This passage is one of the large number in the writings of that time to which recent events have given a new interest; nor is it now without salutary meaning for us, though we quote it only to show the reluctance of some of the best citizens of the North to come into a national system.  Suppose, to-day, that the United States were invited to merge their sovereignty into a confederation of all the nations of America, which would require us to abolish the city of Washington, and send delegates to a general congress on the Isthmus of Darien!  A sacrifice of pride like that was demanded of the leading States of the Union in 1787.  Severe was the struggle, but the sacrifice was made, and it cost the great States of the North as painful a throe as it did the great States of the South.  Why, then, has State pride died away in the North, and grown stronger in the South?  Why is it only in the Southern States that the doctrine of States’ Rights is ever heard of?  Why does the Northern man swell with national pride, and point with exultation to a flag bearing thirty-seven stars, feeling the remotest State to be as much his country as his native village, while the Southern man contracts to an exclusive love for a single State, and is willing to die on its frontiers in repelling from its sacred soil the national troops, and can see the flag under which his fathers fought torn down without regret?

The study of John Randolph of Virginia takes us to the heart of this mystery.  He could not have correctly answered the question we have proposed, but he was an answer to it.  Born when George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and James Madison were Virginia farmers, and surviving to the time when Andrew Jackson was President of the United States, he lived through the period of the decline of his race, and he was of that decline a conscious exemplification.  He represented the decay of Virginia, himself a living ruin attesting by the strength and splendor of portions of it what a magnificent structure it was once.  “Poor old Virginia!  Poor old Virginia!” This was the burden of his cry for many a year.  Sick, solitary, and half mad, at his lonely house in the wilderness of Roanoke, suffering from inherited disease, burdened with inherited debt, limited by inherited errors, and severed by a wall of inherited prejudice from the life of the modern world, he stands to us as the type of the palsied and dying State.  Of the doctrine of States’ Rights he was the most consistent and persistent champion; while of that feeling which the North Carolina Reader No.  III. styles “State pride,” we may call him the very incarnation.  “When I speak of my country,” he would say, “I mean the Commonwealth of Virginia.”  He was the first eminent man in the Southern States who was prepared in spirit for war against the government of the United States; for daring the Nullification imbroglio of 1833, he not only was in the fullest accord with Calhoun, but he used to say, that, if a collision took place between the nullifiers and the forces of the United States, he, John Randolph of Roanoke, old and sick as he was, would have himself buckled on his horse, Radical, and fight for the South to his last breath.