Calhoun’s call for force against force frightened even the South Carolinians. What could this mean except civil war? The South Carolina legislature printed five thousand copies of the secretly authored manifesto but declined to adopt it.
Calhoun’s challenge circulated, and it required a response. Daniel Webster stepped forward. Times had changed since Webster burst on the national scene with his Rockingham memorial proclaiming the prerogatives of the states against the federal government. Jackson’s eleventh-hour victory at New Orleans had rescued America’s honor, making doubters like Webster seem defeatist. His Federalist party disintegrated and he’d been forced to find a new home. He sojourned with the Quincy Adams wing of the Republicans on his way to the anti-Jackson Whigs. Webster found a new physical home, as well, moving from New Hampshire to Boston.
He continued in politics without relinquishing his law practice. He was the most sought-after member of the Supreme Court bar, and among the most highly paid. Besides arguing and winning the McCulloch case, he argued and won a suit involving Dartmouth College, his alma mater, that became a landmark in the law of contracts.
In 1830 he rose in the Senate to rebut John Calhoun, albeit indirectly. Calhoun hadn’t acknowledged authorship of the South Carolina manifesto, and though he sat each day in the Senate as vice president, he said nothing of substance there. The South Carolina case was argued instead by Robert Hayne, a fiery orator albeit less sophisticated than Calhoun. For two days Hayne berated the North, especially New England, and those who represented New England, including Webster. Hayne hammered upon the tariff, upon what he deemed the hypocrisy of Northerners, and upon their determined misreading of the Constitution.
Who were the true enemies of the Union? asked Hayne. “Those who are in favor of consolidation; who are constantly stealing power from the states and adding strength to the federal government; who, assuming an unwarrantable jurisdiction over the states and the people, undertake to regulate the whole industry and capital of the country.”
Who were the Union’s true defenders? “Those who would confine the federal government strictly within the limits prescribed by the Constitution, who would preserve to the states and the people all powers not expressly delegated, who would make this a federal and not a national union, and who, administering the government in a spirit of equal justice, would make it a blessing and not a curse.”
Hayne professed to be a peaceable man. “This controversy is not of my seeking,” he said. But South Carolinians were a proud people and jealous of their rights. When insulted, they didn’t turn the other cheek. “If the gentleman provokes the war, he shall have war. Sir, I will not stop at the border. I will carry the war into the enemy’s territory.”
The city of Washington couldn’t wait to hear Webster’s reply. Businesses closed early to let customers and proprietors crowd into the Senate gallery. The House of Representives cleared its schedule so the members could take seats on the Senate floor to hear Webster.
He began by disavowing ill feelings toward South Carolina or its great figures. “I claim them for countrymen, one and all: the Laurenses, the Rutledges, the Pinckneys, the Sumpters, the Marions,” Webster said. Nor did he feel obliged to relate the history of Massachusetts in leading America to independence. “The world knows it by heart.”
He cut to his purpose in speaking this day. “It is to state and to defend what I conceive to the true principles of the Constitution under which we are here assembled.” He identified the crux of his difference with Hayne—and with Calhoun, though Webster didn’t mention the vice president, sitting before him. “The great question is, whose prerogative is it to decide on the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of the laws?” The South Carolinians said the prerogative was the states’. Webster said it was the federal judiciary’s.
The question turned on the nature of the national government and the basis of its authority. “Whose agent is it?” he asked. “Is it the creature of the state legislatures, or the creature of the people?”
Webster chose the people. “It is, sir, the people’s Constitution, the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.”
Webster considered the alternative: that the states controlled the national government. This would produce chaos, he said. “In Carolina, the tariff is a palpable, deliberate usurpation; Carolina, therefore, may nullify it and refuse to pay the duties. In Pennsylvania, it is both clearly constitutional and highly expedient, and there the duties are to be paid.” No country could live under such a regime.
Webster asked his listeners to reflect on America’s experience with the Constitution and the Union it established. “The people have preserved this, their chosen Constitution, for forty years, and have seen their happiness, prosperity and renown grow with its growth and strengthen with its strength. It is to that Union we owe our safety at home and our consideration and dignity abroad.”
The nullifiers complained of the cost of the tariff. But what would be the cost of nullification? The alternative to the Union was not liberty but anarchy and civil war. Webster shuddered to envision what nullification portended. “When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in Heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on states dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!”
Webster prayed Americans be spared such a fate. “Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the glorious ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as ‘What is all this worth?’ Nor those other words of delusion and folly, ‘Liberty first and Union afterwards’—but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart: ‘Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!’”
Again, thanks for bringing those memorable words of Webster to the reader's attention. These historic moments show many of our present troubles have a deep past.