Nullification, Secession, Webster's Argument, and the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. Caleb William Loring

would pass laws forbidding and preventing the collection in its territory of the duties levied under it.

      Before taking up Webster’s constitutional argument, we will give a brief account of his answer to the attack made on himself and the East.

      Webster, in his great speech, the second in reply to Hayne, alluding to Hayne’s allegation that he, Webster, had slept upon his first speech, said, “he must have slept upon it, or not slept at all”: and he assured him that he did sleep on it and slept soundly.

      One of the most stinging and dramatic events that ever occurred in the Senate-chamber, as a distinguished Senator from Maine has told the writer, was the manner in which Webster turned upon his opponents the taunt of Hayne, that the ghost of the murdered coalition, like Banquo’s, would not down at their bidding, and had brought up him and his friends to defend themselves. Webster replied that it was not the friends but the enemies of the murdered Banquo, at whose bidding the spirit would not down. The ghost of Banquo, like that of Hamlet, was an honest ghost; then turning on and pointing to Calhoun, who, as Vice-President in Jackson’s first administration, was presiding over the Senate, and whose reputed ambition to succeed as President had signally failed, he asked:

      “Those who murdered Banquo, what did they win by it? Substantial good? Permanent power? Or disappointment rather, and sore mortification;—dust and ashes—the common fate of vaulting ambition overleaping itself?... Did they not soon find that for another they had ‘filed their mind,’ that their ambition had put

      

      “‘A barren sceptre in their gripe,

       Thence to be wrenched by an unlineal hand—

       No son of theirs succeeding.’”

      Calhoun showed his emotion and moved in his chair. In a speech made three years afterwards, when a Senator, he denied that he had aspired after the presidency.

      Webster defended at great length, and successfully, the policy of the East as to the public lands, internal improvements, and the tariff. He showed that Calhoun himself was originally in favor of internal improvements, and that he voted for tariffs; that in 1816 a protective tariff (denounced as such) was supported by South Carolina votes and was opposed by Massachusetts; that under the tariffs of 1816, 1824, 1828, which were protective tariffs and had become the policy of the country, Massachusetts became interested in manufacturing; so he, Mr. Webster, in 1828 supported a protective tariff, though in 1816 and 1824 he had opposed it.

      As to Hayne’s “carrying the war into the enemy’s country by attacking Massachusetts,” Webster asks: “Has he disproved a fact, refuted a proposition, weakened an argument, maintained by me?” And “what sort of a war has he made of it? Why, sir, he has stretched a drag net over the whole surface of perished pamphlets, indiscreet sermons, frothy paragraphs, and fuming popular addresses; over whatever the pulpit in its moments of alarm, the press in its heats, and parties in their extravagance, have severally thrown off in times of general excitement and violence.”

      Webster, declining to separate these accusations and answer them, asks: “But what had this to do with the controversy on hand; why should New England be abused for holding opinions as dangerous to the Union as those which he now holds? Why does he find no fault with those opinions recently promulgated in South Carolina?”

      Then Webster, noticing Hayne’s eulogium of South Carolina, instead of attacking her, puts himself on the higher plane of a common national pride and patriotism.

      “I shall not acknowledge that the honorable member goes before me in regard for whatever of distinguished talent or distinguished character South Carolina has produced. I claim part of the honor, I partake in the pride of her great names. I claim them for countrymen one and all. The Laurenses, the Rutledges, the Pinckneys, the Sumters, the Marions,—Americans all, whose fame is no more to be hemmed in by State lines, than their talents and patriotism were capable of being circumscribed within the same narrow limits. Him whose honored name the gentleman himself bears, does he esteem me less capable of gratitude for his patriotism, or sympathy for his sufferings, than if his eyes had first opened on the light of Massachusetts, instead of South Carolina?”

      Then Webster refers to the great harmony of principle and feeling formerly existing between the two States. “Shoulder to shoulder they went through the revolution, hand in hand they stood round the administration of Washington and felt his own great arm lean on them for support.”

      It was one of those great efforts delivered on the spur of the moment, which, though not written out, had been thought and studied beforehand. The bitter invective, the grand patriotic words for our National Union, which make the heart beat and quicken the blood, came from the genius of the orator. Dr. Francis Lieber, a most competent judge, wrote: “To test Webster’s oratory, which has been very attractive to me, I read a portion of my favorite speeches of Demosthenes and then read, always aloud, parts of Webster’s; then returned to the Athenian, and Webster stood the test.”[3] The question of the supremacy of the government of the Union over that of the States was familiar to Webster; he had taken part in the argument of the cases before the Supreme Court involving that issue, and well knew the decisions of Marshall, its great chief. There is no such thing “as extemporaneous acquisition,” as Webster himself said of his speech. Its views and arguments have been adopted by our jurists, and by Bancroft, Hildreth, Fiske, and all of our old Northern historians. Webster was probably a more diligent student than Mr. Lodge gives him credit for; his habit being to rise in the early morn and work then. The writer of this has heard him say that he had read through all the volumes of Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates.

      In giving Webster’s argument on the question of nullification, we will use his speech in reply to Hayne, and his subsequent speech in answer to Calhoun, delivered three years later, in 1833.

      He showed, as we shall see, that by adopting the Constitution a national government was formed, with legislative authority to make laws that should be supreme within the powers granted in the Constitution, with an Executive to carry out those laws, and a supreme Judicial Department that should decide all questions arising under those laws, and whether they were within the granted powers, whose decision no State could question.

      After disposing of the personal attack on himself and that against the East, Webster took up that against the Union; he went back to its formation, treating it historically. Under the confederacy made between the States the whole power of the government was in the Continental Congress. Though it could make war and peace, it could raise troops and obtain its revenues only through the action of the several States; it could not even regulate commerce and had no coercive power over the States; its executive powers were exercised by committees and officers appointed by the Congress. This Continental Congress carried the country safely through the revolution; but during the few years afterwards,—without the rights and powers essential to an effective government, without a Judiciary and a responsible Executive, the States quarrelling amongst themselves and struggling with internal troubles—its authority became so weakened that it inspired respect neither at home nor abroad[4]; and the people of all the States, finding the necessity of a stronger government, the separate States entered into a convention to form one.

      The first resolution of this convention was, that the government of the United States ought to consist of a Supreme Legislature, Judiciary, and Executive; this showed the power that it intended to give the government.

      The declaration in the preamble of the Constitution they formed, set forth: “We, the PEOPLE of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union,” etc., “do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”[5] It was not that the States or the people of the separate States made the Constitution, but it was the people of the whole United States, and the acceptance of this Constitution was submitted to conventions of each State, chosen by the people, and not to the State governments and legislatures.

      

      It was from Webster’s declaration, “It is the people’s Constitution, the people’s government; made for the people; made by the people and answerable to the people,” that Lincoln took the