The Address and Reasons of Dissent
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should it be demonstrated that the powers vested by this Constitution in
Congress will have such an effect as necessarily to produce one consolidated government, the question then will be reduced to this short issue,
viz: whether satiated with the blessings of liberty, whether repenting of
the folly of so recently asserting their unalienable rights against foreign
despots at the expense of so much blood and treasure, and such painful
and arduous struggles, the people of America are now willing to resign
every privilege of freemen, and submit to the dominion of an absolute
government that will embrace all America in one chain of despotism; or
whether they will, with virtuous indignation, spurn at the shackles
prepared for them, and confirm their liberties by a conduct becoming
freemen.
That the new government will not be a confederacy of States, as it
ought, but one consolidated government, founded upon the destruction
of the several governments of the States, we shall now show.
The powers of Congress under the new Constitution are complete and
unlimited over the purse and the sword, and are perfectly independent of
and supreme over the State governments, whose intervention in these
great points is entirely destroyed. By virtue of their power of taxation,
Congress may command the whole or any part of the property of the
people. They may impose what imposts upon commerce, they may impose what land taxes, poll taxes, excises, duties on all written instruments and duties on every other article, that they may judge proper; in
short, every species of taxation, whether of an external or internal nature,
is comprised in section the eighth of article the first, viz:
‘‘The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defence
and general welfare of the United States.’’
As there is no one article of taxation reserved to the State governments, the Congress may monopolize every source of revenue, and thus
indirectly demolish the State governments, for without funds they could
not exist; the taxes, duties and excises imposed by Congress may be so
high as to render it impracticable to levy farther sums on the same articles; but whether this should be the case or not, if the State governments
should presume to impose taxes, duties or excises on the same articles
with Congress, the latter may abrogate and repeal the laws whereby they