Both sets declare 1.  That the Constitution of the United States is a compact or contract. 2.  That to this contract each state is a party; that is, the united states are equal partners in a great political firm.  So far they agree; but at this point they differ.  The Kentucky Resolutions assert that when any question arises as to the right of Congress to pass any law, each state may decide this question for itself and apply any remedy it likes.  The Virginia Resolutions declare that the states may judge and apply the remedy.

Both declared that the Alien and Sedition laws were wholly unconstitutional.  Seven states answered by declaring that the laws were constitutional, whereupon Kentucky in 1799 framed another set of resolutions in which she said that when a state thought a law to be illegal she had the right to nullify it; that is, forbid her citizens to obey it.  This doctrine of nullification, as we shall see, afterwards became of very serious importance.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The answers of the states are printed in Elliot’s Debates, Vol.  IV., pp. 532-539.]

%238.  The Naval War with France.%—­Meantime war opened with France.  The Navy Department was created in April, 1798, and before the year ended, a gallant little navy of thirty-four frigates, corvettes, and gun sloops of war had been collected and sent with a host of privateers to scour the sea around the French West Indies, destroy French commerce, and capture French ships of war.[1] One of our frigates, the Constellation, Captain Thomas Truxton in command, captured the French frigate Insurgente, after a gallant fight.  On another occasion, Truxton, in the Constellation, fought the Vengeance and would have taken her, but the Frenchman, finding he was getting much the worst of it, spread his sails and fled.  Yet another of our frigates, the Boston, took the Berceau, whose flag is now in the Naval Institute Building at Annapolis.  In six months the little American twelve-gun schooner Enterprise took eight French privateers, and recaptured and set free four American merchantmen.  These and a hundred other actions just as gallant made good the patriotic words of John Adams, “that we are not a degraded people humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority.”  So impressed was France with this fact that the war had scarcely begun when the Directory meekly sent word that if another set of ministers came they would be received.  They ought to have been told that they must send a mission to us.  But Adams in this respect was weak, and in 1800, the Chief Justice, Oliver Ellsworth, William R. Davie, and William Vans Murray were sent to Paris.  The Directory had then fallen from power, Napoleon was ruling France as First Consul, and with him in September, 1800, a convention was concluded.

[Footnote 2:  For an account of this war, read Maclay’s History of the United States Navy, Vol.  I., pp. 155-213.]