New Hampshire's Governor delivers a sweeping message to the state legislature attacking federal overreach and warning against the dangers of concentrated national power. The core argument is blunt: Congress has assumed powers "not expressly conferred by the Constitution," and the remedy is a return to strict federalism where states handle their own affairs. The Governor is particularly scathing about Senate members who defy state legislative instructions, calling their resistance "scarcely more justifiable than the usurpation of the tyrant who puts down the voice of the people by force." He also takes aim at Congressional self-dealing, arguing that members chase re-election through "partial legislation"—securing local appropriations and special favors rather than pursuing the general good. On internal improvements, New Hampshire has wisely avoided state-funded roads, canals, and turnpikes, leaving such ventures to private enterprise, while other states like New York and Pennsylvania have burdened themselves with debt. The Governor praises New Hampshire's modest state salaries as economical virtue, contrasting them with federal extravagance where "the mere boy in the navy is paid as high in some instances as the Judges of your highest State court."

This message captures the Jacksonian era's fundamental tension over federalism and executive power. In 1836, the nation was fracturing over the proper scope of national government—Andrew Jackson himself had just battled the National Bank and states' rights advocates, and this New Hampshire Governor echoes those themes with intensity. The emphasis on "instruction" (state legislatures controlling federal senators) reflects pre-17th Amendment thinking, when senators answered to state legislatures, not voters. The anxiety about Congressional members serving too long and becoming disconnected from constituents prefigures modern debates about term limits. Most critically, this message reveals how localist sentiment remained potent even in the North—New Hampshire's refusal to fund internal improvements stands as deliberate policy choice, not mere poverty. The Governor is essentially arguing that smaller, accountable government is superior to larger, distant bureaucracy—a philosophy that would shape American politics for generations.

• The Governor invokes the Erie Canal as a rare success story—a work that 'in many years will discharge its own debt' while raising property values 'to an almost incredible amount'—yet dismisses most improvements because 'scarcely one in ten of them will be expected to pay for itself,' revealing the infrastructure crisis of the 1830s.
• A jaw-dropping salary comparison: officers at a single subordinate naval establishment near New Hampshire's principal seaport earn more collectively than the entire state civil list except for the Legislature itself, showing federal-state compensation disparities that scandalized contemporaries.
• Congress passed a Navy pay raise in 1835 'at the heel of the session, and forced through one branch without the exhibition of a reason'—a glimpse of procedural railroading that infuriated state-power advocates.
• The Governor claims New Hampshire's modest officer compensation paradoxically produces wealth: 'in no part of the United States where higher salaries have existed, can an equal number of officers be presented whose pecuniary condition has been so uniformly improved'—a counter-intuitive argument for low pay.
• He praises New Hampshire's 'admirable system of common schools' in passing, confirming that public education was already becoming a state signature, even before Horace Mann's education reforms took flight.

• The Governor's obsession with Senate term limits—he wishes no senator could serve beyond 'a single continuous term of six years'—reveals this was already a hot debate in 1836, 100+ years before the 22nd Amendment capped presidential terms and 160+ years before serious term-limit movements gained steam.
• His argument that New York's Erie Canal would eventually 'pay for itself' proved prophetic: the Canal, completed in 1825, became one of America's most profitable public works and made New York City the nation's premier port—yet he uses it precisely to argue that *most* projects fail, showing how rare success stories made the case for skepticism.
• The Governor's contempt for Congressional 'talkers and not doers'—'men who either delight in hearing themselves'—echoes anti-intellectual sentiment in Jacksonian America, where plain-spoken virtue was prized over rhetorical flourish.
• His invocation of the doctrine of 'instruction' (state legislatures binding federal senators) represents the final decades of this constitutional theory; by 1860, it was largely dead, and the 17th Amendment (1913) finally ended state legislative election of senators entirely.
• The naval pay raises he condemns—raising some junior officers to salaries matching state supreme court judges—reflect the militarization and expanding federal infrastructure in the 1830s, as America built its first permanent standing navy and coastal fortifications.