From this vantage-ground, Jackson issued his proclamation of December 10, in which he plainly told South Carolina that the federal laws would be enforced at the point of the bayonet, and that, furthermore, the Union was an indissoluble nation, as Webster and himself had declared; and he at the same time urged upon Congress the so-called “Force Bill,” granting him full power to punish all infractions of the national revenue laws. And now for the first time he expressed his real view that the tariff was unjust. The Verplanck Bill to reduce the tariff to a twenty-five per cent basis was the President's confession that Calhoun had been right. The two measures were pressed by the Administration, the one strongly national and supported by a strong majority, the other strongly Jacksonian and opposed by most of the leaders who desired to see Calhoun humiliated. It seemed almost certain, early in 1833, that this program would be carried out to the letter.
Such a victory for the Union forces and especially for Jackson was too much for the opposition. Henry Clay stopped in Philadelphia on his way to Washington and held a conference there with the industrial leaders of the Middle States. He went on to the capital with a plan of his own. Its purpose was to keep the control of things in the hands of the friends of the American System and to deprive the President of the prestige of settling the tariff and the nullification problems at the same time. He held a carte blanche from the leading protected interests to do what he thought best. Webster and John Quincy Adams hesitated. They urged the passage of the “Force Bill” at once; but hoped to defeat the Verplanck measure, its counterpart. Clay made overtures to Calhoun, and Washington was surprised to see the two great antagonists associating and planning together, apparently in concert as of old when they forced the War of 1812 upon an unwilling President.
The “Force Bill” was to be accepted by the Calhoun men; but a new and final tariff measure was to take the place of the one upon which Jackson had set his heart. The famous compromise law of 1833 was the result. This gave the planters a reduction to twenty per cent, a lower rate than Jackson had offered, but the reductions were to be made gradually during a period of ten years, thus giving time for the industrial men to readjust their affairs without great losses. There was one joker in the scheme which the Southerners seem to have winked at: that which exempted the wool-growers of the Middle States and the West from the reductions. The author of the American System now hotly urged the men who a year ago would defy the “South, the Democratic party, and the Devil” to undo all their work. On March 1, three days before the close of the session, both the President's “Force Bill” and Clay's compromise tariff passed.
Meanwhile South Carolina, acting on Calhoun's advice, had postponed the enforcement of her nullifying ordinance, and now, as Congress adjourned, the former Vice-President, ill and greatly discouraged, hurried by rapid stages to Columbia to make sure that the crisis should be brought to a peaceful close. The convention was reassembled; an embassy from Virginia was on the ground urging peace, and, as was natural, the ordinance was repealed. The planters had really won a victory and the rising industrial groups understood this both at the time and later, when they clamored for the restoration of their privileges. The cotton and tobacco men, producing the larger part of the national exports, had shown their strength. Their opponents, the manufacturers and the bankers of the East, with a much greater income, were as yet not so strong as the planters. The West and the South were their markets, and concessions must be made; the Union was to them essential, while to the South, selling its huge crops in European markets, it was less important. As yet the West, with its hero the master in Washington, had obtained none of the reforms for which it had so long striven. Benton and his friends looked to the next Congress for results. Would they be disappointed?
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The Messages and Papers of the Presidents (1900), vol. II, gives Jackson's official statements. Bassett's and Parton's biographies, already mentioned, are still very serviceable. There is no full biography of Clay, but C. Colton's The Private Life of Henry Clay contains some of Clay's letters. Carl Schurz's Henry Clay and T. H. Clay's Henry Clay, already noted, offer some good information. The best source for Calhoun is J. F. Jameson's The Correspondence of John C. Calhoun (1899). G. Hunt's Life of Calhoun (1908), in American Crises series, is excellent, while D. F. Houston's Critical Study of Nullification, already referred to, and W. E. Dodd's Calhoun, in Statesmen of the Old South (1911), offer still further information as to Calhoun and nullification. C. H. Van Tyne's Letters of Daniel Webster (1902) supplies information about Webster which is lacking in the older Works by Everett (1851) or F. Webster (1857). H. C. Lodge's Daniel Webster, in American Statesmen series and J. B. McMaster's Daniel Webster (1902) are the standard biographies. Thomas H. Benton has told his own story in his Thirty Years' View (1854), though Roosevelt's Thomas Hart Benton, in the American Statesmen, and W. M. Meigs's Thomas Hart Benton, in the American Crises series, are good brief portraits. William McDonald's The Jacksonian Democracy (1906), in the American Nation series, is an excellent general survey, while E. Stanwood's American Tariff Controversies (1903) is the best account of the tariff disputes.