HENRY CLAY WATCHED and listened as the war of words escalated. He yielded nothing to Andrew Jackson in devotion to the Union, but he judged that Jackson’s temper and penchant for fighting posed as great a danger to the Union as the threats of the nullifiers. John Calhoun he found harder to read. Clay recalled the days when Calhoun had been his ally; in those times he had seemed the soul of reasonableness. But since the passage of the tariff of 1828 he had been seized by something Clay couldn’t put his finger on. It might have been simple ambition, a desire for the same high office Clay had twice contested for. Clay was the last person to ignore ambition as a driver in men who found their way to the banks of the Potomac. But if ambition it was, it took strange forms in Calhoun. The South Carolinian seemed a man possessed—not by evil spirits but by ideas, ideas that wouldn’t let him go. It might have been expedience that suggested the idea that the Constitution created a compact of American states rather than a government of the American people, but once seized of the idea, Calhoun couldn’t escape the conclusions to which it led him.
Yet Calhoun was the one Clay had to work with. Calhoun held the key to a compromise that might avert the day of reckoning. Through Robert Letcher, his fellow Kentuckian, Clay proposed a meeting with Calhoun. He invited Calhoun to his private apartment. Calhoun was suspicious of Clay and initially resisted. Perhaps at Clay’s urging, Letcher related to Calhoun that Andrew Jackson was about to arrest those he considered the leaders of the nullification movement, starting with Calhoun. A treason prosecution could be expected to follow. Calhoun chose to accept Clay’s invitation.
When Calhoun entered the room, Clay rose, bowed and offered him a seat. Calhoun stiffly took it. Robert Letcher tried to ease the atmosphere, without success. Calhoun looked coldly at Clay, who looked back almost as grimly. Letcher, acting as mediator, turned to the subject at hand. The nation needed a compromise, he said. The beneficiaries of the tariff must give back some of what they had taken in 1828; the nullifiers must step away from the brink of secession and war.
Calhoun yielded no ground. He barely spoke. Clay couldn’t get him to open up, even to commence negotiations. After an uncomfortable few minutes the meeting ended. Nothing was agreed to, nothing compromised. A spy at the door, watching Calhoun leave, might have supposed that the crisis was as intractable as ever.
But something had happened. Likely Clay measured the strength of Calhoun’s resolve; Calhoun did the same of Clay’s. Possibly they recalled particular memories of their former, more cooperative days. Each apparently satisfied himself of the sincerity of the other. Each concluded he could work with the other.
Clay went first. The author of the Missouri Compromise let out that he was going to offer another compromise. Washington took notice, and the Senate was crowded as he took the floor to explain. “When I survey, sir, the whole face of our country,” Clay declared, “I behold all around me evidences of the most gratifying prosperity, a prospect which would seem to be without a cloud upon it, were it not that through all parts of the country there exist great dissensions and unhappy distinctions.” The dissensions over the tariff, the distinctions between North and South, East and West, threatened America’s prosperity and imperiled the country itself. America’s elected officials had caused the troubles; it was up to America’s elected officials to ease or end them.
The tariff was a principal cause of the troubles, so the tariff must be a large part of the solution, Clay said. This was a striking admission by the father of the American System, of which the protective tariff was a central pillar. More striking still was Clay’s warning about the future of the tariff. “The tariff stands in imminent danger,” he said. “If it should even be preserved during this session, it must fall at the next session.” The South had always opposed the tariff; the West, never more than tepid, had grown cooler of late. The Democrats as a party appeared happy to sink it. Clay lamented the demise of the protective tariff, citing the businesses that had been built on the expectation of its continuance. But statesmen must deal with realities, he said. If the friends of the tariff didn’t reduce it slowly, its enemies would erase it at once. Professing to speak as the truest friend of the tariff, Clay offered a bill dictating its gradual reduction. Over nine years, rates would fall from their current protective level to a revenue level—that is, the level at which they would pay for the operations of the government, but no higher.
Protectionists would complain, Clay acknowledged. But they had little basis for doing so. “What was the principle which had always been contended for in this and in the other House?” he asked. “That, after the accumulation of capital and skill, the manufacturers would stand alone, unaided by the government, in competition with the articles from any quarter.” American industry was flourishing, and in the years of the tariff drawdown it would flourish even more.
Clay granted that his compromise was imperfect. But what compromise was not? “It has been remarked, and justly remarked, by the great Father of our Country himself, that if the work which is the charter of our liberties, and under which we have so long flourished, had been submitted, article by article, to all the different states composing this Union, the whole would have been rejected; and yet, when the whole was presented together, it was accepted as a whole.” If George Washington could be so wise, his heirs could not afford not to be.
Some would say he was capitulating to the secessionists of South Carolina, that legislative compromise under threat of war denied every principle of democracy. Clay deflected the premise. Earlier news reports had indeed led him to believe that South Carolina was already in arms, itching to battle the United States. “But since my arrival here I found that South Carolina does not contemplate force, for it is denied and denounced by that state. She disclaims it and asserts that she is merely making an experiment. The experiment is this: By a course of state legislation, and by a change in her fundamental laws, she is endeavoring, by her civil tribunals, to prevent the general government from carrying the laws of the United States into operation within her limits. That she has professed to be her object. Her appeal is not to arms but to another power; not to the sword but to the law.”
Clay didn’t say that his informant on this subject was John Calhoun, but word of his meeting with Calhoun had gotten out and his auditors drew the inference. “It seems to me the aspect of South Carolina has changed, or rather, the new light which I have obtained enables me to see her in a different attitude,” Clay continued. “South Carolina is doing nothing more, except that she is doing it with more rashness, than some other states have done.” Virginia and Kentucky had started down this path in 1798, several states of New England during the War of 1812. None of those states had seceded, and neither would South Carolina. “I say it is utterly impossible that South Carolina ever desired, for a moment, to become a separate and independent state.” Yet South Carolina was proud and might be provoked; it must be treated with the respect due every state. “Sir, I repeat, that I think South Carolina has been rash, intemperate, and greatly in the wrong; but I do not want to disgrace her, nor any other member of this Union. No; I do not desire to see the luster of one single star dimmed of that glorious confederacy which constitutes our political sun. Still less do I wish to see it blotted out and its light obliterated forever.”
Clay appealed to the goodwill and tolerance of his fellow lawmakers. “Allow me to entreat and implore each individual member of this body to bring into the consideration of this measure, which I have had the honor of proposing, the same love of country which, if I know myself, has actuated me, and the same desire for restoring harmony to the Union which has prompted this effort.” Statesmen should put aside party and section and heed only their feelings as Americans. “I should hope that under such feelings, and with such dispositions, we may advantageously proceed to the consideration of this bill and heal, before they are yet bleeding, the wounds of our distracted country.”
CLAY’S ABANDONMENT OF the principle of protection caught many in the Senate off guard, but his broader appeal for compromise seemed in keeping with his long-standing preference for the middle path. By contrast, John Calhoun’s endorsement of the middle path jolted nearly everyone. Calhoun—a compromiser? It was hard to imagine.
Yet there he was, standing where Clay had stood and saying much the same thing. “He who loves the Union must desire to see this agitating question brought to a termination,” Calhoun declared of the troubles provoked by the tariff. “Until it is terminated, we can not expect the restoration of peace or harmony, or a sound condition of things, throughout the country.” The Clay proposal made a good start. And the broader Clay approach—of seeking not victory over the other side, but accommodation—made an even better one. “It has been my fate to occupy a position as hostile as any one could, in reference to the protecting policy,” Calhoun conceded. “But if it depended on my will, I would not give my vote for the prostration of the manufacturing interest. A very large capital has been invested in manufactures, which have been of great service to the country; and I would never give my vote to suddenly withdraw all those duties by which that capital was sustained in the channel into which it had been directed.”
Echoing Clay, Calhoun acknowledged that all compromises were imperfect. There were parts of the Clay bill he would like to see changed. “But I look upon these minor points of difference as points in the settlement of which no difficulty will occur, when gentlemen meet together in that spirit of mutual compromise which, I doubt not, will be brought into their deliberations, without at all yielding the constitutional question as to the right of protection.”
Calhoun might have spoken more, and indeed he would speak more. But the gallery erupted in cheers at the gulf that had been crossed by the senators from Kentucky and South Carolina. The president pro tem pounded his gavel and ordered the gallery cleared, but two members, evidently supporters of compromise, petitioned for a stay of the order. The president pro tem acceded, even as he told the sergeant at arms that another outburst must cause his order to be implemented at once.