Showing posts with label Charles J McDonald. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charles J McDonald. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Charles J. McDonald* to Howell Cobb, July 7, 1846

Macon [ga.], 7th July, 1846.

Dear Cobb, I am here, and a moment's leisure gives me the opportunity to inquire of you what the Democratic party intend to do? Can it be possible that the unanimity of the committee which reported on the proceedings of the Memphis Convention is an indication of the mind of Congress on the subject? It is reported that a majority of the democratic members of Congress from Virginia will follow that committee in trampling down the cherished doctrines of her Jeffersons and Madisons on the construction of the Constitution of the United States. It is by the strict construction alone, which they practiced and enjoined, that Congress can be kept within the bounds prescribed for it by the people who formed the instrument which gave it being. The people never intended to give their representatives the right to assume power by implication. The power to regulate commerce gives no authority to create roads or canals. It is the authority to prescribe the rules or laws which shall govern the commercial intercourse between the States. It is to be hoped that the perilous doctrine will be at once rebuked. Mr. Madison about twenty years ago vetoed a bill with such objects. Can you get the Maysville veto for me? I suppose all the high protectionists will, to a man, support a doctrine which will draw from the Treasury annually twenty millions of dollars. That sum can be lost in the unfathomable bed of the Mississippi every year without any improvement in its ever varying channel. Will the whole Democracy of the West be drawn from their positions by the apparent interest of their constituents in the stupendous expenditures to which this policy will give rise? These men are too apt to be swerved from duty by an interested ambition. No political death is so sweet as that in which a man falls a sacrifice to noble principles. I have not heard from you on this subject, but I take it for granted that you are not a convert to this new faith. Let me hear from you.

I am sorry to hear of the dissensions in the Democratic ranks at Washington. Can they not be healed? The party have treated Mr. Polk unkindly in not sustaining his patriotic measures in regard to our foreign relations. They have given the Whigs a decided advantage, and the whole course of Congress in regard to the Oregon question has shown the ignoble spirit that would concede to power what it would maintain against a nation less able to defend its usurpations.

Why has Mr. Polk passed by the army, which distinguished itself in the late battles, in making his appointments?
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* Governor of Georgia, 1839-1843; candidate for the governorship in 1851 on the Southern Rights ticket, defeated by Howell Cobb. Judge of the supreme court of Georgia, 1856-1861.

SOURCE: Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Editor, The Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1911, Volume 2: The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, p. 84-5