Both sides were well satisfied with the presentation of their views. Certainly neither was converted to the position of the other. The debate served, however, to set before the country with greater clearness than ever before the two great systems of constitutional interpretation that were struggling for mastery, and large numbers of men whose ideas had been hazy were now led to adopt thoughtfully either the one body of opinions or the other. The country was not yet ready to follow the controversy to the end which Webster clearly foresaw—civil war. But each side treasured its vitalized and enriched arguments for use in a more strenuous day.
Advantage in the great discussion lay partly with Hayne and partly with his brilliant antagonist. On the whole, the facts of history were on the side of Hayne. Webster attempted to argue from the intent of the framers of the Constitution and from early opinion concerning the nature of the Union; but a careful appraisal of the evidence hardly bears out his contentions. On economic matters also, notably the operation of the protective tariff, he trod uncertain ground. He realized this fact and as far as possible kept clear of economic discussion. The South had real grievances, and Webster was well enough aware that they could not be argued out of existence.
On the other hand, the Northerner was vastly superior to his opponent in his handling of the theoretical issues of constitutional law; and in his exposition of the practical difficulties that would attend the operation of the principle of nullification he employed a fund of argument that was simply unanswerable. The logic of the larger phases of the situation lay, too, with him. If the Union for which he pleaded was not the Union which the Fathers intended to establish or even that which actually existed in the days of Washington and the elder Adams, it was at all events the Union in which, by the close of the fourth decade under the Constitution, a majority of the people of the United States had come to believe. It was the Union of Henry Clay, of Andrew Jackson, of Abraham Lincoln. And the largest significance of Webster’s arguments in 1830 arises from the definiteness and force which they put into popular convictions that until then were vague and inarticulate—convictions which, as has been well said, “went on broadening and deepening until, thirty years afterward, they had a force sufficient to sustain the North and enable her to triumph in the terrible struggle which resulted in the preservation of national life.” It was the Second Reply to Hayne which, more than any other single event or utterance between 1789 and 1860, “compacted the States into a nation.”
[CHAPTER VIII]
TARIFF AND NULLIFICATION
It was more than brilliant oratory that had drawn to the Senate chamber the distinguished audiences faced by Webster and Hayne in the great debate of 1830. The issues discussed touched the vitality and permanence of the nation itself. Nullification was no mere abstraction of the senator from South Carolina. It was a principle which his State—and, for aught one could tell, his section—was about to put into action. Already, in 1830, the air was tense with the coming controversy.
South Carolina had traveled a long road, politically, since 1789. In the days of Washington and the elder Adams the State was strongly Federalist. In 1800 Jefferson secured its electoral vote. But the Virginian’s leadership was never fully accepted, and even before the Republican party had elsewhere submitted to the inevitable nationalization the South Carolina membership was openly arrayed on the side of a protective tariff, the National Bank, and internal improvements. Calhoun and Cheves were for years among the most ardent exponents of broad constitutional construction; Hayne himself was elected to the Senate in 1822 as a nationalist, and over another candidate whose chief handicap was that he had proposed that his State secede rather than submit to the Missouri Compromise.
After 1824 sentiment rapidly shifted. The cause appeared to be the tariff; but in reality deeper forces were at work. South Carolina was an agricultural State devoted almost exclusively to the raising of cotton and rice. Soil and climate made her such, and the “peculiar institution” confirmed what Nature already had decreed. But the planters were now beginning to feel keenly the competition of the new cotton lands of the Gulf plains. As production increased, the price of cotton fell. “In 1816,” writes Professor Turner, “the average price of middling uplands … was nearly thirty cents, and South Carolina’s leaders favored the tariff; in 1820 it was seventeen cents, and the South saw in the protective system a grievance; in 1824 it was fourteen and three-quarters cents, and the South Carolinians denounced the tariff as unconstitutional.” ¹