By way of a little junket, the General visits New England, and at the genial sight of him that chill region thaws like icicles in July. Indeed, the New England temperature rises to a height where Harvard College confers upon the General the degree of Doctor of Laws. At which Statesman Adams nurses his wrath with this entry in his sour diary:
“Seminaries of learning have been timeservers and sycophants in every age.”
The General has done his people many a service. He has defended them from savage Red Stick Creeks, and savage Red-coat English with their war cry of “Beauty and Booty!” Now he will do his foremost work of all, and buckler them against the javelins of treason, save them from between the jaws of a conspiracy—wolfish and widespread for national destruction.
The conspiracy has its birth in the ambition-crazed bosom of Statesman Calhoun; its shiboleth is “Nullification!”
“I would sooner,” said Caesar, when his courtiers were laughing at the pompous mayor of a little mud town in Spain—“I would sooner be first here than second in Rome!” And, centuries after, the sentiment wakes a responsive echo in the jealous breast of Statesman Calhoun.
Statesman Calhoun aims to follow the General in the headship of American affairs. Defeated of that, he is resolved to sever those constitutional links which bind his home-state of South Carolina to her sister States in Federal Union, and declare her a nation by and of herself.
In his new rôle of “seceder,” Statesman Calhoun makes this impression on the English Harriet Martineau. After speaking of him as involving himself tighter and tighter in spinnings of political mysticism and fantastic speculation, she calls him a “cast-iron man” and says:
“He (Calhoun) is eager, absorbed, overspeculative. I know of no one who lives in such intellectual solitude. He meets men and harangues them by the fireside as in the Senate. He is wrought like a piece of machinery, set going vehemently by a weight, and stops while you answer. He either passes by what you say, or twists it into suitability with what is in his head, and begins to lecture again. He is full of his 'Nullification,' and those who know the force that is in him and his utter incapacity for modification by other minds, will no more expect repose and self-retention from him than from a volcano in full force. Relaxation is no longer in the power of his will. I never saw anyone who gave me so completely the idea of 'possession.'”
By which the English woman would say that she thinks Statesman Calhoun insane. She overstates, however, his “incapacity for modification” and “self-retention.” There will come a day when he does not pause, nor close his eyes in sleep, between Washington and his home in South Carolina, such is his fear-spurred eagerness—with the shadow of the gibbet all across him!—to stamp out what fires of treason he has been at pains to kindle, and avoid that halter which the General promises as their reward.
It is in Senate debate that Statesman Calhoun removes the mask from his intended treason, and gives the world a glimpse of its blackness. He threatens, unless the tariff be changed to match his pleasure, that South Carolina will prevent its enforcement within her borders. He declares South Carolina superior to the nation in her powers, and proclaims for her the right to “nullify” what Federal laws she deems inimical to her peculiar interest. He shows how South Carolina will, as against the tariff contemplated, invoke that inherent right to “nullify,” and says, should the Washington government attempt to coerce her, she will take herself out of the Union.