THE EATON AFFAIR continued as Congress convened in the new year of 1830. The main issue before the legislature was the tariff. John Calhoun’s exposition had been disseminated far beyond South Carolina, and many in the capital thought the Carolinians were itching for a fight. The first test of strength came on a matter apparently unrelated to the tariff. Samuel Foot of Connecticut introduced a resolution requesting a review of the process by which federal lands in the West were surveyed and sold. The query might have been a sincere attempt to gather information, but Western representatives bristled at what they took to be an effort by New England to hinder their growth. Thomas Benton of Missouri and others blasted the New Englanders, and they found ready allies among Southern opponents of the tariff, which was similarly attributed to Yankee malevolence.
John Calhoun would have jumped in had he not been restrained by the Constitution and by Senate practice. As vice president, Calhoun presided over the Senate, hearing every word there spoken. But he was not supposed to speak on matters of substance, and he couldn’t vote except to break a tie. The cause of South Carolina fell to Robert Hayne, a veteran of the War of 1812 who had been sent by the South Carolina legislature to the Senate in 1823. Hayne was known for his temper, his sarcasm and his devotion to states’ rights. He was not among the first rank of Senate speakers, but in the reaction to Samuel Foot’s resolution he stepped forward and during two days defended the honor and practices of his state and region.
Taking Daniel Webster as the spokesman for New England, Hayne imputed to Webster the sins of the Northeast. He scoured Webster’s speeches for slights against the South and its institutions and practices. Webster had impugned Southern honor, Hayne said, when, in one address, he had contrasted the prosperity of Ohio with a supposed backwardness in Kentucky and attributed the difference to slavery. Hayne denounced such section-baiting as egregious and partisan. “I thought I could discern the very spirit of the Missouri question,” he said. Hayne refused to be lectured to by a senator from Massachusetts. New England acted high and moral on the slave question, but its hands were as dirty as those of any Southern state, and had been so from the beginning. “The profits of the slave trade were not confined to the South,” Hayne said. “Southern ships and Southern sailors were not the instruments of bringing slaves to the shores of America, nor did our merchants reap the profits of that ‘accursed traffic.’ ” Northern merchants continued to batten on slavery. “I am thoroughly convinced that, at this time, the states north of the Potomac actually derive greater profits from the labor of our slaves, than we do ourselves.” Most Southern trade with the world was conducted through Northern merchants and financial houses; those individuals and firms would be commercial shadows of their current selves if not for Southern slave labor.
The modern South hadn’t invented slavery, Hayne remarked. “If slavery, as it now exists in this country, be an evil, we of the present day found it ready made to our hands. Finding our lot cast among a people, whom God had manifestly committed to our care, we did not sit down to speculate on abstract questions of theoretical liberty. We met it as a practical question of obligation and duty.” Obligation and duty included accounting for the welfare of the enslaved. “We resolved to make the best of the situation in which Providence had placed us, and to fulfill the high trust which had developed upon us as the owners of slaves, in the only way in which such a trust could be fulfilled, without spreading misery and ruin throughout the land.”
Northern abolitionists demanded immediate freedom for the slaves. Nothing could be more irresponsible, Hayne said. Southerners, who knew slaves better than any Northerners, had discovered generations ago that black slaves were fundamentally different from white men. “We found that we had to deal with a people whose physical, moral, and intellectual habits and character totally disqualified them from the enjoyment of the blessings of freedom.” If freed, what would become of the slaves? “We could not send them back to the shores from whence their fathers had been taken; their numbers forbid the thought, even if we did not know that their condition here is infinitely preferable to what it possibly could be among the barren sands and savage tribes of Africa.” Hayne asserted that the North had nothing to boast of in its treatment of free blacks, who often huddled in Northern cities. “There does not exist, on the face of the whole earth, a population so poor, so wretched, so vile, so loathsome, so utterly destitute of all the comforts, conveniences, and decencies of life, as the unfortunate blacks of Philadelphia, and New York, and Boston.” Liberty to them was a curse, not a blessing.
But neither slavery nor land policy, nor even the tariff, formed the heart of the issue at hand. The crux of the matter was the nature of the Union, Hayne said. Webster and his Northern friends claimed to defend the Union, but what they were really defending was the national government, which they sought to enlarge and consolidate. The Union and the government were two different things, and the distinction was crucial in understanding the true purpose of the Constitution. “It was not to draw power from the States, in order to transfer it to a great national government, but, in the language of the Constitution itself, ‘to form a more perfect union,’ ” Hayne said. How was this to be accomplished? “By ‘establishing justice,’ ‘promoting domestic tranquility,’ and ‘securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.’ ” Hayne paused for effect. “This is the true reading of the Constitution,” he said.
Hayne hammered Webster for inconsistency, indeed hypocrisy. Webster had ardently opposed tariff protection in 1824, only to reverse course and support it in 1828. Webster claimed to love the Union, but his Federalist friends had been on the verge of secession at the Hartford convention. In fact, Webster’s whole program of government aggrandizement was the greatest threat to the Union as it existed under any honest reading of the Constitution.
Who, then, were the true defenders of the Union? “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.”
And who were the enemies of the Union? “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.”
Hayne disavowed any previous animus toward Webster or New England. “This controversy is not of my seeking,” he said. But a South Carolinian did not back down from a fight. “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.”
HAYNE’S SPEECH PRODUCED a sensation. Charles March was an ally of Webster and an enemy of everything Hayne stood for. But March had to grant that Hayne had done well. “The dashing nature of the attack; the assurance, almost insolence, of its tone; the severity and apparent truth of the accusations; confounded almost every hearer,” he recalled. “The immediate impression of the speech was most assuredly disheartening to the cause Mr. Webster upheld.” Many others lauded Hayne’s effort. “Congratulations from almost every quarter were showered upon the speaker,” March recorded. “Mr. Benton said, in the full Senate, that much as Col. Hayne had done before to establish his reputation as an orator, a statesman, a patriot and a gallant son of the South, the efforts of that day would eclipse and surpass the whole.” The Southern press praised Hayne to the sky. None of the great English orators—Chatham, Burke, Fox—could have done better, the Southern editorialists said.
Yet a few adherents of Hayne’s cause weren’t convinced he had carried the field. “These gentlemen knew, for they had felt, Mr. Webster’s power,” March said. “They knew the great resources of his mind, the immense range of his intellect, the fertility of his imagination, his copious and fatal logic, the scathing severity of his sarcasm, and his full and electrifying eloquence.” One of the doubters observed, to a Hayne enthusiast who was ready to read last rites over Webster, “He has started the lion. But wait till we hear his roar or feel his claws.”
Edward Everett would win renown as an orator the equal of almost any in America; having come to Washington to witness the fight over the tariff, he sought out Webster that evening. “Mr. Webster conversed with me freely and at length upon the subject of the reply, which he felt it necessary to make to Colonel Hayne’s speech,” Everett recounted. “He regarded that speech as an entirely unprovoked attack upon the Eastern States, which it was scarcely possible for him, as a New England senator, to leave unnoticed. He thought Colonel Hayne’s speech, however, much more important in another point of view, that is as an exposition of a system of politics which, in Mr. Webster’s opinion, went far to change the form of government from that which was established by the Constitution, into that (if it could be called a government) which existed under the confederation. He expressed his intention of putting that theory to rest for ever, as far as it could be done by an argument in the Senate chamber.”
Everett knew Webster well enough to have a basis of emotional comparison. “I never saw him more calm and self-possessed, nor in better spirits,” Everett said. “And in fact the dry business tone in which he partly talked and partly read over his points to me, gave me some uneasiness, for fear he was not sufficiently aware how much was expected of him the next day.”