Henry Clay was three times a candidate for the presidency. He had done so much for the country that he had made enemies of many whom he had to oppose at different times. So each time he was defeated by a man not nearly so great or powerful, but for whom more people were willing to vote.
While Webster and Clay were leaders in Congress there was great excitement because that body passed a tariff law which the southern people did not like. Many of the southern leaders, especially those of South Carolina, said that Congress had no right to pass such a law and that each state might declare the objectionable law null and void or of no effect within its borders. Such action by a state was called “nullification.” There was talk that some of the states would withdraw from the Union if the President tried to enforce the hated law. Such withdrawal on the part of a state was called “secession.”
About the time these mutterings of disunion were in the air, Robert Y. Hayne, a great orator from South Carolina, made a strong speech in the Senate of the United States, maintaining the right of his state to “nullify” and withdraw from the Union. Daniel Webster, the champion of the Union, delivered one of the greatest appeals ever made by any orator, in his famous reply to Hayne. It closed with these now familiar words:
“Let my last feeble and lingering glance behold the glorious ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured; bearing for its motto no such miserable question as, ‘What is all this worth?’ or those other words of delusion and folly, ‘Liberty first and Union afterwards;’ but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing in all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”
The greatest leader in the south and champion of the right of his state, South Carolina, was John C. Calhoun. He also was an eloquent speaker. He declared in the Senate of the United States, in speaking of the tariff law meant to tax goods which people needed, “We look upon it as a dead law, null and void, and will not obey it.” South Carolina nullified the tariff law and threatened to secede from the Union.
General Andrew Jackson, the bluff old Indian fighter and hero of the War of 1812, was then President. He declared, “The Union must and shall be preserved!” John C. Calhoun and all others acquainted with “Old Hickory,” as the President was nicknamed, knew that he meant just what he said. It seemed that civil war was about to begin when Henry Clay, who loved the Union, averted the danger by proposing a plan of compromise which both sides could accept.
THE KIND HEART OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
LITTLE Abe Lincoln lived in a log cabin in Kentucky. When he was seven, his family moved across the Ohio River into Indiana, and lived all winter in an open shed called a “half-faced camp,” before his father built a better cabin, with bare earth for its floor. Tom Lincoln, Abe’s father, was “a mighty hunter.” He liked to shoot game better than the hard work of clearing land and farming. He thought Abe was timid because he did not like to kill harmless animals or see them suffer.
During the fourteen years Abe lived in southern Indiana, he went to school a few weeks at a time—less than a year in all. A girl who went to school when he did, used to tell, after she became an old woman, that Abe’s first “composition” was against cruelty to animals. She always remembered how he read this sentence in it: “An ant’s life is as sweet to it as ours is to us.”
One day Abe caught several lads laughing at a turtle as it moved slowly about, showing, as well as a dumb animal could, the misery it was in. For there were burning coals on its back, and the biggest boy stood by with a smoking shingle in his hand. This showed Abe how the hot coals came upon the terrapin’s back. Snatching the shingle from the big bully’s hand, he brushed them off and began