Thirty Years' View (Vol. I of 2)

In this extract from that remarkable speech, the first one in which Mr. Calhoun defended nullification and secession in the Senate, and in which every word bears the impress of intense thought, there is distinctly to be seen his opinion of the defects of our duplicate form of government (State and federal), and of the remedy for those defects. I say, in our form of government; for his speech had a practical application to ourselves, and was a defence, or justification of the actual measures of the State he represented. And this defect was, the unchecked authority of a majority; and the remedy was, an authority in the minority to check that majority, and to secede. This clearly was an absolute condemnation of the fundamental principle upon which the administration of the federal constitution, and of the State constitutions rested. But he did not limit himself to the benefits of the veto and of secession, as shown in Roman history; he had recourse to the Jewish for the same purpose – and found it – not in a veto in each of the twelve tribes, but in the right of secession; and found it, not in the minority, but the majority, in the reign of Jeroboam, when ten tribes seceded. That example is thus introduced:

"Among the few exceptions in the Asiatic nations, the government of the twelve tribes of Israel, in its early period, was the most striking. Their government, at first, was a mere confederation, without any central power, till a military chieftain, with the title of king, was placed at its head, without, however, merging the original organization of the twelve distinct tribes. This was the commencement of that central action among that peculiar people, which, in three generations, terminated in a permanent division of their tribes. It is impossible even for a careless reader to peruse the history of that event without being forcibly struck with the analogy in the causes which led to their separation, and those which now threaten us with a similar calamity. With the establishment of the central power in the king commenced a system of taxation, which, under king Solomon, was greatly increased, to defray the expense of rearing the temple, of enlarging and embellishing Jerusalem, the seat of the central government, and the other profuse expenditures of his magnificent reign. Increased taxation was followed by its natural consequences – discontent and complaint, which before his death began to excite resistance. On the succession of his son, Rehoboam, the ten tribes, headed by Jeroboam, demanded a reduction of the taxes; the temple being finished, and the embellishment of Jerusalem completed, and the money which had been raised for that purpose being no longer required, or, in other words, the debt being paid, they demanded a reduction of the duties – a repeal of the tariff. The demand was taken under consideration, and, after consulting the old men (the counsellors of '98), who advised a reduction, he then took the opinion of the younger politicians, who had since grown up, and knew not the doctrines of their fathers. He hearkened unto their counsel, and refused to make the reduction; and the secession of the ten tribes, under Jeroboam, followed. The tribes of Judah and Benjamin, which had received the disbursements, alone remained to the house of David."

This example also had a practical application, and a squint at the Virginia resolutions of '98-'99, and at the military chieftain then at the head of our government, with a broad intimation of what was to happen if the taxes were not reduced; and that happened to be secession. And all this, and the elaborate speech from which it is taken, and many others of the same character at the same time, was delivered at a time when the elections had decided for a reduction of the taxes – when a bill in the House was under consideration for that purpose – and when his own "compromise" bill was in a state of concoction, and advanced to a stage to assure its final passing. Strong must have been Mr. Calhoun's desire for his favorite remedy, when he could contend for it under such circumstances – under circumstances which showed that it could not be wanted for the purpose which he then avowed. Satisfied of the excellence, and even necessity in our system, of this remedy, the next question was to create it, or to find it; create it, by an amendment to the constitution; or find it already existing there; and this latter was done by a new reading of the famous Virginia resolutions of '98-'99. The right in any State to arrest an act of Congress, and to stay it until three fourths of the States ordered it to proceed, and with a right forcibly to resist if any attempt was made in the mean time to enforce it, with the correlative right of secession and permanent separation, were all found by him in these resolutions – the third especially, which was read, and commented upon for the purpose. Mr. Rives, of Virginia, repulsed that interpretation of the act of his State, and showed that an appeal to public opinion was all that was intended; and quoted the message of Governor Monroe to show that the judgment of the federal court, under one of the acts declared to be unconstitutional, was carried into effect in the capital of Virginia with the order and tranquillity of any other judgment. He said:

"But, sir, the proceedings of my State, on another occasion of far higher importance, have been so frequently referred to, in the course of this debate, as an example to justify the present proceedings of South Carolina, that I may be excused for saying something of them. What, then, was the conduct of Virginia, in the memorable era of '98 and '99? She solemnly protested against the alien and sedition acts, as 'palpable and alarming infractions of the constitution;' she communicated that protest to the other States of the Union, and earnestly appealed to them to unite with her in a like declaration, that this deliberate and solemn expression of the opinion of the States, as parties to the constitutional compact, should have its proper effect on the councils of the nation, in procuring a revision and repeal of the obnoxious acts. This was 'the head and front of her offending' – no more. The whole object of the proceedings was, by the peaceful force of public opinion, embodied through the organ of the State legislatures, to obtain a repeal of the laws in question, not to oppose or arrest their execution, while they remained unrepealed. That this was the true spirit and real purpose of the proceeding, is abundantly manifested by the whole of the able debate which took place in the legislature of the State, on the occasion. All the speakers, who advocated the resolutions which were finally adopted, distinctly placed them on that legitimate, constitutional ground. I need only refer to the emphatic declaration of John Taylor, of Caroline, the distinguished mover and able champion of the resolutions. He said 'the appeal was to public opinion; if that is against us, we must yield.' The same sentiment was avowed and maintained by every friend of the resolutions, throughout the debate.

"But, sir, the real intentions and policy of Virginia were proved, not by declarations and speeches merely, but by facts. If there ever was a law odious to a whole people, by its daring violation of the fundamental guaranties of public liberty, the freedom of speech and freedom of the press, it was the sedition law to the people of Virginia. Yet, amid all this indignant dissatisfaction, after the solemn protest of the legislature, in '98, and the renewal of that protest, in '99, this most odious and arbitrary law was peaceably carried into execution, in the capital of the State, by the prosecution and punishment of Callender, who was fined and imprisoned for daring to canvass the conduct of our public men (as Lyon and Cooper had been elsewhere), and was still actually imprisoned, when the legislature assembled, in December, 1800. Notwithstanding the excited sensibility of the public mind, no popular tumult, no legislative interference, disturbed, in any manner, the full and peaceable execution of the law. The Senate will excuse me, I trust, for calling their attention to a most forcible commentary on the true character of the Virginia proceedings of '98 and '99 (as illustrated in this transaction), which was contained in the official communication of Mr. Monroe, then Governor of the State, to the legislature, at its assembling, in December, 1800. After referring to the distribution which had been ordered to be made among the people, of Mr. Madison's celebrated report, of '99, he says 'In connection with this subject, it is proper to add, that, since your last session, the sedition law, one of the acts complained of, has been carried into effect, in this commonwealth, by the decision of a federal court. I notice this event, not with a view of censuring or criticising it. The transaction has gone to the world, and the impartial will judge of it as it deserves. I notice it for the purpose of remarking that the decision was executed with the same order and tranquil submission, on the part of the people, as could have been shown by them, on a similar occasion, to any the most necessary, constitutional and popular acts of the government.'"

Mr. Webster, in denying the derivation of nullification and secession from the constitution, 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 is revolution? Why, sir, that is revolution which overturns, or controls, or successfully resists the existing public authority; that which arrests the exercise of the supreme power; that which introduces a new paramount authority into the rule of the state. Now, sir, 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. Under the name of an ordinance, it declares null and void, within the State, all the revenue laws of the United States. Is not this revolutionary? Sir, so soon as this ordinance shall be carried into effect, a revolution will have commenced in South Carolina. She will have thrown off the authority to which her citizens have, heretofore, been subject. She will have declared her own opinions and her own will to be above the laws, and above the power of those who are intrusted with their administration. If she makes good these declarations, she is revolutionized. As to her, it is as distinctly a change of the supreme power as the American Revolution, of 1776. That revolution did not subvert government, in all its forms. It did not subvert local laws and municipal administrations. It only threw off the dominion of a power claiming to be superior, and to have a right, in many important respects, to exercise legislative authority. Thinking this authority to have been usurped or abused, the American colonies, now the United States, bade it defiance, and freed themselves from it, by means of a revolution. But that revolution left them with their own municipal laws still, and the forms of local government. If Carolina now shall effectually resist the laws of Congress – if she shall be her own judge, take her remedy into her own hands, obey the laws of the Union when she pleases, and disobey them when she pleases – she will relieve herself from a paramount power, as distinctly as did the American colonies, in 1776. In other words, she will achieve, as to herself, a revolution."

The speaker then proceeded to show what nullification was, as reduced to practice in the ordinance, and other proceedings of South Carolina; and said:

"But, sir, while practical nullification in South Carolina would be, as to herself, actual and distinct revolution, its necessary tendency must also be to spread revolution, and to break up the constitution, as to all the other States. It strikes a deadly blow at the vital principle of the whole Union. To allow State resistance to the laws of Congress to be rightful and proper, to admit nullification in some States, and yet not expect to see a dismemberment of the entire government, appears to me the wildest illusion and the most extravagant folly. The gentleman seems not conscious of the direction or the rapidity of his own course. The current of his opinions sweeps him along, he knows not whither. To begin with nullification, with the avowed intent, nevertheless, not to proceed to secession, dismemberment, and general revolution, is as if one were to take the plunge of Niagara, and cry out that he would stop half-way down. In the one case, as in the other, the rash adventurer must go to the bottom of the dark abyss below, were it not that that abyss has no discovered bottom.

"Nullification, if successful, arrests the power of the law, absolves citizens from their duty, subverts the foundation both of protection and obedience, dispenses with oaths and obligations of allegiance, and elevates another authority to supreme command. Is not this revolution? And it raises to supreme command four-and-twenty distinct powers, each professing to be under a general government, and yet each setting its laws at defiance at pleasure. Is not this anarchy, as well as revolution? Sir, the constitution of the United States was received as a whole, and for the whole country. If it cannot stand altogether, it cannot stand in parts; and, if the laws cannot be executed every where, they cannot long be executed any where. The gentleman very well knows that all duties and imposts must be uniform throughout the country. He knows that we cannot have one rule or one law for South Carolina, and another for other States. He must see, therefore, and does see – every man sees – that the only alternative is a repeal of the laws throughout the whole Union, or their execution in Carolina as well as elsewhere. And this repeal is demanded, because a single State interposes her veto, and threatens resistance! The result of the gentleman's opinions, or rather the very text of his doctrine, is, that no act of Congress can bind all the States, the constitutionality of which is not admitted by all; or, in other words, that no single State is bound, against its own dissent, by a law of imposts. This was precisely the evil experienced under the old confederation, and for remedy of which this constitution was adopted. The leading object in establishing this government, an object forced on the country by the condition of the times, and the absolute necessity of the law, was to give to Congress power to lay and collect imposts without the consent of particular States. The revolutionary debt remained unpaid; the national treasury was bankrupt; the country was destitute of credit; Congress issued its requisitions on the States, and the States neglected them; there was no power of coercion but war; Congress could not lay imposts, or other taxes, by its own authority; the whole general government, therefore, was little more than a name. The articles of confederation, as to purposes of revenue and finance, were nearly a dead letter. The country sought to escape from this condition, at once feeble and disgraceful, by constituting a government which should have power of itself to lay duties and taxes, and to pay the public debt, and provide for the general welfare; and to lay these duties and taxes in all the States, without asking the consent of the State governments. This was the very power on which the new constitution was to depend for all its ability to do good; and, without it, it can be no government, now or at any time. Yet, sir, it is precisely against this power, so absolutely indispensable to the very being of the government, that South Carolina directs her ordinance. She attacks the government in its authority to raise revenue, the very mainspring of the whole system; and, if she succeed, every movement of that system must inevitably cease. It is of no avail that she declares that she does not resist the law as a revenue law, but as a law for protecting manufactures. It is a revenue law; it is the very law by force of which the revenue is collected; if it be arrested in any State, the revenue ceases in that State; it is, in a word, the sole reliance of the government for the means of maintaining itself and performing its duties."

Mr. Webster condensed into four brief and pointed propositions his opinion of the nature of our federal government, as being a Union in contradistinction to a League, and as acting upon INDIVIDUALS in contradistinction to States, and as being, in these features discriminated from the old confederation.

"1. That the constitution of the United States is not a league, confederacy, or compact, between the people of the several States in their sovereign capacities; but a government proper, founded on the adoption of the people, and creating direct relations between itself and individuals.

"2. That no State authority has power to dissolve these relations; that nothing can dissolve them but revolution; and that, consequently, there can be no such thing as secession without revolution.

"3. That there is a supreme law, consisting of the constitution of the United States, acts of Congress passed in pursuance of it, and treaties; and that, in cases not capable of assuming the character of a suit in law or equity, Congress must judge of, and finally interpret, this supreme law, so often as it has occasion to pass acts of legislation; and, in cases capable of assuming, and actually assuming, the character of a suit, the Supreme Court of the United States is the final interpreter.

"4. That an attempt by a State to abrogate, annul, or nullify an act of Congress, or to arrest its operation within her limits, on the ground that, in her opinion, such law is unconstitutional, is a direct usurpation on the just powers of the general government, and on the equal rights of other States; a plain violation of the constitution, and a proceeding essentially revolutionary in its character and tendency."

Mr. Webster concluded his speech, an elaborate and able one, in which he appeared in the high character of patriot still more than that of orator, in which he intimated that some other cause, besides the alleged one, must be at the bottom of this desire for secession. He was explicit that the world could hardly believe in such a reason, and that we ourselves who hear and see all that is said and done, could not believe it. He concluded thus:

"Sir, the world will scarcely believe that this whole controversy, and all the desperate measures which its support requires, have no other foundation than a difference of opinion, upon a provision of the constitution, between a majority of the people of South Carolina, on one side, and a vast majority of the whole people of the United States on the other. It will not credit the fact, it will not admit the possibility, that, in an enlightened age, in a free, popular republic, under a government where the people govern, as they must always govern, under such systems, by majorities, at a time of unprecedented happiness, without practical oppression, without evils, such as may not only be pretended, but felt and experienced; evils not slight or temporary, but deep, permanent, and intolerable; a single State should rush into conflict with all the rest, attempt to put down the power of the Union by her own laws, and to support those laws by her military power, and thus break up and destroy the world's last hope. And well the world may be incredulous. We, who hear and see it, can ourselves hardly yet believe it. Even after all that had preceded it, this ordinance struck the country with amazement. It was incredible and inconceivable, that South Carolina should thus plunge headlong into resistance to the laws, on a matter of opinion, and on a question in which the preponderance of opinion, both of the present day and of all past time, was so overwhelmingly against her. The ordinance declares that Congress has exceeded its just power, by laying duties on imports, intended for the protection of manufactures. This is the opinion of South Carolina; and on the strength of that opinion she nullifies the laws. Yet has the rest of the country no right to its opinions also? Is one State to sit sole arbitress? She maintains that those laws are plain, deliberate, and palpable violations of the constitution; that she has a sovereign right to decide this matter; and, that, having so decided, she is authorized to resist their execution, by her own sovereign power; and she declares that she will resist it, though such resistance should shatter the Union into atoms."

Mr. Davis, of Massachusetts, had been still more explicit, in the expression of the belief already given (in the extract from his speech contained in this work), that the discontent in South Carolina had a root deeper than that of the tariff; and General Jackson intimated the same thing in his message to the two Houses on the South Carolina proceedings, and in which he alluded to the ambitious and personal feelings which might be involved in them. Certainly it was absolutely incomprehensible that this doctrine of nullification and secession, prefigured in the Roman secession to the sacred mount, and the Jewish disruption of the twelve tribes, should be thus enforced, and impressed, for that cause of the tariff alone; when, to say nothing of the intention of the President, the Congress and the country to reduce it, Mr. Calhoun himself had provided for its reduction, satisfactorily to himself, in the act called a "compromise;" to which he was a full contracting party. It was impossible to believe in the soleness of that reason, in the presence of circumstances which annulled it; and Mr. Calhoun himself, in a part of his speech which had been quoted, seemed to reveal a glimpse of two others – slavery, about which there was at that time no agitation – and the presidency, to which patriotic Southern men could not be elected. The glimpse exhibited of the first of these causes, was in this sentence: "The contest (between the North and the South) will, in fact, be a contest between power and liberty, and such he considered the present; a contest in which the weaker section, with its peculiar labor, productions and situation, has at stake all that is dear to freemen." Here is a distinct declaration that there was then a contest between the two sections of the Union, and that that contest was between power and liberty, in which the freedom and the slave property of the South were at stake. This declaration at the time attracted but little attention, there being then no sign of a slavery agitation; but to close observers it was an ominous revelation of something to come, and an apparent laying an anchor to windward for a new agitation on a new subject, after the tariff was done with. The second intimation which he gave out, and which referred to the exclusion of the patriotic men of the South from the presidency was in this sentence: "Every Southern man, true to the interests of his section, and faithful to the duties which Providence has allotted him, will be forever excluded from the honors and emoluments of this government, which will be reserved for those only who have qualified themselves, by political prostitution, for admission into the Magdalen asylum." This was bitter; and while revealing his own feelings at the prospect of his own failure for the presidency (which from the brightness of the noon-day sun was dimming down to the obscurity of dark night), was, at the same time, unjust, and contradicted by all history, previous and subsequent, of our national elections; and by his own history in connection with them. The North had supported Southern men for President – a long succession of them – and even twice concurred in dropping a Northern President at the end of a single term, and taking a Southern in his place. He himself had had signal proofs of good will from the North in his two elections to the vice-presidency; in which he had been better supported in the North than in the South, getting the whole party vote in the former while losing part of it in the latter. It was evident then, that the protective tariff was not the sole, or the main cause of the South Carolina discontent; that nullification and secession were to continue, though their ostensible cause ceased; that resistance was to continue on a new ground, upon the same principle, until a new and impossible point was attained. This was declared by Mr. Calhoun in his place, on the day of the passage of the "compromise" bill, and on hearing that the "force bill" had finally passed the House of Representatives. He then stood up, and spoke thus: