Before going farther I must speak of a pestilent doctrine then held in South Carolina, which underlay the whole controversy, and was the animating cause of the antagonism of the Southern leaders to the patriotic representatives of the North. This was known as nullification, and Mr. Calhoun was its sponsor. To explain: South Carolina claimed the right to overrule any law of the general government which did not please her, or which her courts might judge to be unconstitutional. If she did not see fit to pay customs, she claimed that the government could not coerce her. All power was reposed in her own executive, her own legislature, and her own judiciary, and the national power was subordinate to them.
It will be easily seen that this was a most dangerous doctrine to hold, one which if allowed would everywhere subject the national authority to contempt. The United States never had an external foe half so insidious or half so dangerous as this assumption which had grown up within its own borders.
To return to the great debate. When Col. Hayne took his seat at the close of his second speech his friends gathered round him in warm congratulation. Mr. Webster’s friends were sober. Much as they admired him, they did not see how he was going to answer that speech. They knew that he would have little or no time for preparation, and it would not do for him to make an ordinary or commonplace reply to such a dashing harangue. So on the evening of Monday the friends of Mr. Webster walked about the streets gloomy and preoccupied. They feared for their champion.
But how was it with him? During Col. Hayne’s speech he calmly took notes. Occasionally there was a flash from the depths of his dark eyes as a hint or a suggestion occurred to him, but he seemed otherwise indifferent and unmoved, He spent the evening as usual, and enjoyed a refreshing night’s sleep.
In the morning of the eventful day three hours before the hour of meeting crowds set their faces towards the Capitol. At twelve o’clock the Senate Chamber—its galleries, floors and even lobbies—was filled to overflowing. The Speaker retained his place unwillingly in the House, but hardly enough members were present to transact business.
When the fitting time came Mr. Webster rose. He was in the full vigor of a magnificent manhood, the embodiment of conscious strength. He gazed around him, never more self-possessed than at that moment. He saw his adversaries with their complacent faces already rejoicing in his anticipated discomfiture; he looked in the faces of his friends, and he noted their looks of anxious solicitude; but he had full confidence in his own strength, and his deep cavernous eyes glowed with “that stern joy which warriors feel in foemen worthy of their steel.”
There was a hush of expectation and a breathless silence as those present waited for his first words.
He began thus: “Mr. President, when the mariner has been tossed for many days, in thick weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course. Let us imitate this prudence, and before we float further on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to form some conjecture where we now are. I ask for the reading of the resolution.”
This was felt to be a happy exordium, and was sufficient to rivet the attention of the vast audience.
After the resolution was read Mr. Webster continued: “We have thus heard, sir, what the resolution is which is actually before us for consideration; and it will readily occur to every one that it is almost the only subject about which something has not been said in the speech, running through two days, by which the Senate has been now entertained by the gentleman from South Carolina. Every topic in the wide range of our public affairs, whether past or present, everything, general or local, whether belonging to national politics or party politics, seems to have attracted more or less of the honorable members attention, save only the resolution before the Senate. He has spoken of everything but the public lands; they have escaped his notice. To that subject in all his excursions he has not paid even the cold respect of a passing glance.
“When this debate, sir, was to be resumed on Thursday morning, it so happened that it would have been convenient for me to be elsewhere. The honorable member, however, did not incline to put off the discussion to another day. He had a shot, he said, to return, and he wished to discharge it. That shot, which it was kind thus to inform us was coming, that we might stand out of the way, or prepare ourselves to fall before it and die with decency, has now been received. Under all advantages, and with expectation awakened by the tone which preceded it, it has been discharged and has spent its force. It may become me to say no more of its effect than that, if nobody is found, after all, either killed or wounded by it, it is not the first time in the history of human affairs that the vigor and success of the war have not quite come up to the lofty and sounding phrase of the manifesto.”
Referring to Col. Hayne’s statement that there was something rankling here (indicating his heart) which he wished to relieve, Mr. Webster said: “In this respect, sir, I have a great advantage over the honorable gentleman. There is nothing here, sir, which gives me the slightest uneasiness; neither fear nor anger, nor that which is sometimes more troublesome than either, the consciousness of having been in the wrong.... I must repeat, also, that nothing has been received here which rankles or in any way gives me annoyance. I will not accuse the honorable gentleman of violating the rules of civilized war; I will not say he poisoned his arrows. But whether his shafts were, or were not, dipped in that which would have caused rankling if they had reached, there was not, as it happened, quite strength enough in the bow to bring them to their mark. If he wishes now to gather up these shafts he must look for them elsewhere; they will not be found fixed and quivering in the object at which they were aimed.”
Col. Hayne and his friends, as they listened to these words, breathing a calm consciousness of power not unmixed with a grand disdain, must have realized that they had exulted too soon. Indeed Hayne’s friends had not all looked forward with confidence to his victory. Senator Iredell, of North Carolina, to a friend of Hayne’s who was praising his speech, had said the evening previous, “He has started the lion—but wait till we hear his roar, or feel his claws.”
While I do not propose to give an abstract of this famous oration, I shall quote some of the most brilliant and effective passages, well known and familiar though they are, because they will be re-read with fresh and added interest in this connection. There was not a son of Massachusetts, nay, there was not a New Englander, whose heart was not thrilled by the splendid tribute to Massachusetts.
“Mr. President, I shall enter upon no encomium on Massachusetts; she needs none. There she is. Behold her and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State from New England to Georgia, and there they will lie forever. And, sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it, if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it, if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed in separating it from that union by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked; it will stretch forth its arm with whatever of vigor it may still retain over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin.”
Mr. Webster shows his magnanimity by pronouncing, in like manner, an eulogium upon his opponent’s native State, which is in bright contrast with the mean and unjust attacks of Col. Hayne upon Massachusetts. This is what he says:
“Let me observe that the eulogium pronounced on the character of South Carolina by the honorable gentleman for her Revolutionary and other merits meets my hearty concurrence. I shall not acknowledge that the honorable member goes before me in regard for whatever of distinguished talent, of distinguished character, South Carolina has produced. I claim part of the honor. I partake in the pride of her great names. I claim them for countrymen, one and all, the Laurenses, the Rutledges, the Pinkneys, the Sumters, the Marions, Americans all, whose fame is no more to be hemmed in by State lines than their talents and patriotism were capable of being circumscribed within the same narrow limits. In their day and generation they served and honored the country, and the whole country; and their renown is one of the treasures of the whole country. Him whose honored name the gentleman himself bears—does he esteem me less capable of gratitude for his patriotism, or sympathy for his sufferings, than if his eyes had first opened upon the light of Massachusetts instead of South Carolina? Sir, does he suppose it in his power to exhibit a Carolina name so bright as to produce envy in my bosom? No, sir; increased gratification rather. I thank God that, if I am gifted with little of the spirit which is able to raise mortals to the ski............