o the common intendment of the time, and of those who framed
it;) to give also to all parties and authorities, time for reflection
and for consideration, whether, under a temperate view of the possible
consequences, and especially of the constant obstructions which an
equivocal majority must ever expect to meet, they will still prefer the
assumption of this power rather than its acceptance from the free will
of their constituents; and to preserve peace in the mean while, we
proceed to make it the duty of our citizens, until the legislature shall
otherwise and ultimately decide, to acquiesce under those acts of
the federal branch of our government which we have declared to be
usurpations, and against which, in point of right, we do protest as null
and void, and never to be quoted as precedents of right.

We therefore do enact, and be it enacted by the General Assembly of
Virginia, that all citizens of this Commonwealth, and persons and
authorities within the same, shall pay full obedience at all times to
the acts which may be passed by the Congress of the United States, the
object of which shall be the construction of post-roads, making canals
of navigation, and maintaining the same, in any part of the United
States, in like manner as if the said acts were, _totidem verbis_,
passed by the legislature of this Commonwealth.

LETTER CLXXXVII.--TO WILLIAM B. GILES, December 25, 1825

TO WILLIAM B. GILES.

Monticello, December 25, 1825.

Dear Sir,

Your favor of the 15th was received four days ago. It found me engaged
in what I could not lay aside till this day.

Far advanced in my eighty-third year, worn down with infirmities which
have confined me almost entirely to the house for seven or eight
months past, it afflicts me much to receive appeals to my memory for
transactions so far back as that which is the subject of your letter.
My memory is indeed become almost a blank, of which no better proof can
probably be given you than by my solemn protestation, that I have not
the least recollection of your intervention between Mr. John Q. Adams
and myself, in what passed on the subject of the embargo. Not the
slightest trace of it remains in my mind. Yet I have no doubt of the
exactitude of the statement in your letter. And the less, as I recollect
the interview with Mr. Adams, to which the previous communications which
had passed between him and yourself were probably and naturally the
preliminary. That interview