THIS TIME THE gallery did erupt. Webster’s close brought his listeners to their feet shouting and applauding. The president pro tem glowered at the sergeant at arms, who hustled the offenders out the door.
Yet Webster was the hero of the moment only. The force bill rallied the many opponents of Calhoun and the nullifiers, but in doing so it drove the nullifiers deeper into their trenches. When the bill’s Senate supporters compelled a vote, over the objections of the Calhoun cohort, the latter walked out of the chamber in protest. The measure passed on a shrunken tally and in an atmosphere of growing bitterness.
Henry Clay managed to be absent at the time of the vote, not to protest the bill, but to preserve his position as mediator. And he immediately tried to refocus the Senate on the tariff bill. The force bill was Jackson’s measure, not Clay’s, yet Clay realized that the force bill, besides being unstoppable, could become a crucial adjunct to his tariff bill. The tariff bill applied persuasion to get the nullifiers to reconsider their opposition to federal authority; the force bill threatened coercion should persuasion fail.
Not everyone appreciated Clay’s artful approach. Daniel Webster denounced Clay’s tariff bill as a surrender to extortion, a capitulation to a willful minority, a perversion of constitutional principles of republican self-rule. The existing tariff had won the requisite majorities in Congress; its beneficiaries were under no obligation to apologize for what they had accomplished fairly and honorably, Webster told the Senate. South Carolinians were unhappy with the status quo; Americans at large would be unhappy with the proposed change. “If this bill should become a law, there will be an action on the part of the people at the next session to overthrow it,” Webster predicted. “It will not be all requiem and lullaby when this bill shall be passed. On the contrary, there will be discord and discontent.” Webster had nothing against South Carolina. “I would do as much to satisfy South Carolina as any man.” But he couldn’t swallow Clay’s scheme. “My constituents will excuse me for surrendering their interests, but they will not forgive me for a violation of the Constitution.”
BEFORE WEBSTER’S LISTENERS could respond, before they even realized he had finished, Henry Clay was on his feet. Clay knew Webster’s power, and knew he had to counter it at once. “I have long, with pleasure and pride, cooperated in the public service with the senator from Massachusetts, and I have found him faithful, enlightened and patriotic,” Clay declared. “I have not a particle of doubt as to the pure and elevated motives which actuate him.” But in rejecting the tariff revision, Webster was recklessly shortsighted. “Let us not deceive ourselves. Now is the time to adjust the question in a manner satisfactory to both parties. Put it off until the next session and the alternative may and probably then would be a speedy and ruinous reduction of the tariff or a civil war with the entire South.” The revision offered hope. “The bill before us strongly recommends itself by its equality and impartiality. It favors no one interest, and no one state, by an unjust sacrifice of others. It deals equally by all.” Was it imperfect? Undoubtedly. But it could be fixed later. Clay took a page from America’s founding. “Let us, on this occasion of compromise, pursue the example of our fathers who, under the influence of the same spirit, in the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, determined to ratify it, and go for amendments afterward.”
The Senate’s approval of the force bill made tariff revision more crucial than ever, Clay said. The two measures together, and only together, held the key to resolving the current crisis. “The first will satisfy all who love order and law and disapprove the inadmissible doctrine of nullification. The last will soothe those who love peace and concord, harmony and union. One demonstrates the power and the disposition to vindicate the authority and supremacy of the laws of the Union; the other offers that which, if it be accepted in the fraternal spirit in which it is tendered, will supersede the necessity of the employment of all force.” Webster and those who joined him in opposition to the tariff bill saw only half the picture. “The difference between the friends and the foes of the compromise under consideration is that they would, in the enforcing act, send forth alone a flaming sword; we would send that out also, but along with it the olive branch, as a messenger of peace. They cry out, the law! the law! the law! Power! power! power! We, too, reverence the law and bow to the supremacy of its obligation; but we are in favor of the law executed in mildness and of power tempered with mercy. They, as we think, would hazard a civil commotion, beginning in South Carolina and extending God only knows where. While we would vindicate the authority of the federal government, we are for peace, if possible, union and liberty. We want no war; above all, no civil war, no family strife. We want to see no sacked cities, no desolated fields, no smoking ruins, no streams of American blood, shed by American arms.”
Clay closed on a personal note. Some critics of the compromise read ambition into his sponsorship of the bargain. He was looking to the 1836 presidential election, they declared. Clay shook his head in weariness at their failure to understand his motives. His ambitions for higher office were spent, he said. His only ambition was to retire in peace. “Pass this bill, tranquilize the country, restore confidence and affection in the Union, and I am willing to go home to Ashland and renounce public service forever.”