within the scope of their respective jurisdictions, are mutually
obligatory. They are respectively the depositories of such powers of
legislation as the people were willing to surrender, and their duty is
to co-operate within their several jurisdictions to maintain the
rights of the same citizens under both Governments unimpaired. A
proscription, therefore, of the Constitution and laws of one or more
States, determining property, on the part of the Federal Government,
by which the stability of its social system may be endangered, is
plainly repugnant to the conditions on which the Federal Constitution
was adopted, or which that Government was designed to accomplish. Each
of the States surrendered its powers of war and negotiation, to raise
armies and to support a navy, and all of these powers are sometimes
required to preserve a State from disaster and ruin. The Federal
Government was constituted to exercise these powers for the
preservation of the States, respectively, and to secure to all their
citizens the enjoyment of the rights which were not surrendered to the
Federal Government. The provident care of the statesmen who projected
the Constitution was signalized by such a distribution of the powers
of Government as to exclude many of the motives and opportunities for
promoting provocations and spreading discord among the States, and for
guarding against those partial combinations, so destructive of the
community of interest, sentiment, and feeling, which are so essential
to the support of the Union. The distinguishing features of their
system consist in the exclusion of the Federal Government from the
local and internal concerns of, and in the establishment of an
independent internal Government within, the States. And it is a
significant fact in the history of the United States, that those
controversies which have been productive of the greatest animosity,
and have occasioned most peril to the peace of the Union, have had
their origin in the well-sustained opinion of a minority among the
people, that the Federal Government had overstepped its constitutional
limits to grant some exclusive privilege, or to disturb the legitimate
distribution of property or power among the States or individuals. Nor
can a more signal instance of this be found than is furnished by the
act before us. No candid or rational man can hesitate to believe, that
if the subject of the eighth section of the act of March, 1820, had
never been intr