"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:
"He had said, that as far as this subject was concerned, he believed that peace and harmony would follow. But there is another connected with it, which had passed this House, and which had just been reported as having passed the other, which would prevent the return of quiet. He considered the measure to which he referred as a virtual repeal of the constitution; and, in fact, worse than a positive and direct repeal; as it would leave the majority without any shackles on its power, while the minority, hoping to shelter itself under its protection, and having still some respect left for the instrument, would be trammelled without being protected by its provisions. It would be idle to attempt to disguise that the bill will be a practical assertion of one theory of the constitution against another—the theory advocated by the supporters of the bill, that ours is a consolidated government, in which the States have no rights, and in which, in fact, they bear the same relation to the whole community as the counties do to the States; and against that view of the constitution which considers it as a compact formed by the States as separate communities, and binding between the States, and not between the individual citizens. No man of candor, who admitted that our constitution is a compact, and was formed and is binding in the manner he had just stated, but must acknowledge that this bill utterly overthrows and prostrates the constitution; and that it leaves the government under the control of the will of an absolute majority.
"If the measure be acquiesced in, it will be the termination of that long controversy which began in the convention, and which has been continued under various fortunes until the present day. But it ought not—it will not—it cannot be acquiesced in—unless the South is dead to the sense of her liberty, and blind to those dangers which surround and menace them; she never will cease resistance until the act is erased from the statute book. To suppose that the entire power of the Union may be placed in the hands of this government, and that all the various interests in this widely extended country may be safely placed under the will of an unchecked majority, is the extreme of folly and madness. The result would be inevitable, that power would be exclusively centered in the dominant interest north of this river, and that all the south of it would be held as subjected provinces, to be controlled for the exclusive benefit of the stronger section. Such a state of things could not endure; and the constitution and liberty of the country would fall in the contest, if permitted to continue.
"He trusted that that would not be the case, but that the advocates of liberty every where, as well in the North as in the South; that those who maintained the doctrines of '98, and the sovereignties of the States; that the republican party throughout the country would rally against this attempt to establish, by law, doctrines which must subvert the principles on which free institutions could be maintained."
Here was a new departure, upon a new point, as violent as the former complaint, looking to the same remedy, and unfounded and impossible. This force bill, which was a repeal of the constitution, in the eyes of Mr. Calhoun, was a mere revival of formerly existing statutes, and could have no operation, if resistance to the tariff laws ceased. Yet, nullification and secession were to proceed until it was erased from the statute book; and all the morbid views of the constitution, and of the Virginia resolutions of '98 and '99, were to hold their places in Mr. Calhoun's imagination, and dominate his conduct in all his political action, until this statute was erased. But it is due to many of his friends and followers, to say that, while concurring in his complaints against the federal government, and in his remedies, they dissented from his source of derivation of these remedies. He found them in the constitution, shown to be there by the '98-'99 Virginia resolutions; the manly sense of McDuffie, and some others, rejected that sophistry, and found their justification wholly in the revolutionary right of self-defence from intolerable oppression.