conception of the Union; and the principles, which he made clear and definite, went on broadening and deepening and carried the North through the civil war and preserved the national life. A singular result from a speech, if it were so fundamentally and historically wrong.

If Mr. Lodge, and those who agree with him, and there are some at the North who do, be right, and Hayne got the better of Webster in that celebrated contest, the nullification doctrines and acts of South Carolina were constitutionally sound and legal; and if South Carolina were right in her nullification, the secession of the South, thirty years afterwards, was also right.

We do not concede that nullification and secession have been barred because the course of events has been such that independent sovereign States have grown into a nation; nor do we admit that the Union and its indissolubility depend only on the result of an appeal to arms. We claim with Webster that nullification and secession were entirely indefensible constitutionally, and also in the light of history at the time of the foundation of our Constitution, and ever since.

There can be no doubt of the effect of Webster’s speeches at the time of their delivery; they aroused the national pride of the people, and the whole country, except portions of the South, responded.

It was in this nullification controversy that Webster won the title of the Great Expounder of the Constitution; he was then at his prime, physically and mentally. Always carefully dressed, when he made his speeches, in the blue coat with brass buttons, buff waistcoat, and white cravat of the Whigs of Fox’s time; his large frame, his massive head with dark, straight hair, and deep set and, in debate, luminous black eyes; his superb swarthy complexion brightened with brilliant color that is even in women so handsome; his grand and rich voice; his emphatic delivery;—all served to make him the most impressive of orators.

It was often said by his contemporaries at the bar that unless Webster wholly believed in the justice of the cause he was maintaining he could not argue well. He was not like some of the greatest advocates, whose ability and ingenuity are only fully brought forth when they have to contend with the difficulties of a weak and almost desperate case.

Hayne, his antagonist, was an able, eloquent, and accomplished orator. His speech did not create that enthusiasm at the South that Webster’s did at the North; but his own State pertinaciously adhered to its doctrine of nullification and saw no defeat to its champion.

There were no less than three speeches of Hayne’s—one of them, the second, running through two days—and the same number of replies by Webster. The debate took place in the Senate in January, 1830; it arose on an amended resolution originally offered by Mr. Foote as to the expediency of limiting or hastening the sales of the public lands. South Carolina was then threatening to declare the existing tariff null and void, and to pass laws preventing the United States from collecting duties in its ports. Hayne urged that the government should dispose of the public lands and after paying the national debt with the proceeds should get rid of the remainder, so that there should not be a shilling of permanent revenue; he looked with alarm on the consolidation of the government. To get the support of the West against the East, he accused the East of a narrow policy towards the West as to the public lands and the tariff, “the accursed tariff,” as he termed it, which kept multitudes of laborers in the East to the detriment of the West. In his second speech, Hayne not only attacked the East and its policy as to the public lands and support of the tariff, but went further and “carried the war into Africa,” as he styled it, reading speeches, pamphlets, and sermons, showing, as he claimed, the disloyalty of New England in the war of 1812.

He maintained that the United States had exceeded the powers granted to it by the Constitution in making the existing tariff, which protected the manufacturing industry of the East, only a section of the country, and compelled the non-manufacturing States to pay tribute to it; that the United States government was a compact between independent sovereign States; that each of the States, being an independent sovereign, had a right in its own sovereign capacity to decide whether laws made by the United States exceeded the powers given it by the Constitution, and if a State held a law made by the United States was not authorized by the Constitution, it could treat it as null and void; that the existing tariff was a clear and palpable violation of the Constitution, and that South Carolina could and 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:

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