The Webster–Hayne debate (sometimes the Hayne-Webster debate) was a debate in the United States Senate from January 19–27, 1830, between Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina on the topics of land reform, tariffs, and American nationalism versus sectionalism generally. ^[a] The debate stemmed from a resolution calling for temporary suspension of surveying until land already on the market was sold, which would effectively stop the introduction of new lands onto the market and slow the pace of American territorial expansion. Hayne opposed the motion; Webster responded in support.

The most famous speech during the debate was Webster's speech of January 26–27, which became known as Webster's Second Reply to Hayne and served as a rallying point for American nationalists in the decades before and after the American Civil War. The speech elevated Webster to the forefront of the nationalist cause and is known for his declaration:

"Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable". ^[b]

The Second Reply has been regarded as "the most eloquent speech ever delivered in Congress" ^[2] and the "most famous" speech in Senate history. The debate itself served as an immediate prelude to the Nullification Crisis and later, the American Civil War. Webster's description of the United States government as "made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people," was famously adapted by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address.

Background

From the foundation of the United States of America, debates between nationalists and sectionalists dominated political discourse. In 1787, the United States Constitution supplanted the Articles of Confederation and granted relatively greater authority to the federal government, including the power to impose taxation.

Daniel Webster

Daniel Webster was born January 18, 1782 in Salisbury, New Hampshire. He was a supporter of the Federalist Party from an early age, graduated from Dartmouth College, and became an attorney in New Hampshire. He established himself as a leading critic of the Embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812 for their effect on New England shipping, though he opposed calls for New England to secede from the Union.

Webster was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1812. As a member of the Federalist minority, Webster generally took a middle ground on tariffs. He favored using rates to protect domestic manufacturing but did not want rates to be so high that they would harm his home state's shipping industry; however, he was absent for the final vote on the Tariff of 1816. After leaving office in 1817, he moved to Boston and became a leading attorney while growing his reputation in politics. He was elected to a second stint in the U.S. House in 1822.

Robert Y. Hayne

Robert Young Hayne was born November 10, 1791 in modern Colleton County, South Carolina. He read law under Langdon Cheves and became an attorney in Charleston, though he suspended his practice shortly after beginning to serve in the War of 1812. After returning from war, he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1814. In 1822, he was elected by the legislature to represent South Carolina in the United States Senate.

Like his parents, Hayne was a proprietor of multiple plantations and by 1820, the owner of 187 enslaved persons.

Slavery and westward expansion

No issue tended to inflame sectional tensions more dramatically than the debate over chattel slavery, an essential element of the Southern plantation economy. While the import of slaves had been banned since 1808, and the practice had been abolished in much of the North before 1830, westward expansion repeatedly raised the question as it applied in new, federally administered territories.

The potential for future extensions of Southern territory (and thus the slave economy) led Northerners to fear domination by the " Slave Power," an alliance between Southern planters and Northern investors in the cotton and slave trade. Likewise, Southern planters feared Northern expansion would lead to the nationwide abolition of slavery.

Tariffs

Debate over the use of tariffs (tax rates on imported goods) was constant through 1830.

Early nationalist leaders such as Alexander Hamilton and political economists such as Daniel Raymond and Mathew Carey proposed high tariffs to supply the federal government with necessary revenue, foster domestic manufacturing growth (a policy known as " protection"), and fund internal improvements. Tariffs accounted for nearly all federal government revenues and varied by the good imported, requiring complex negotiation over the rate schedule. From 1792 to 1810, the average tariff rate was around 12.5%; rates were then doubled to meet expenditures necessary to fight the War of 1812. The resultant expansion in American industry set off a cycle of industrial growth, lobbying by American industry, rate increases, further industrial growth which permitted additional lobbying, and so on. Critics of federal authority challenged both the right to impose tariffs and the disparate impact on agricultural exports. Along with slavery, the agrarian South relied on imported equipment and export markets for their crops; Southerners therefore generally opposed tariffs as a restraint on international trade. The rapidly industrializing North favored tariffs as a barrier against competition, though port cities which relied on merchant shipping (such as New York City and Boston) tended toward ambivalence or opposition.

In the Tariff of 1824, Congress passed the first import tax explicitly designed to protect domestic industry. The bill, backed by Henry Clay, raised duties on iron, woolens, cotton, hemp, and wool and cotton bagging. The tariff was opposed in the South and split New England, with Webster leading his region's opposition, ^[3] but it narrowly passed.

In 1828, Martin Van Buren and Silas Wright Jr. of New York introduced a new tariff designed to boost the presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson against President John Quincy Adams. The resulting Tariff of 1828 was designed to win Jackson support in critical swing states while ignoring the interests of the South (deemed safe for Jackson) and New England (deemed safe for Adams). The bill was expected to fail but bait Adams and New England into opposition on sectional lines, hurting his support in the critical states. However, a substantial minority of New England representatives, including Webster, voted in favor of the rate increase. The surprising result outraged Southern supporters of free trade, who called it "the Tariff of Abominations." Jackson was ultimately elected by a large margin, and Van Buren was named Secretary of State.

Nullification crisis

The doctrine of nullification had been theorized as early as the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, though the extent to which those resolutions adopted the theory was and remains a matter of ongoing debate. Nullification had been attempted in South Carolina at least as early as 1822, when the legislature passed an act requiring black foreign seamen to be jailed, at cost to their ship, or sold into slavery. Though the act was ruled unconstitutional by the United States Circuit Court as a deviation from international treaties, the South Carolina Senate resolved to hold the ruling invalid, and the federal government never enforced it.

After the final vote on the Tariff of 1828, the South Carolina congressional delegation met at Senator Hayne's home to plan their opposition. Though the South Carolinians failed to rally support in other states, opposition to tariffs in their state was especially acute. South Carolina was heavily reliant on slavery, cotton, and the plantation economy and had undergone a severe economic and population collapse, which some blamed on the mounting import tax. As a result of these meetings, Vice President John C. Calhoun, though formerly a nationalist, anonymously authorized the South Carolina Exposition and Protest in December 1828, advancing a compact theory of the Constitution and justifying nullification. When President Jackson took office in March 1829, he addressed the Tariff of 1828 in his inaugural address and his first three messages to Congress but offered no specific relief, and the constitutional crisis over nullification grew. The "Exposition and Protest" started a national debate on the doctrine of nullification. The leading opponents of Calhoun were nationalists, including Webster, John Quincy Adams, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, Judge William Alexander Duer, Nathaniel Chipman, and Nathan Dane. ^[4] They rejected the compact theory advanced by Calhoun, claiming that the Constitution was the product of the people, not the states. According to the nationalist position, the Supreme Court had the final say on legislation's constitutionality, and the national union was perpetual and had supreme authority over individual states. ^[4]

Debate

The debate was incited on December 29, 1829, when Samuel A. Foot of Connecticut introduced a resolution of enquiry which appeared to be the basis for future legislation limiting the sales of public land to acreage already surveyed. ^[1] Typically, such non-binding resolutions were not controversial and passed without delay, but the proposal that it seemed to imply and the general controversy surrounding the sale of public lands provoked a response from Senators in the West and South.

Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri moved against the resolution, with the intention of building an alliance of Western and Southern Senators representative of agricultural interests, framing the two sections as victims of federal land and tariff policies designed to serve northeastern capitalists. ^[1] Debate on Foot's resolution would continue for five months. ^[1]

Speech of Robert Y. Hayne: January 19

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Webster-Hayne debate

Hayne's speech was taken as a conditional acceptance of Benton's implied offer of general alliance between West and South. ^[5] He opened by echoing Benton's position that "no inquiry ought ever to be instituted as to the expediency of doing a 'great and acknowledged wrong.'" Hayne argued Congress had treated the Westerners "in the spirit of a hard taskmaster, resolved to promote our selfish interests from the fruit of their labor," and contrasted this policy with the historical practice of granting land to colonists "without money and without price," other than nominal consideration.

Having laid out the case that free land benefited Western states, Hayne responded to the opposing argument that the sale of lands would provide "a great fund for permanent revenue" by criticizing any policy which favored a "great permanent national treasury" in the "keeping of our national rulers," as a natural threat to liberty and a "fund for corruption." Even the existing system of revenue by tariffs, Hayne said, "has done much to weaken the responsibility of our federal rulers to the people and has made them, in some measure, careless of [the people's] rights and regardless of the high trust committed to their care."

Hayne then expounded on constitutional doctrine:

"Sir, I am one of those who believe that the very life of our system is the independence of the states. ... I am opposed, therefore, in any shape, to all unnecessary extension of the powers or the influence of the legislature or executive of the union of the states; and, most of all, I am opposed to those partial distributions of favors whether by legislation or appropriation, which has a direct and powerful tendency to spread corruption through the land, to create an abject spirit of dependence, to sow the seeds of dissolution, to produce jealousy among the different portions of the union, and, finally, to sap the very foundations of the government itself."

Hayne criticized the nationalist American System as necessitating the immigration of "that low and degraded population which infest the cities and towns of Europe, who having no other means of subsistence, will work for the lowest wages, and be satisfied with the smallest possible share of human enjoyment," and argued that restrictions on the sale of land were proposed "as to prevent the drawing off [the non-immigrant] population from the manufacturing states." Hayne spoke out against industrialization, developmentalism, and regulation more generally:

"Sir, it is bad enough that the government should presume to regulate the industry of man—it is sufficiently monstrous that they should attempt, by arbitrary legislation, artificially to adjust and balance the various pursuits of society, and to 'organize the whole labor and capital of the country.' ... The people of America are, and ought to be, for a century to come, essentially an agricultural people, and I can conceive of no policy that can possibly be pursued in relation to the public lands, none that would be more 'for the common benefit of all the states,' than to use them as the means of furnishing a secure asylum to that class of our fellow citizens, who, in any portion of the country, may find themselves unable to procure a comfortable subsistence by the means immediately within their reach."

Hayne closed by returning to the subject of public lands. Though professing sympathy for Benton's argument, he denied that the Western states had "a full and perfect legal and constitutional right to all the lands within their respective limits" as they claimed, and further blamed Westerners for participating in the American System, which he derided again as a system of "petty and partial appropriations" by which "they will be kept for ever in a state of dependence." He closed by summarizing his position as, "[the public lands] should be administered chiefly with a view to the creation, within reasonable periods, of great and flourishing communities, to be formed into free and independent states—to be invested in due season with the control of all the lands within their respective limits."

Webster's first reply: January 20

Webster's first speech was a deliberate attack on South Carolina and the South, calculated to goad Hayne into a defense of Southern sectionalism and undermine his attempt at any alliance with Benton. ^[6] Webster avoided mentioning any other Senator by name and directed his remarks toward "the gentleman from South Carolina." ^[5]

Webster began by admitting his focus was not on the resolution at hand, which was nevertheless harmless. ^[c] After a brief analysis of the matter of land sales, he proceeded to a direct response against Hayne, beginning with his historical case. Webster denied that analogy could be drawn to European colonization, because the colonists "derived neither succor nor protection from their governments at home," while the Western settlers remained a part of the Union. Further, the planned development of the West had developed that land "to the full extent of our utmost means." Drawing on the example of the Virginia cession of the vast Northwest Territory, Webster argued that the extensive crown territories which had fallen to the states as a result of the American Revolution and the Treaty of Paris, "ought to devolve on the United States, for the good of the whole." Because the war "was undertaken and carried on at the common expense of all the colonies, its benefits, if successful, ought also to be common, and the property of the common enemy, when vanquished, ought to be regarded as the general acquisition of all." The Northwest Ordinance thus established that federal territories were for the common interest of all the states, the sale of their lands should be to the common benefit. ^[d]

Having concluded his defense of a common national treasury drawn from public lands, Webster turned to Hayne's constitutional theory. He derided Hayne's critique of a national treasury as creating "a tendency to consolidation," as "neither more nor less than [opposition to] strengthening the Union itself." Framing himself as a supporter of " General Washington's consolidation... the true constitutional consolidation," Webster quoted from Washington's address transmitting the Constitution to the states:

"'In all our deliberations on this subject we kept steadily in our view that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American: the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence. This important consideration, seriously and deeply impressed on our minds, led each State in the convention to be less rigid on points of inferior magnitude, than might have been otherwise expected.' ^[7] ... I confess I rejoice in whatever tends to strengthen the bond that unites us and encourages the hope that our Union may be perpetual."

Then, Webster confronted and intentionally provoked Hayne by arguing that many Southerners (Hayne himself excluded), relied on a narrow view of the Constitution and calculating, profit-driven mentality, were incapable of providing national leadership:

"I know that there are some persons in the [South] who habitually speak of the Union in terms of indifference or even of disparagement. ... They significantly declare that it is time to calculate the value of the Union, and their aim seems to be to enumerate and magnify all the evils, real and imaginary, which the government under the Union produces."

Finally, Webster turned to attacks made "without the least foundation in facts" against "the East," which he said was "the main occasion" of his speech. Webster launched into a lengthy defense of New England and its residents as having always put the interests of the whole country first, citing his and others' opposition to the Tariff of 1824, their support for the Cumberland Road and other western improvements, and the role of Nathan Dane in drafting the Northwest Ordinance; ^[e] Webster contrasted these to Southern opposition to infrastructure improvements which would subsidize westward migration, quoting at length from an 1825 House speech made by South Carolinian George McDuffie (by 1830, a leading nullifier) in opposition to Webster's support for such a subsidy. Webster concluded his reply with an implied challenge to Hayne:

"As a true representative of the state which has sent me here, it is my duty, and a duty which I shall fulfill, to place her history and her conduct, her honor and her character, in their just and proper light, so often as I think an attack is made upon her, so respectable as to deserve to be repelled."

Hayne's first reply: January 21 and 25

Since the vast majority of Webster's speech had focused on Hayne, contemporaries asserted that Hayne "was bound to repel" the attack. ^[8] He accepted the challenge, gradually building a defense of the South against Webster's argument for nationalism and industrialization and against slavery. He strove to establish that the South had nobly promoted the true interests of the Union, whereas New England had pursued narrow sectional interests and threatened the nation's integrity. ^[8]

After another speech by Benton, Hayne returned to the floor on the following day. He denied his initial speech was an attack on New England and blamed Benton ("the author of those charges") for provoking the attack. Ultimately, Hayne charged, Webster was afraid of the "coalition" between West and South which had elected Jackson in 1828. Hayne denied that the Western states had grown great as the result of economic planning, but rather "in spite of your protection." ^[f] He further cited Nathan Dane's participation in the Hartford Convention, ^[g] which recommended "restraining Congress in the exercise of an unlimited power to make new states," and quoted Webster from a January 1825 speech, arguing the Western states ought never be "regarded as any great source of revenue" and that Congress should focus on "getting them settled."

To counter Webster's argument that the South seeks to "calculate the value of the Union," Hayne then said,

"Sir, let me tell the gentleman, that in the part of the country in which I live, we do not measure political benefits by the money standard. We consider as more valuable than gold liberty, principle, and justice."

Returning to his assault on the American System, Hayne argued any alliance between the West and New England is based on appropriations for local purposes, a natural source of corruption. As his chief example, he cited the " corrupt bargain of 1825" between Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, which the South had opposed out of "constitutional scruples." Hayne also denied nationality could be created by any other means than "the affections of the people." Attempting to bind the people to the national government by economic policy was "at war with virtue and patriotism" and potentially fatal to liberty.

Defense of slavery

Hayne then intensified the debate by offering a defense of slavery as a necessary evil at worst and the fault of earlier generations:

"If slavery, as it now exists in this country, be an evil, we of the present day found it ready made to our hands. Finding our lot cast among a people whom God had manifestly committed to our care, we did not sit down to speculate on abstract questions of theoretical liberty. We met it as a practical question of obligation and duty. We resolved ... to fulfill the high trust which has devolved on us as the owners of slaves, ... in the only way [possible] without spreading misery and ruin throughout the land. ... [Nowhere is there] a population so poor, so wretched, so vile, so loathsome, so utterly destitute of all the ... decencies of life [as the freed former slaves]. ... Liberty has been to them the greatest of calamities."

As to whether the South was weaker for its reliance on slavery, Hayne posited that the economic power lay in the South, which produced twice the value of goods for export and could continue to do so during time of war, when a small fraction of white men would fight while the slaves continued to produce.

Hayne denies the proposition of colonization of slaves as impossible, given the number of slaves, and immoral, given the condition of life in Africa. As to their liberation, Hayne compares the condition of the slaves of the South favorably to that of freedmen in the North, who are in his view, "naked and houseless, almost starving in the streets, and abandoned by all the world." Abolition, he says, is thus "false philanthropy," and the argument that the presence of slaves threatens the stability of the South or could require the intervention of the North is disproven by the British West Indies, where slaves outnumber the white population nine to one, but are "kept in entire subjection."

Quoting nationalist economist Mathew Carey, Hayne further accused the Northern capitalists of hypocrisy: "I sicken for the honor of the human species. ... The naked fact is, that the demagogues in the Eastern States, not satisfied with deriving all the benefit from the southern section of the Union that they would from so many wealthy colonies... have uniformly treated it with outrage, insult, and injury." He cited the examples of Washington and President Jackson to laud slavery's effect on the mind of free white Southerners, quoting Edmund Burke: "Those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. [It] is to them ... a kind of rank and privlege. ... In such a people, the haughtiness of dominion combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible."

Historical narrative

Hayne then turned to partisan politics and history once more, decrying the National Republicans and those favoring consolidated national government ("the worst of evils") as "descendants" of the Tories, whereas the Democratic Republicans were descended from the Whigs, whose most precious possession was "an ardent love of liberty." Hayne then countered Webster's "unprovoked and uncalled-for" charge of Southern disunion; the South, he argued, only sought to oppose self-interested policy. South Carolina had always demonstrated its "uniform, zealous, ardent, and uncalculating devotion to the Union" and fought "noble daring, dreadful suffering, and heroic endurance."

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 21-30

Nullification

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 31-40

This, Hayne argued, was the Southern theory of unionism: by choice but never by policy. Hayne further invoked the doctrine of nullification. ^[8] With Vice President John C. Calhoun, the doctrine's strongest advocate, presiding over the Senate, Hayne drew on James Madison and Thomas Jefferson's Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, but also cited "statesmen from New England" as well as "the enlightened citizens of Boston" and Webster himself. By Hayne's account, the South remained squarely within the Revolutionary tradition of resisting usurpation of illegitimate authority. ^[8]

Webster's second reply: January 26 and 27

Webster remained confident after Hayne's reply, telling Joseph Story that he would "grind... [Hayne] as fine as a pinch of snuff!" ^[9] Having set Hayne's agenda himself, Webster was prepared to answer his charges point-for-point; he began work on his second speech before Hayne's reply. ^[6] Anticipation for his response was high within Washington and throughout the United States, and Webster arranged for Joseph Gales of the National Intelligencer to record his speech in shorthand, so that he would have an accurate copy to revise for publication. ^[5]

He rose on January 26, dressed in the symbolic Revolutionary colors of blue and buff. ^[10] The speech that followed, one of the most famous in the history of the United States, can be divided into three portions: a defense of nationalist public policy, a review of New England's role in American history, and a climatic critique of Hayne's constitutional doctrines of compact theory and nullification. ^[6]

Public policy

First, Webster defended the policies of government-funded internal improvements, the protectionist tariff, and government intervention, including the establishment of a national bank, as good for the nation generally. ^[10] These programs were the substance of the American System of political economy, endorsed by the National Republicans to facilitate the growth the market economy and domestic industry. ^[10]

By contrast, he argued that the Southern economic program was destructively parochial. He emphasized that in addition to the moral evil it presented, slavery was politically oppressive of the North given the additional representation it granted free Southern men. ^[11] Nevertheless, he announced, "I go for the Constitution as it is, and for the Union as it is," implying a contrast between his paramount commitment to Union and the Southern commitment to the unique, sectional institution of slavery. ^[11] Whereas Webster looked upon the American System as good insofar as it was "connected with the common good," Hayne, he said, "deems them all, if good at all, only local good." ^[12]

Historical narrative

In the historical narrative, Webster laid claim to New England's role as the birthplace of the Revolution and its persistent loyalty to the Union. ^[11] In rebutting Hayne's "new crusade against New England," ^[13] he connected the Hartford Convention to present radicalism in South Carolina, noting the "reproach and contumely" that Hayne had direct at "his own chosen precedents." ^[13] Hayne, he said, could only denounced the Convention for its timing, while Webster would denounce it as "disloyal" if it had in fact advocated secession or even sought "to calculate the value of the Union," though he denied it had done either. ^[13] In contrast to recent "proceedings" in South Carolina, Webster claimed, New England would not "hold conventions to decide constitutional law!" ^[13]

Webster denied that he was moved by "local prejudice or gangrened by State jealousy," but instead longed for a time when Massachusetts and South Carolina stood "shoulder to shoulder" in xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

Constitutional theory

Finally, he expounded upon the Constitution, offering a defense of broad constitutional construction which was both essential to the American System and inseparable from his narrative of New England history. ^[11]

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Hayne's second reply: January 27

Scholarly analysis

Webster's Second Reply

Webster's Second Reply has long been thought of as a great oratorical celebration of American nationalism in a period of sectional conflict. James Schouler lauded it as "a speech full of burning passages, which will live as long as the American Union, and the grandest effort of [Webster's] life," though "some of his historical deductions may be questioned." ^{[14][ page needed]} Robert A. Ferguson credits the speech with formalizing "a shift in the American mind toward the idea of a single, democratic union," ^[15] and historian Merrill D. Peterson argues that Webster "raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart." ^[15]

In contrast, Harlow W. Sheidley argued that, while the nationalist character of the speech "cannot and should not be denied," its particular position as a rejoinder to Hayne's accusation of New England sectionalism should neither be ignored. ^[15] Sheidley argues that Webster's vision of nationalism and the manner of his Second Reply were "in great measure determined by the sectional interests and culture of the conservative elite community of Massachusetts... on whose behalf he spoke." In Sheidley's formulation, rather than acting as a "disinterested spokesman for an imperiled Union," Webster rose to prevent an alliance between the South and West by shifting the debate from specific policy to broad issues of constitutional interpretation. ^[16] He expounded nationalism "in a consciously divisive manner, wielding [it] as a weapon on the battleground of sectional politics." ^[6]

Hayne

Historian Avery Craven argues that addition to Hayne's effort to unite the greater South with the West, his speeches also strove to unite South Carolinians in a defense of nullification; the inland portions of the state were "still a part of the greater West, and if Calhoun deserted its people, they would not desert Jackson." Thus framed, Hayne's role was to unify farming interests throughout the country. He failed, in Craven's view, because "Calhoun had offered a political device for which the people of the section as a whole were not yet ready. The lure of internal improvements and home markets through national aid proved stronger than the appeal to local pride." ^[17]

Aftermath

Reaction

Forty thousand copies of Webster's Second Reply were distributed nationwide. ^[18] Reaction was sharply divided along regional lines; Northerners upheld Webster as the new hero of the nationalist cause, while Southerners, especially South Carolinians, though Hayne had handled himself ably. Within South Carolina, the debate likely accelerated the crisis by energizing the radicals over the moderate faction in state government. ^[19]

Within the federal government, however, Webster succeeded in bringing a number of influential figures out publicly against the cause of nullification.

On April 13, at the traditional Democratic Party celebration honoring Jefferson's birthday, Hayne raised a toast to "The Union of the States, and the Sovereignty of the States." President Jackson's dramatic response, when his turn came, was, "Our Federal Union: It must be preserved." Jackson soon after told a South Carolinian:

"Please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach." ^[20]

With Jackson's firm stance, the nullification crisis was eventually resolved without bloodshed in 1833.

Former President James Madison, known as the " Father of the Constitution," personally congratulated Webster on his success. ^{[21] [h]} He also addressed an open letter to Webster's ally Edward Everett, denouncing Calhoun's interpretation of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions: ^[22]

Can more be necessary to demonstrate the inadmissibility of such a doctrine than that it puts it in the power of the smallest fraction... to give the law and even the [Constitution] to seventeen States, each of the seventeen having as parties to the [Constitution] an equal right with each of the seven to expound it and to insist on the exposition. That the seven might, in particular instances be right and the seventeen wrong, is more than possible. But to establish a positive & permanent rule giving such a power to such a minority over such a majority, would overturn the first principle of free Govt. and in practice necessarily overturn the Govt. itself. ^[23]

The debate and ensuing crisis also elevated John C. Calhoun. In 1832, Hayne and Calhoun resigned as Senator and Vice President, respectively. Hayne became Governor of South Carolina and Calhoun took his seat in the Senate. Historian John Niven argues this move was the direct consequence of Webster's success in the debate two years prior: "There is no doubt that these moves were part of a well-thought-out plan whereby Hayne would restrain the hotheads in the state legislature and Calhoun would defend his brainchild, nullification, in Washington against administration stalwarts and the likes of Daniel Webster, the new apostle of northern nationalism." ^[24]

Influence

Legacy

References

Notes

Works cited

• Herman Belz, ed. (2000). The Webster-Hayne Debate on the Nature of the Union: Selected Documents. Liberty Fund.
• Brant, Irving (1970). The Fourth President: A Life of James Madison. Bobbs Merrill.
• Brooks, Stefan M. (2009). The Webster-Hayne Debate: An Inquiry into the Nature of Union. Univeristy Press of America. p. 156. ISBN  978-0-7618-4304-7.
• Ellis, Richard E. (1987). The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States' Rights, and the Nullification Crisis.
  • reviewed by Gutzman, Kevin R. C. (August 2010). "The Webster-Hayne Debate: An Inquiry into the Nature of Union [book review]". The Journal of Southern History: 715–716.
• Freehling, William W. (1965). Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Crisis in South Carolina, 1816-1836. ISBN  0-19-507681-8.
• McDonald, Forrest (2000). States' Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio 1776-1876. ISBN  0-7006-1040-5.
• Niven, John (1988). John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union. ISBN  0-8071-1451-0.
• Remini, Robert V. (1981). Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832. Vol. 2. ISBN  0-06-014844-6.
• Sheidley, Harlow W. (March 1994). "The Webster-Hayne Debate: Recasting New England's Sectionalism". The New England Quarterly. 67 (1): 5–29.

Further reading

• Craven, Avery (1957). The Coming of the Civil War (2 ed.). ISBN  0-226-11894-0.
• Peterson, Merrill D. (1987). The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun.
• Smith, Page (1981). The Nation Comes of Age: A People's History of the Antebellum Years. Vol. 4.
• Nevins, Allan (1947). Ordeal of the Union: Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847–1852. Vol. 1.
• Robert Remini, ed. (1972). The Age of Jackson. ISBN  0872492745.

Articles

• Apap, Christopher (Summer 2010). "The Genius of Latitude: Daniel Webster and the Geographical Imagination in Early America". Journal of the Early Republic. 30 (2): 201–223.
• Beeman, Richard R. (September 1968). "Unlimited Debate in the Senate: The First Phase". Political Science Quarterly. 83 (3): 419–434.
• Brogdon, Matthew S. (Spring 2011). "Defending the Union: Andrew Jackson's Nullification Proclamation and American Federalism". The Review of Politics. 73 (2): 245–273.
• Fields, Wayne (February 1983). "The Reply to Hayne: Daniel Webster and the Rhetoric of Stewardship". Political Theory. 11 (1): 5–28.
• Henson, D. Leigh (Winter 2014). "Classical Rhetoric as a Lens for Reading the Key Speeches of Lincoln's Political Rise, 1852–1856". Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. 35 (1): 1–25.
• Kirsch, Geoffrey R. (December 2018). ""So Much a Piece of Nature": Emerson, Webster, and the Transcendental Constitution". The New England Quarterly. 91 (4): 625–650.
• Towers, Frank (December 2019). "The Threat of Consolidation: States' Rights and American Discourses of Nation and Empire in the Nineteenth Century". Journal of the Civil War Era. 9 (4): 612–632.
• Voss, Frederick (Autumn 2001). "Webster Replying to Hayne: George Healy and the Economics of History Painting". American Art. 15 (3): 34–53.

External links

• The Hayne-Webster Debate

Category:Great Triumvirate Category:United States public land law Category:Political debates Category:1830 in American politics