writer alleged that the decision “involved more danger
to the liberties of America than the claims of the
British Parliament to tax us without our consent.
If you submit to the demand, you will authorize a
sovereign jurisdiction to exercise a power which can
never be exercised by it but to the destruction of your
own power, to the overthrow of the State Governments,
to the consolidation of the Union for the purpose of
arbitrary power, to the downfall of liberty and the
subversion of the rights of the people; for whenever all
the important powers of government shall be centred in
that of the United States, it will be without check or
control." Others said that "if the sovereignty of the
States is to be thus annihilated, there must be a consolidated Government and a standing army", and
that the "craft and subtility of lawyers" had introduced this clause into the Constitution as "the plan of
all aristocrats to reduce the States to corporations.[1]
Another stated that it "fritters States away to corporations." Another said that: "It must excite serious ideas
in those who have from the beginning been inclined to
suspect that the absorption of the State governments
- ↑ It was also said that this "usurpation" was "apprehended by many of the members of the Massachusetts Convention when deliberating on that very clause of the Federal Constitution, respecting the Judiciary power, but which apprehen- sions were said to be groundless by the advocates of the Constitution." See letter of "Brutus"; letter of "A Republican"; article on "The Crisis"; letter from "Hampden"; letter from "Sydney" to "Crito" in Independent Chronicle, July 18, 25, Aug. 1, 15, 1793; see also Boston Gazette, Sept. 23, 1793. See letters from "Anti-Wizard" in Columbian Centinel, Aug. 3, 10, 1798. To Federalist letters referring to the "inflammatory strictures on the Chisholm Case" and stating that: "If by losing independence is meant losing the power of doing wrong, if setting justice and common sense at defiance, if oppressing the individual with the insulting reply that the State is above the law, lawless, then God be praised that such independence exists no longer", the Anti-Federalists made reply that the writers were evidently "a member of the tribe of monarchy men", "an old Tory . . . who wishes for an opportunity of getting back from the Government some confiscated property”, “a sophistical aristocrat whose writings are calculated to introduce a consolidated Government"; see Columbian Centinel, July 31, Aug. 3, 7, 10, 1792; see also letter of "Crito", a Federalist, and of "Uncle Toby", "Essex", and "Sydney", Anti-Federalists, in Salem Gazette, July 30, Aug. 6, 13, 15, 20, 27, 1793.
