It was decided that a fitting post for a successor while awaiting his turn—particularly for one who was not popular—would be the ministership to Great Britain; and Van Buren duly traveled to London to take up the duties of this position. But when the appointment was submitted to the Senate, Calhoun’s friends adroitly managed matters so that the Vice President should have the satisfaction of preventing confirmation by his casting vote. “It will kill him, sir, kill him dead,” declared the vengeful South Carolinian to a doubting friend. “He will never kick, sir, never kick.” But no greater tactical error could have been committed. Benton showed the keener insight when he informed the jubilant Calhoun men that they had “broken a minister,” only to elect a Vice President.
[CHAPTER VII]
THE WEBSTER-HAYNE DEBATE
The United States came out of her second war with Great Britain a proud and fearless nation, though her record was not, on its face, glorious. She went to war shockingly unprepared; the people were of divided opinion, and one great section was in open revolt; the military leaders were without distinction; the soldiery was poorly trained and equipped; finances were disordered; the operations on land were mostly failures; and the privateers, which achieved wonders in the early stages of the contest, were driven to cover long before the close; for the restoration of peace the nation had to thank England’s war weariness far more than her own successes; and the Treaty of Ghent did not so much as mention impressment, captures, or any of the other matters mainly at issue when the war was begun. Peace, however, brought gratitude, enthusiasm, optimism. Defeats were quickly forgotten; and Jackson’s victory at New Orleans atoned for the humiliations of years. After all, the contest had been victorious in its larger outcome, for the new world conditions were such as to insure that the claims and practices which had troubled the relations of the United States and Great Britain would never be revived. The carpings of critics were drowned in the public rejoicings. The Hartford Convention dissolved unwept and unsung. Flushed with pride and confidence, the country entered upon a new and richer epoch.
The dominant tone of this dawning period was nationalism. The nation was to be made great and rich and free; sectional interests and ambitions were to be merged in the greater national purpose. Congress voiced the sentiment of the day by freely laying tariffs to protect newly risen manufactures, by appropriating money for “internal improvements,” by establishing a second United States Bank, and by giving full support to the annexation of territory for the adjustment of border difficulties and the extension of the country to its natural frontiers.
Under the leadership of John Marshall, the Supreme Court handed down an imposing series of decisions restricting the powers of the States and throwing open the floodgates for the expansion of national functions and activities. Statesmen of all sections put the nation first in their plans and policies as they had not always done in earlier days. John C. Calhoun was destined shortly to take rank as the greatest of sectionalists. Nevertheless, between 1815 and 1820 he voted for protective tariffs, brought in a great bill for internal improvements, and won from John Quincy Adams praise for being “above all sectional … prejudices more than any other statesman of this union” with whom he “had ever acted.”
The differences between the nationalist and state rights schools were, however, deep-rooted—altogether too fundamental to be obliterated by even the nationalizing swing of the war period; and in a brief time the old controversy of Hamilton and Jefferson was renewed on the former lines. The pull of political tradition and of sectional interest was too strong to be resisted. In the commercial and industrial East tradition and interest supported, in general, the doctrine of broad national powers; and the same was true of the West and Northwest. The South, however, inclined to limited national powers, large functions for the States, and such a construction of the Constitution as would give the benefit of the doubt in all cases to the States.
The political theory current south of the Potomac and the Ohio made of state rights a fetish. Yet the powerful sectional reaction which set in after 1820 against the nationalizing tendency had as its main impetus the injustice which the Southern people felt had been done to them through the use of the nation’s larger powers. They objected to the protective tariff as a device which not only brought the South no benefit but interfered with its markets and raised the cost of certain of its staple supplies. They opposed internal improvements at national expense because of their consolidating tendency, and because few of the projects carried out were of large advantage to the Southern people. They regarded the National Bank as at best useless; and they resisted federal legislation imposing restrictions on slavery as prejudicial to vested rights in the “peculiar institution.”
After 1820 the pendulum swung rapidly back toward particularism. State rights sentiment was freely expressed by men, both Southern and Northern, whose views commanded respect; and in more than one State—notably in Ohio and Georgia—bold actions proclaimed this sentiment to be no mere matter of academic opinion. Ohio in 1819 forcibly collected a tax on the United States Bank in defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of M’Culloch vs. Maryland; and in 1821 her Legislature reaffirmed the doctrines of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions and persisted in resistance, even after the Supreme Court had rendered a decision ¹ specifically against the position which the State had taken. Judge Roane of Virginia, in a series of articles in the Richmond Enquirer, argued that the Federal Union was a compact among the States and that the nationalistic reasoning of his fellow Virginian, Marshall, in the foregoing decisions was false; and Jefferson heartily endorsed his views. In Cohens vs. Virginia, in 1821, the Supreme Court held that it had appellate jurisdiction in a case decided by a state court where the Constitution and laws of the United States were involved, even though a State was a party; whereupon the Virginia House of Delegates declared that the State’s lawyers had been right in their contention that final construction of the Constitution lay with the courts of the States. Jefferson, also, gave this assertion his support, and denounced the centralizing tendencies of the Judiciary, “which, working like gravity without any intermission, is to press us at last into one consolidated mass.”