"We denounce these great outrages upon the Constitution"

State Convention. July 2d.

The Committee on Resolutions, through their Chairman, Mr. Walton, reported the following, which were adopted, to wit:

DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES AND RESOLUTIONS.

...The Constitution itself has been stricken through and through--a sacrifice to the 0ligarchy by open violation of the privileges of the Senate and the freedom of debate; by denials of the right of petition; by violations of the right to the writ of habeas corpus and trial by jury; by tests of office, and arrests for constructive treason, unknown to the Constitution and the laws; by suppressing freedom of speech and of the press; by deniels of the common and constitutional rights of citizenship; by searches and seizures without a warrant; by infrengements upon the right to keep and bear arms; by deprivals of life, liberty and property without due process of law; and finally by denying the power of self-government to the people of Kansas, and suppressing the sacred right of suffrage at the point of the bowie-knife and the bayonet. We denounce these great outrages upon the Constitution, and will rally for its defence.
  The President of the United States has been recreant to his constitutional obligation "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed," in that he has suffered the Kansas-Nebraska act to be violated with impunity; and he has been recreant to his oath of office, in that he has neither prevented these great outrages upon the Constitution, nor promptly brought the perpetrators of them to condign punishment. We will seek to purge the Presidential Chair from all Traitor tothe Constitution.
  Finally,--a spurious Democracy,--forsaking the old apostles, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, to follow after false teachers.--and sacrificing Freedom for pelf, their birth-right, their very manhood, for a mess of pottage--is deaf to the cries of freemen robbed of all their rights--dumb at the grossest outrages ever perpetrated upon any people, and basely succumbs to an oligarchy more despotic than the autocrat of Russia....

- The Burlington Free Press, Burlington, VT. Friday, July 11, 1856. Vol. XXX--New Series, Vol. III. Number Two. Pg. 1.