DANIEL WEBSTER HAD not been invited to the love fest. Nor did he desire to join it. He congratulated Clay and Calhoun for seeking peace between the sections on the tariff issue. But peace was one thing, and principle another. “There are principles in it to which I do not at present see how I can ever concur,” he said of Clay’s bill. The Kentucky senator’s words tried to reassure protectionists, but his bill would sacrifice them. Consumers in the South might cheer, but the manufacturers in the North, and their employees and suppliers, would suffer. Webster challenged a basic premise of Clay’s argument: that the tariff was in sudden, imminent danger. “I know nothing which has happened, within the last six or eight months, changing so materially the prospects of the tariff,” he said. In any event, senators should act out of courage, not out of fear. He would stick to his principles, and stand by the tariff.
Webster was just warming up. So, it turned out, was John Calhoun. But when the battle was rejoined, it involved a measure even more controversial than the tariff. Andrew Jackson’s warning to South Carolina was followed by an administration request of Congress for explicit authority to employ force in case South Carolina obstructed collection of the tariff in the state. The administration called the measure a “revenue collection bill”; everyone else called it a force bill. And it inflamed South Carolina the more by making explicit the specter of war on South Carolina’s soil against South Carolina’s people. Several other Southern states were only slightly less alarmed.
Calhoun accused Jackson of double-crossing the South, which had looked to him to solve the tariff problem. Southerners, including South Carolinians, had turned out in great numbers and carried Jackson to victory in the two elections. “But little did the people of Carolina dream that the man whom they were thus striving to elevate to the highest seat of power would prove so utterly false to all their hopes.”
The force bill was abhorrent in the unfettered powers it would confer on the executive, Calhoun said. “It puts at the disposal of the president the army and navy, and the entire militia of the country.” And to what purpose? “To make war against one of the free and sovereign members of this confederation, which the bill proposes to deal with not as a state but as a collection of banditti or outlaws, thus exhibiting the impious spectacle of this government, the creature of the states, making war against the power to which it owes its existence.”
The force bill was egregiously unconstitutional, Calhoun said. “This bill proceeds on the ground that the entire sovereignty of this country belongs to the American people, as forming one great community, and regards the states as mere fractions or counties, and not as an integral part of the Union, having no more right to resist the encroachments of this government than a county has to resist the authority of a state.” The bill declared war on South Carolina—indeed, worse than war, for it set an organized force against an unorganized people. “It decrees a massacre of her citizens!” It gave the chief executive powers no man should ever wield. “It authorizes the president, or even his deputies, when they suppose the law to be violated, without the intervention of a court or jury to kill without mercy or discrimination!”
Supporters of the force bill declared that the law must be enforced. “The law must be enforced!” Calhoun repeated scornfully. What they meant was: “The imperial edict must be executed.” Sixty years earlier Britain’s Lord North had said the tea tax must be enforced, and he had driven the American colonies to rebellion. The president was doing the same to the Southern states.
Backers of the force bill said the Union must be preserved. “And how is it proposed to preserve the Union? By force! Does any man in his senses believe that this beautiful structure, this harmonious aggregate of states produced by the joint consent of all, can be preserved by force?” There was not a chance. “Its very introduction will be certain destruction of this federal Union. No, no; you cannot keep the states united in their constitutional and federal bonds by force. Force may indeed hold the parts together, but such union would be the bond between master and slave, a union of exaction on one side and of unqualified obedience on the other.”
Calhoun leveled a warning. “Disguise it as you might, the controversy is one between power and liberty, and I will tell the gentlemen who are opposed to me that strong as might be the love of power on your side, the love of liberty is still stronger on ours.” He acknowledged that his side lacked numbers and arms; the odds were fearful against them. Yet this made their duty all the clearer and potentially more rewarding. “To discharge successfully this high duty requires the highest qualities, moral and intellectual, and should we perform it with a zeal and ability in proportion to its magnitude, instead of being mere planters, our section will become distinguished for its patriots and statesmen.” Failure to oppose the president would exact a terrible cost. “If we yield to the steady encroachment of power, the severest and most debasing calamity and corruption will overspread the land.”
NO APPLAUSE INTERRUPTED John Calhoun this time; none followed his conclusion. In response to Henry Clay’s tariff bill he had praised reason and compromise; in reply to Andrew Jackson’s force bill he threatened war and the destruction of the Union. His words sobered even his supporters.
Daniel Webster rose at once to rebut him. Webster blamed Calhoun for a mode of address ill befitting a member of Congress. “The gentleman has terminated his speech in a tone of threat and defiance toward this bill, even if it should become a law of the land, altogether unusual in the halls of Congress,” Webster said. But the tone was not worse than the argument itself. “He does himself no justice. The cause which he espouses finds no basis in the Constitution, no succor from public sympathy, no cheering from a patriotic community. He has no foothold on which to stand, where he might display the powers of his acknowledged talents. Every thing beneath his feet is hollow and treacherous.”
Calhoun couldn’t be more wrong about the constitutionality of nullification and secession, Webster said. “The Constitution does not provide for events which must be preceded by its own destruction. Secession, therefore, since it must bring these consequences with it, is revolutionary. And nullification is equally revolutionary.” What was revolution? That which overturned or arrested the legitimate authority of government. “This is the precise object of nullification. It attempts to supersede the supreme legislative authority. It arrests the arm of the executive magistrate. It interrupts the exercise of the accustomed judicial power.” South Carolina’s ordinance of nullification did all these things. Indeed, nullification was worse than revolutionary. “It raises to supreme command four-and-twenty distinct powers”—the twenty-four states—“each professing to be under a general government and yet each setting its laws at defiance at pleasure. Is this not anarchy, as well as revolution?”
The fulcrum of Calhoun’s argument was that the Constitution was a compact among states, forming a confederacy or a league rather than a unified nation. Webster examined the Constitution itself for evidence of this. “Does it call itself a compact? Certainly not. It uses the word ‘compact’ but once, and that is when it declares that states shall enter into no compact. Does it call itself a league, a confederacy, a subsisting treaty between the states? Certainly not. There is not a particle of such language in all its pages.”
What was it, then? “It declares itself a constitution.” Americans were fully familiar with constitutions, from their experience in the states. “We are at no loss to understand what is meant by the constitution of one of the states, and the constitution of the United States speaks of itself as being an instrument of the same nature.”
A compact or a confederation—like that of the Articles of Confederation—acted upon states. But the Constitution acted upon the people as individuals. “This government may punish individuals for treason and all other crimes in the code, when committed against the United States. It has power, also, to tax individuals, in any mode and to any extent, and it possesses the further power of demanding from individuals military service. Nothing, certainly, can more clearly distinguish a government from a confederation of states than the possession of these powers. No closer relations can exist between individuals and any government.”
The Constitution granted Congress the power to declare war. Under Calhoun’s theory, the states should be able to nullify war declarations as easily as any other congressional acts, Webster said. “Can any thing be more preposterous?” Half the country go to war, and the other half abstain?
“The truth is, Mr. President, and no ingenuity of argument, no subtlety of distinction, can evade it, the people of the United States are one people. They are one in making war, and one in making peace. They are one in regulating commerce, and one in laying duties of impost. The very end and purpose of the Constitution was to make them one people in these particulars, and it has effectually accomplished its object.”
The framers had made their purpose patent at the start. “How can any man get over the first words of the Constitution itself?—‘We, the people of the United States, do ordain and establish this constitution.’ These words must cease to be part of the Constitution, they must be obliterated from the parchment on which they are written, before any human ingenuity or human argument can remove the popular basis on which that Constitution rests and turn the instrument into a mere compact between sovereign states.”
The nullifiers railed at the oppressions they claimed to suffer. They protested far too much, Webster said. Americans, including Southerners, had never lived better. “At this very moment, sir, the whole land smiles in peace and rejoices in plenty. A general and a high prosperity pervades the country. And, judging by the common standard, by increases of population and wealth, or judging by the opinions of that portion of her people not embarked in those dangerous and desperate measures, this prosperity overspreads South Carolina herself.”
Against this horizon of happiness, the malcontents in South Carolina worked their selfish mischief. “One danger only creates hesitation; one doubt only exists to darken the otherwise unclouded brightness of that aspect which she exhibits to the view and to the admiration of the world.” Would the nullifiers wreck the Union? That was the question. America wanted to know; the world wanted to know. “All Europe is, at this moment, beholding us and looking for the issue of this controversy—those who hate free institutions, with malignant hope; those who love them, with deep anxiety and shivering fear.”
Senators, and all Americans, must choose sides in this fateful struggle. “For myself, sir, I shun no responsibility justly devolving on me, here or elsewhere, in attempting to maintain the cause,” Webster said. “I shall exert every faculty I possess in aiding to prevent the Constitution from being nullified, destroyed or impaired; and even should I see it fail, I will still, with a voice feeble, perhaps, but earnest as ever issued from human lips and with fidelity and zeal which nothing shall extinguish, call on the people to come to its rescue.”