Because the "American States, as well as the American people, have believed a close and firm Union to be essential to their liberty and to their happiness.
Albert Beveridge
The Public Record
Albert Jeremiah Beveridge was an American historian and United States senator from Indiana. He was an intellectual leader of the Progressive Era and a biographer of Chief Justice John Marshall and President Abraham Lincoln.
gutenberg.org
Like all men of the first rank, Marshall met in a great way, and without attempt at compromise, a great issue that could not be compromised--an issue which, everywhere, at that moment, was challenging the existence of the Nation.
There must be no dodging, no hedging, no equivocation.
Instead, there must be the broadest, frankest, bravest declaration of National powers that words could express.
Nothing less than the prostration of the National Government "at the feet of every state in the Union....
At this point he rises to the heights of august eloquence: "A constitution is framed for ages to come, and is designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it.
No government ought to be so defective in its organization as not to contain within itself the means of securing the execution of its own laws against other dangers than those which occur every day.
The people made the constitution, and the people can unmake it.
It is the creature of their own will, and lives only by their will.
But this supreme and irresistible power to make or to unmake, resides only in the whole body of the people; not in any sub-division of them.
The attempt of any of the parts to exercise it is usurpation, and ought to be repelled by those to whom the people have delegated their power of repelling it.
In many other respects, the American people are one; and the government which is alone capable of controlling and managing their interests in all these respects, is the government of the Union.
America has chosen to be, in many respects, and to many purposes, a nation; and for all these purposes, her government is complete; to all these objects, it is competent.
The people have declared, that in the exercise of all powers given for these objects it is supreme.
It can, then, in effecting these objects, legitimately control all individuals or governments within the American territory.
The Constitution and laws of a state, so far as they are repugnant to the Constitution and laws of the United States, are absolutely void.
When the legislature or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity.
Every check on the wild impulse of the moment is a check on his own power, & he is unfriendly to the source from which it flows.
The attack upon the judiciary is in fact an attack upon the union.
The judicial department is well understood to be that through which the government may be attacked most successfully, because it is without patronage, & of course without power.
And it is equally well understood that every subtraction from its jurisdiction is a vital wound to the government itself.
The attack upon it therefore is a masked battery aimed at the government itself.
A protective tariff is only another monstrous child of Marshall's accursed Nationalism, that prolific mother of special favors for the few.
A few such doctrinal decisions, as barefaced as that of the Cohens," may so arouse certain powerful States as to check the march of Nationalism.
Broadly speaking, slavery and free trade, State banking and debtors' relief laws were arraigned on the side of Localism; while slavery restriction, national banking, a protective tariff, and security of contract were marshaled beneath the…
Politicians like Albert Beveridge
