Beacon Lights of History Volume Xii Part 5

It was at this crisis that Mr. Webster delivered his celebrated 7th of March speech,--in many respects his greatest,--in which he advocated conciliation and adherence to the Const.i.tution, but which was represented to support Southern interests, which all his life he had opposed; and more, to advocate these interests, in order to secure Southern votes for the presidency. Some of the rich and influential men of Boston who disliked Webster for other reasons,--for he used to snub them, even after they had lent him money,--made the most they could of that speech, to alienate the people. The Abolitionists, at last hostile to Mr. Webster, who stood in their way and would not adopt their dictation or advice, also bitterly denounced this speech, until it finally came to be regarded by the common people, few of whom ever read it, as a very unpatriotic production, entirely at variance with the views that Webster formerly advanced; and they forsook him.

Now, what is the real gist and spirit of that speech? The pa.s.sions which agitated the country when it was delivered have pa.s.sed away, and not only can we now calmly criticise it, but people will listen to the criticism with all the attention it deserves.

It is my opinion, shared by Peter Harvey and other friends of Mr.

Webster, that in no speech he ever made are patriotic and Union sentiments more fully avowed. Said he, with fiery emphasis:--

"I hear with distress and anguish the word 'secession.' Secession!

peaceable secession! Sir, your eyes and mine are never destined to see that miracle. The dismemberment of this great country without convulsion! The breaking up the fountains of the great deep without ruffling the surface! There can be no such thing as peaceable secession.

It is an utter impossibility. Is this great Const.i.tution, under which we live, to be melted and thawed away by secession, as the snows on the mountains are melted away under the influence of the vernal sun? No, sir; I see as plainly as the sun in the heavens what that disruption must produce. I see it must produce war."

"Peaceable secession! peaceable secession! What would be the result?

Where is the line to be drawn? What States are to secede? What is to remain American? What am I to be? Am I to be an American no longer,--a sectional man, a local man, a separatist, with no country in common?

Heaven forbid! Where is the flag of the Union to remain? Where is the eagle still to tower? What is to become of the army? What is to become of the navy? What is to become of the public lands? How is each of the thirty States to defend itself? Will you cut the Mississippi in two, leaving free States on its branches and slave States at its mouth? Can any one suppose that this population on its banks can be severed by a line that divides them from the territory of a foreign and alien government, down somewhere,--the Lord knows where,--upon the lower branches of the Mississippi? Sir, I dislike to pursue this subject. I have utter disgust for it. I would rather hear of national blasts and mildews and pestilence and famine, than hear gentlemen talk about secession. To break up this great government! To dismember this glorious country! To astonish Europe with an act of folly, such as Europe for two centuries has never beheld in any government! No, sir; such talk is enough to make the bones of Andrew Jackson turn round in his coffin."

Now, what are we to think of these sentiments, drawn from the 7th of March speech, so disgracefully misrepresented by the politicians and the fanatics? Do they sound like bidding for Southern votes? Can any Union sentiments be stronger? Can anything be more decided or more patriotic? He warns, he entreats, he predicts like a prophet. He proves that secession is incompatible with national existence; he sees nothing in it but war. And of all things he dreaded and hated, it was war. He knew what war meant. He knew that a civil war would be the direst calamity. He would ward it off. He would be conciliating. He would take away the excuse of war, by adhering to the Const.i.tution,--the written Const.i.tution which our fathers framed, and which has been the admiration of the world, under which we have advanced to prosperity and glory as no nation ever before advanced.

But a large cla.s.s regarded the Const.i.tution as unsound, in some respects a wicked Const.i.tution, since it recognized slavery as an inst.i.tution. By "the higher law," they would sweep slavery away, perhaps by moral means, but by endless agitations, until it was destroyed. Mr. Webster, I confess, did not like those agitations, since he knew they would end in war. He had a great insight, such as few people had at that time. But his prophetic insight was just what a large cla.s.s of people did not like, especially in his own State. He uttered disagreeable truths,--as all prophets do,--and they took up stones to stone him,--to stone him for the bravest act of his whole life, in which a transcendent wisdom appeared, and which will be duly honored when the truth shall be seen.

The fact was, at that time Mr. Webster seemed to be a croaker, a Jeremiah, as Burke at one time seemed to his generation, when he denounced the recklessness of the French Revolution. Very few people at the North dreamed of war. It was never supposed that the Southern leaders would actually become rebels. And they, on the other hand, never dreamed that the North would rise up solidly and put them down. And if war were to happen, it was supposed that it would be brief. Even so great and sagacious a statesman as Seward thought this. The South thought that it could easily whip the Yankees; and the North thought that it could suppress a Southern rebellion in six weeks. Both sides miscalculated. And so, in spite of warnings, the nation drifted into war; but as it turned out in the end it seems a providential event, --the way G.o.d took to break up slavery, the root and source of all our sectional animosities; a terrible but apparently necessary catastrophe, since more than a million of brave men perished, and more than five thousand millions of dollars were spent. Had the North been wise, it would have compensated the South for its slaves. Had the South been wise, it would have accepted the compensation and set them free, But it was not to be. That issue could only be settled by the most terrible contest of modern times.

I will not dwell on that war, which Webster predicted and dreaded. I only wish to show that it was not for want of patriotism that he became unpopular, but because he did not fall in with the prevailing pa.s.sions of the day, or with the public sentiment of the North in reference to slavery, not as to its evils and wickedness, but as to the way in which it was to be opposed. The great reforms of England, since the accession of William III., have been effected by using const.i.tutional means,--not violence, not revolution, not war; but by an appeal to reason and intelligence and justice. No reforms in any nation have been greater and more glorious than those of the nineteenth century,--all effected by const.i.tutional methods. Mr. Webster vainly attempted const.i.tutional means. He was a lawyer. He reverenced the Const.i.tution, with all its compromises. He would observe the law of contracts. Yet no man in the nation was more impatient than he at the threats of secession. He foretold that secession would lead to war. And if Mr. Webster had lived to see the war of which he had such anxious prescience, I firmly believe that he would have marched under the banner of the North with patriotism equal to any man. He would have been where Mr. Everett was. One of his own sons was slain in that war. He was not a Northern man with Southern principles; his whole life attested his Northern principles. There never was a time when he was not hated and mistrusted by the Southern leaders.

It is not a proof that he was Southern in his sympathies because he was not an Abolitionist; and by an Abolitionist I mean what was meant thirty years ago,--one who was unscrupulously bent on removing slavery by any means, good or bad; since slavery, in his eyes, was a _malum per se_, not a misfortune, an evil, a sin, but a crime to be washed out by the besom of destruction.

Mr. Webster did not sympathize with these extreme views. He was not a reformer; but that does not show that he was unpatriotic, or a Southern man in his heart. "The higher law," to him, was the fulfilment of a contract; the maintenance of promises made in good faith, whether those promises were wise or foolish; the observance of laws so long as they were laws. There was, undeniably, a great evil and shame to be removed, but he was not responsible for it; and he left that evil in the hands of Him who said, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay,"--as He did repay in four years' devastations, miseries, and calamities, and these so awful, so unexpected, so ill-prepared for, that a thoughtful and kind-hearted person, in view of them, will weep rather than rejoice; for it is not pleasant to witness chastis.e.m.e.nts and punishments, even if necessary and just, unless the people who suffer are fiends and incarnate devils, as very few men are. Human nature is about the same everywhere, and individuals and nations peculiarly sinful are generally made so by their surroundings and circ.u.mstances. The reckless people of frontier mining districts are not naturally worse than adventurers in New York or Philadelphia; nor is any vulgar and ignorant man, in any part of the country, suddenly made rich, probably any coa.r.s.er in his pleasures, or more sensual in his appearance, or more profane in his language, than was Vitellius, or Heliogabalus, or Otho, on an imperial throne.

But even suppose Mr. Webster, in the decline of his life, intoxicated by his magnificent position or led astray by ambition, made serious political errors. What then? All great men have made errors, both in judgment and in morals,--Caesar, when he crossed the Rubicon; Theodosius, when he slaughtered the citizens of Thessalonica; Luther, when he quarrelled with Zwingli; Henry IV., when he stooped at Canossa; Elizabeth, when she executed Mary Stuart; Cromwell, when he bequeathed absolute power to his son; Bacon, when he took bribes; Napoleon, when he divorced Josephine; Hamilton, when he fought Burr. The sun itself pa.s.ses through eclipses, as it gives light to the bodies which revolve around it. Even David and Peter stumbled. Because Webster professed to know as much of the interests of the country as the shoemakers of Lynn, and refused to be instructed in his political duties by Garrison and Wendell Phillips, does he deserve eternal reprobation? Because he opposed the public sentiments of his const.i.tuents on one point, when perhaps they were right, is he to be hurled from his lofty pedestal? Are all his services to be forgotten because he did not lift up his trumpet voice in favor of immediate emanc.i.p.ation? And even suppose he sought to conciliate the South when the South was preparing for rebellion,--is peace-making such a dreadful thing? Go still farther: suppose he wished to conciliate the South in order to get Southern support for the presidency--which I grant he wanted, and possibly sought,--is he to be unforgiven, and his name to be blasted, and he held up to the rising generation as a fallen man? Does a man fall hopelessly because he stumbles? Is a man to be dethroned because he is not perfect? When was Webster's vote ever bought and sold? Who ever sat with more dignity in the councils of the nation? Would he have voted for "back pay"? Would he have bought a seat in the Senate, even if he had been as rich as a bonanza king?

Consider how few errors Webster really committed in a public career of nearly forty years. Consider the beneficence and wisdom of the measures which he generally advocated, and which would have been lost but for his eloquence and power. Consider the greatness and l.u.s.tre of his congressional career on the whole. Who has proved a greater benefactor to this nation, on the floor of Congress, than he? I do not wish to eulogize, still less to whitewash, so great a man, but only to render simple justice to his memory and deeds. The time has come to lift the veil which for thirty years has concealed his n.o.ble political services.

The time has come to cry shame on those boys who mocked a prophet, and said, "Go up, thou bald-head!"--although no bears were found to devour them. The time has come for this nation to bury the old slanders of an exciting political warfare, and render thanks for the services performed by the greatest intellectual giant of the past generation,--services rendered not on the floor of the Senate alone, not in the national legislature for thirty years, but in one of the great offices of State, when he made a treaty with England which saved us from an entangling war. The Ashburton treaty is the brightest gem in the coronet with which he should be crowned. It was the proudest day in Webster's life when Rufus Choate announced to him one evening that the Senate had confirmed the treaty. It was not when he closed his magnificent argument in behalf of Dartmouth College, not when he addressed the intelligence of New England at Bunker Hill, not when he demolished Governor Hayne, not when he sat on the woolsack with Lord Brougham, not when he was entertained by Louis Philippe, that the proudest emotions swelled in his bosom, but when he learned that he had prevented a war with England,--for he knew that England and America could not afford to fight; that it would be a fight where gain is loss and glory is shame.

At last, worn out with labor and disease, and perhaps embittered by disappointment, and saddened to see the increasing tendency to elevate little men to power,--the "gra.s.shoppers, who make the field ring with their importunate c.h.i.n.ks, while the great cattle chew the cud and are silent,"--Webster died at Marshfield, Oct. 24, 1852, at seventy years of age. At the time he was Secretary of State. He died in the consolations of a religion in which he believed, surrounded with loving friends; and even his enemies felt that a great man in Israel had fallen. Nothing then was said of his defects, for great defects he had,--a towering intellectual pride like Chatham, an austerity like Gladstone, pa.s.sions like those of Mirabeau, extravagance like that of Cicero, indifference to pecuniary obligations, like Pitt and Fox and Sheridan; but these were overbalanced by the warmth of his affections for his faithful friends, simplicity of manners and taste, courteous treatment of opponents, dignity of character, kindness to the poor, hospitality, enjoyment of rural scenes and sports, profound religious instincts, devotion to what he deemed the welfare of his country, independence of opinions and boldness in a.s.serting them at any hazard and against all opposition, and unbounded contempt of all lies and shams and tricks. These traits will make his memory dear to all who knew him. And as Florence, too late, repented of her ingrat.i.tude to Dante, and appointed her most learned men to expound the "Divine Comedy" when he was dead, so will the writings of Webster be more and more a study among lawyers and statesmen. His fame will spread, and grow wider and greater, like that of Bacon and Burke, and of other benefactors of mankind; and his ideas will not pa.s.s away until the glorious fabric of American inst.i.tutions, whose foundations were laid by G.o.d-fearing people, shall be utterly destroyed, and the Capitol, where his n.o.blest efforts were made, shall become a ma.s.s of broken and prostrate columns beneath the debris of the nation's ruin!

No, not then shall they perish, even if such gloomy changes are possible, any more than the genius of Cicero has faded among the ruins of the Eternal City; but they shall s.h.i.+ne upon the most distant works of man, since they are drawn from the wisdom of all preceding generations, and are based on those principles which underlie all possible civilizations!

AUTHORITIES.

The Works of Daniel Webster, in eight octavo volumes, including his speeches, addresses, orations, and legal arguments; Life of Daniel Webster, by G.T. Curtis; Private Correspondence, edited by F. Webster; Private Life, by C. Lanman; C.W. March's Reminiscences of Congress; Peter Harvey's Reminiscences and Anecdotes; Edward Everett's Oration on the Unveiling of the Statue in Boston; R.C. Winthrop and Evarts, on the same occasion in New York; Contemporaneous Lives of Clay, Calhoun, and Benton; the great Oration on Webster by Rufus Choate at Dartmouth College; J. Barnard's Life and Character of Daniel Webster; E.P.

Whipple's Essay on Webster; Eulogies on the Death of Webster, especially those by G.S. Hillard, L. Woods, A. Taft, R.D. Hitchc.o.c.k, and Theodore Parker, also Addresses and Orations on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Webster's Birth, too numerous to mention,---especially the address of Senator Bayard at Dartmouth College. The complete and exhaustive Life of Webster is yet to be written, although the most prominent of his contemporaries have had something to say.

JOHN C. CALHOUN.

1782-1850.

THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

The extraordinary abilities of John C. Calhoun, the great influence he exerted as the representative of Southern interests in the National Legislature, and especially his connection with the Slavery Question, make it necessary to include him among the statesmen who, for evil or good, have powerfully affected the destinies of the United States. He is a great historical character,--the peer of Webster and Clay in congressional history, and more unsullied than either of them in the virtues of private life. In South Carolina he was regarded as little less than a demiG.o.d, and until the antislavery agitation began he was viewed as among the foremost statesmen of the land. His elevation to commanding influence in Congress was very rapid, and but for his identification with partisan interests and a bad inst.i.tution, there was no office in the gift of the nation to which he could not reasonably have aspired.

John Caldwell Calhoun was born in 1782, of highly respectable Protestant-Irish descent, in the Abbeville District in South Carolina.

He was not a patrician, according to the ideas of rich planters. He had but a slender school education in boyhood, but was prepared for college by a Presbyterian clergyman, entered the Junior Cla.s.s of Yale College in 1802, and was graduated with high honors. He chose the law for his profession, studied laboriously for three years, spending eighteen months at the then famous law school at Litchfield, Connecticut, and gave great promise, in his remarkable logical powers, of becoming an eminent lawyer.

Whatever abilities Mr. Calhoun may have had for the law, it does not appear that he practised it long, or to any great extent. His taste and his genius inclined him to politics. And, having married a lady with some fortune, he had sufficient means to live without professional drudgery. After serving a short time in the State Legislature of South Carolina, he was elected a member of Congress, and took his seat in the House of Representatives in 1811, at the age of twenty-nine. From the very first his voice was heard. He made a speech in favor of raising ten thousand additional men to our army to resist the encroachments of Great Britain and prepare for hostilities should the country drift into war.

It was an able speech for a young man, and its scornful repudiation of reckoning the costs of war against insult and violated rights had a chivalric ring about it: "Sir, I here enter my solemn protest against a low and calculating avarice entering this hall of legislation. It is only fit for shops and counting-houses.... It is a compromising spirit, always ready to yield a part to save the residue." Here at an early date we hear the key-note of his life,--hatred of compromises and half-measures. If it were necessary to go to war at all, he would fight regardless of expense.

Thus Calhoun began his public career as an advocate of war with Great Britain. The old Revolutionary sores had not yet had time to heal, and there was general hostility to England, except among the Virginia aristocrats and the Federalists of the North. Although a young man, Calhoun was placed upon the important committee of Foreign Affairs, of which he was soon made chairman.

Calhoun's early speeches in Congress gave promise of rare abilities. The most able of them were those on the repeal of the Embargo, in 1814; on the commercial convention with Great Britain in 1816; on the United States Bank Bill and the tariff the same year; and on the Internal Improvement Bill in 1817. The main subject which occupied Congress from 1812 to 1814 was the war with Great Britain, during the administration of Madison; and afterwards, till 1817, the great questions at issue were in reference to tariffs and internal improvements.

In the discussion of these subjects Calhoun took broad and patriotic ground. At that time we see no sectional interests predominating in his mind. He favored internal improvements, great permanent roads, and even the protection of manufactures, and a National Bank. On all these questions his sectional interests at a later day led him to support the exact opposite of these early national views. Says Von Holst: "His speech on the new tariff bill (April 6, 1816) was a long and carefully prepared argument in favor of the whole economical platform on which the Whig party stood to the last day of its existence.... Even Henry Clay and Horace Greeley have not been able to put their favorite doctrine into stronger language.... His final aim was the industrial independence of the United States from Europe; and this, he thought, could be obtained by protective duties."

Calhoun's speeches, during the six years that he was a member of the House of Representatives, were so able as to attract the attention of the nation, and in 1817 Monroe selected him as his Secretary of War. And he made a good executive officer in this branch of the public service, putting things to rights, and bringing order out of confusion, living on terms of friends.h.i.+p with John Quincy Adams and other members of the cabinet, planning military roads, introducing a system of strict economy in his department, and making salutary reforms. He tolerated no abuses.

He was disposed to do justice to the Indians, and raise them from their degradation, even seeking to educate them, when it was more than probable that they would return to their barbaric habits,--a race, as it would seem from experience, very difficult to civilize. Adams thus spoke of his young colleague: "Mr. Calhoun is a man of fair and candid mind, of honorable principles, of quick and clear understanding, of cool self-possession, of enlarged philosophical views, and of ardent patriotism. He is above all sectional and factious prejudices more than any other statesman of this Union with whom I have ever acted,"--a very different verdict from what he wrote in his diary in 1831. Judge Story wrote of him in 1823 in these terms: "I have great admiration for Mr.

Calhoun, and think few men have more enlarged and liberal views of the true policy of the national government."

The post he held, however, was not Calhoun's true arena, but one which an ambitious young man of thirty-five could not well decline, from the honor it brought. The secretarys.h.i.+p of war is the least important of all the cabinet offices in time of peace, and was especially so when the army was reduced to six thousand men. Its functions amounted to little more than sending small detachments to military posts, making contracts for the commissariat, visiting occasionally the forts and fortifications, and making a figure in Was.h.i.+ngton society. It furnished no field for extensive operations, or the exercise of remarkable qualities of mind. But inasmuch as it made Calhoun a member of the cabinet, it gave him an opportunity to express his mind on all national issues, and exercise an influence on the President himself. It did not make him prominent in the eyes of the nation. He was simply the head of a bureau, although an important personage in the eyes of the cadets of West Point and of some lazy lieutenants stationed among the Indians. But whatever the part he was required to play, he did his duty, showed ability, and won confidence. He doubtless added to his reputation, else he would not have been talked about as a candidate for the presidency, selected as a candidate for the vice-presidency, and chosen to that position by Northern votes, as he was in 1824, when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, and the friends of Henry Clay made Adams, instead of Jackson, President. Calhoun's popularity with all parties resulted in his election as vice-president by a very large popular vote. He deserved it. The day had not come for the ascendency of mere politicians, and their division of the spoils of office.

The condition of the slaveholding States at this period was most prosperous. The culture of cotton had become exceedingly lucrative. Rich planters spent their summers at the North in luxurious independence. It was the era of general "good feeling." No agitating questions had arisen. Young men at the South sought education in the New England colleges; manufacturing interests were in their infancy, and had not, as yet, excited Southern jealousy. Commercial prosperity in New England was the main object desired, although the war with Great Britain had proved disastrous to it. Political influence seemed to centre in the Southern States. These States had furnished four presidents out of five. The great West had not arisen in its might; it had no great cities: but Charleston and Boston were centres of culture and wealth, and on good terms with each other, both equally free from agitating questions, and both equally benignant to the inst.i.tution of slavery, which the Const.i.tution was supposed to have made secure forever. The Adams administration was notable for nothing but beginnings of the tariff question and the protectionist Act of 1828, the growth of the Democratic party, the final intensity of the presidential campaign of 1828, and the election of Jackson, with Calhoun as Vice-president.

As the inc.u.mbent of this office for two terms, Mr. Calhoun did not make a great mark in history. His office was one of dignity and not of power; but during his vice-presidency important discussions took place in Congress which placed him, as presiding officer of the Senate, in an embarra.s.sing position. He was between two fires, and gradually became alienated from the two opposing parties to whom he owed his election. He could go neither with Adams nor with Jackson on public measures, and both interfered with his aspirations for the presidency. His personal relations with Jackson, who had been his warm friend and supporter, became strained after his second election as Vice-President. He took part against Jackson in the President's undignified attempt to force his cabinet to recognize the social position of Mrs. Eaton. Further, it was divulged by Crawford, who had been Secretary of the Treasury in Monroe's cabinet when Calhoun was Secretary of War, that the latter had in 1818 favored a censure of Jackson for his unauthorized seizure of Spanish territory in the Florida campaign during the Seminole War; and this increased the growing animosity. What had been an alienation between the two highest officers of the government ripened into intense hatred, which was fatal to the aspirations of Calhoun for the presidency; for no man could be President against the overpowering influence of Jackson.

This was a bitter disappointment to Calhoun, for he had set his heart on being the successor of Jackson in the presidential chair.

There were two subjects which had arisen to great importance during Mr.

Calhoun's terms of executive office which not only blasted his prospects for the presidency, but separated him forever from his former friends and allies.

One of these was the tariff question, which gave him great uneasiness.

He opened his eyes to see that protection and internal improvements, so ably advocated by Henry Clay, and even by himself in 1816, were becoming the policy of the government to the enriching of the North. True, it was only an economical question, but it seemed to him to lay the axe to the root of Southern prosperity. It was his settled conviction that tariffs for protection would increase the burdens of the South by raising the price of all those articles which it was compelled to buy, and that large profits on articles manufactured in the United States would only enrich the Northern manufacturers. The South, being an agricultural country exclusively, naturally sought to buy in the cheapest market, and therefore wanted no tariff except for revenue. When Mr. Calhoun saw that protectionist duties were an injury to the slaveholding States he reversed entirely his former opinions. And what influence he could exert as the presiding officer of the Senate was now displayed against the Adams party, which had favored his election to the vice-presidency, and of course alienated his Northern supporters, especially Adams, who now turned against him, and as bitterly denounced as once he had favored and praised him. Calhoun had now both the Jackson and Adams parties against him, though for different reasons.

Up to this time, until the agitation of the tariff question began, Mr.

Calhoun had not been a party man. He was regarded throughout the country as a statesman, rather than as a politician.

But when manufactures of cotton and woollen goods were being established in Lowell, Lawrence, Dover, Great Falls, and other places in New England, wherever there was a water-power to turn the mills, it became obvious that a new tariff would be imposed to protect these infant industries and manufacturing interests everywhere. The tariff of 1824 had borne heavily on the South, producing great irritation, and very naturally "the planters complained that they had to bear all the burdens of protection without enjoying its benefits,--that the things they had to buy had become dearer, while the things produced and exported found a less market." Financial ruin stared them in the face. It seemed to them a great injustice that the interests of the planters should be sacrificed to the monopolists of the North.

In the defence of Southern interests Mr. Calhoun in the Senate at first appealed to reason and patriotism. It is true that he now became a partisan, but he had been sent to Congress as the champion of the cotton lords. He was no more unpatriotic than Webster, who at first, as the representative of the merchants of Boston, advocated freer trade in the interests of commerce, and afterwards, as the representative of Ma.s.sachusetts at large, turned round and advocated protective duties for the benefit of the manufacturer. It is a nice question, as to where a Congressman should draw the line of advocacy between local and general interests. What are men sent to Congress for, except to advance the interests intrusted to them by their const.i.tuents? When are these to be merged in national considerations? Calhoun's mission was to protect Southern interests, and he defended them with admirable logical power.

He was one of three great masters of debate in the Senate. No one could reasonably blame him for the opinions he advanced, for he had a right to them; and if he took sectional ground he did as most party leaders do.

It was merely a congressional fight.

But when, after the tariff of 1828, it appeared to Calhoun that there was no remedy; that protection had become the avowed and permanent policy of the government; that the tobacco and cotton of the South, being the chief bulk of our exports, were paying tribute to Northern manufactures, which were growing strong under protection of Federal taxes on competing imports; and that the South was menaced with financial ruin,--he took a new departure, the first serious political error of his life, and became disloyal to the Union.

In July, 1831, he made an elaborate address to the people of South Carolina, in which, discussing the theoretical relations of the States to the Union, he put forth the doctrine that any State could nullify the laws of Congress when it deemed them unconst.i.tutional, as he regarded the existing tariff to be. He looked upon the State, rather than the Union of States, as supreme, and declared that the State could secede if the Union enforced unconst.i.tutional measures. This, as Von Hoist points out, practically meant that, "whenever different views are entertained about the powers conferred by the Const.i.tution upon the Federal government, those of the _minority_ were to prevail,"--an evident absurdity under a republican government.

In June, 1832, was pa.s.sed another tariff bill, offering some reductions, but still based on protection as the underlying principle. In consequence, South Carolina, entirely subservient to the influence of Calhoun, who in August issued another manifesto, pa.s.sed in November the nullification ordinance, to take effect the following February. As already recited, President Jackson took the most vigorous measures, sustained by Congress, and gave the nullifiers clearly to understand that if they resisted the laws of the United States, the whole power of the government would be arrayed against them. They received the proclamation defiantly, and the governor issued a counter one.

It was in this crisis that Calhoun resigned the vice-presidency, and was immediately elected to the United States Senate, where he could fight more advantageously. Then the President sent a message to Congress requesting new powers to put down the nullifiers by force, should the necessity arrive, which were granted, for he was now at the height of his popularity and influence. The nullifiers enraged him, and though they abstained from resorting to extreme measures, they continued their threats. The country appeared to be on the verge of war.

The party leaders felt the necessity of a compromise, and Henry Clay brought forward in the Senate a bill which, in March, 1833, became a law, which reduced the tariff. It apparently appeased the South, not yet prepared to go out of the Union, and the storm blew over. There was no doubt, however, that, had the South Carolinians resisted the government with force of arms they would have been put down, for Jackson was both Infuriated and firm. He had even threatened to hang Calhoun as high as Haman,--an absurd threat, for he had no power to hang anybody, except one with arms in his hands,--and then only through due process of law,--while Calhoun was a Senator, as yet using only legitimate means to gain his ends.

In the compromise which Clay effected, the South had the best of the bargain, and in view of it the culmination of the "irrepressible conflict" was delayed nearly thirty years. Calhoun himself maintained that the Compromise Tariff of 1833 was due to the resistance which his State had made, but he also felt that the Force Bill with which Congress had backed up the President was a standing menace, and, as usual with him, he looked forward to impending dangers. The Compromise Tariff, which reduced duties to twenty per cent in the main, and made provision for still further reduction, found great opponents in the Senate, and was regarded by Webster as anything but a protection bill; nor was Calhoun altogether satisfied with it. It was received with favor by the country generally, however, and South Carolina repealed her nullification ordinance.