within the space of a single twelvemonth. Robert Barnwell Rhett of that state began where Roane left oiT, and drawing constantly upon the 'irginia magazine so recently filled he began and continued an agitation which forced Calhoun to recant his ardent nationalism in 1828, and which swept the South two decades later into Texas an- nexation, ceasing not until the Roane-Marshall debate was settled in the awful tribunal of civil' war. W^ILLIAM E. DODD. Jeffer = Ihid., ^Ibid.,