THE DEBATE CONTINUED, filling a month of the Senate’s calendar. Daniel Webster parried Henry Clay and again rebutted John Calhoun; Calhoun answered Webster; Clay riposted both. The teamwork was complicated, with Clay and Calhoun partnering against Webster on the tariff bill, and Clay and Webster allying against Calhoun on the force bill.
Progress toward a resolution came slowly. The two bills moved through the Senate and the House at different paces. The Senate, having passed the force bill, inched toward a vote on the tariff. The House bogged down in a debate over a competing tariff bill sponsored by Gulian Verplanck of New York, with the force bill yet to be considered.
Clay still didn’t like Jackson’s force bill yet continued to judge it unstoppable. And this judgment made him work harder than ever for his compromise tariff. The force bill would increase the risk of civil war by playing into the hands of the hotheads in South Carolina, but a compromise tariff would give heart to moderates there, allowing the state to step back from nullification without losing face.
Clay was a senator, yet he remembered the ways of the House. At a critical moment he enlisted his House friend Robert Letcher to offer Clay’s Senate tariff bill as a substitute for the Verplanck bill. The maneuver caught the House opponents of tariff compromise off guard, and Clay’s measure sailed through.
The victory in the House added momentum to Clay’s tariff bill in the Senate, which approved it on March 1, 1833. On the same day the House, freed from its tariff tangle, adopted the force bill.
Clay was elated and relieved. “Yesterday was perhaps the most important Congressional day that ever occurred,” he wrote to James Barbour on March 2. “I shall get some curses,” he acknowledged. “But more blessings. I am content if they neutralize each other.”
In South Carolina they just about did. The new tariff caused the nullifiers to rescind the ordinance of nullification. But lest the world think they were yielding anything, they passed an ordinance nullifying Jackson’s Force Act. The move was belligerent but largely symbolic. The crisis ended.
IT DID SO just in time for Andrew Jackson’s second inaugural address. Jackson joined the compromise chorus. While reiterating the duty of all states and citizens to abide by laws passed by Congress, he praised the principle of states’ rights. The key was balance. The Union must be preserved, but the government of the Union must honor the prerogatives of the states.
In private Jackson was ambivalent about what had been accomplished. “I have had a laborious task here, but nullification is dead,” he wrote to an old friend. “Its actors and exciters will only be remembered by the people to be execrated for their wicked designs to sever and destroy the only good government on the globe, and that prosperity and happiness we enjoy over every other portion of the world. Haman’s gallows ought to be the fate of all such ambitious men who would involve their country in civil war and all the evils in its train, that they might reign and ride on its whirlwinds and direct the storm.”
Yet Jackson worried that nullification would rise again, in a more virulent form on a more divisive topic. “The tariff was only the pretext, and disunion and a southern confederacy the real object,” Jackson said. “The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery, question.”
IF JACKSON HAD read John Calhoun’s correspondence, he would have been even more convinced that nullification would be back—and more certain that Calhoun, the ringleader of the nullifiers, must be hanged one day. To Calhoun the purpose of the compromise of 1833 was to buy time. “A year would make an immense difference in our position,” he wrote amid the crisis to a South Carolina associate. “We are growing daily. Our cause would be better understood, our strength increased, and the temper of the South and the other sections better ascertained. To take issue now would be to play into the hands of the administration, while to delay the issue would derange all of their calculations. I feel confident; we want time only to ensure victory.”
The compromise delivered the time. And the struggle to achieve it convinced Calhoun that he had been right about the intentions of the administration and the North. “All that I see and hear satisfies me that the spirit of liberty is dead in the North, and but confirms the truth of the principles for which I have contended under so many difficulties,” he told a friend. “It is of the very genius of a consolidated government to elevate one portion of the community while it corrupts the other. That form of government is now established by law under the bloody act”—the Force Act—“and unless there should be a complete reaction, a reaction which shall repeal that atrocious act and completely reform the government, we must expect and prepare to sink under corruption and despotism. Of such reaction and reform, there is not the least hope but from the South and through the agency of state rights.”
The South must follow the lead of South Carolina, Calhoun said. “The oppressed states must act on the principle systematically that no unconstitutional act shall be enforced within their respective limits. There is no other remedy. We have commenced the system, and as it regards the tariff, the most difficult of all acts to resist, with encouraging success.”
The tariff was but the start. The Union, as defined by the South’s oppressors, had been grievously wounded. “Nullification has dealt the fatal blow.” And it would deliver more. Calhoun accounted South Carolina’s rejection of the Force Act a portent of things to come. “It will never be enforced in this state. Other states may live under its reign, but Carolina is resolved to live only under that of the Constitution. There shall be at least one free state.”