US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0115/01151.txt

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$Unique_ID{USH01151}
$Pretitle{103}
$Title{The Senate - 1789-1989
Chapter 7   The Senate Comes of Age:  1829-1833}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Byrd, Robert C.}
$Affiliation{US Senate}
$Subject{senate
webster
jackson
calhoun
president
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south
clay
new
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$Volume{Vol. 1}
$Date{1989}
$Log{Almost a Match for Webster*0115101.scf
}
Book:        The Senate - 1789-1989
Author:      Byrd, Robert C.
Affiliation: US Senate
Volume:      Vol. 1
Date:        1989

Chapter 7   The Senate Comes of Age:  1829-1833

March 3, 1982.

     Mr. President, with the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, a new era
dawned in this nation.  Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has labeled it the
Age of Jackson.  Others have called it the Age of the People, but, for our
purposes, we may well entitle this era the Coming of Age of the Senate.  It
was during these years, crowded with so many monumentally important issues
which saw the incomparable lions of the nineteenth-century Senate - Clay,
Webster, Calhoun, and Benton - striding through the chamber, that the Senate
became the principal forum and battleground for the questions confronting the
nation.  As issue after issue came to the fore, all eyes focused on the
beautiful old Senate chamber down the hall from where I speak today.

     "The Virginia Dynasty" and the customary line of succession from
secretary of state to president died on the day that the expanded electorate
elevated to the presidency a Tennessee military hero who had never served in
the cabinet; never distinguished himself in Congress, though he had been both
a representative and a senator; and never appealed to the national aristocracy
of intellect and culture.  Though Jackson was opposed by two-thirds of the
newspapers, four-fifths of the preachers, seven-eighths of the bankers, and
nearly all the manufacturers, the people had spoken.  He had amassed 56
percent of the popular vote.

     The growing importance of the electorate and of political parties had an
enormous effect on the Congress, too.  The new parties devised parades,
slogans, picnics, and all the trappings of political hoopla to vie with one
another for popular favor.  The bestowing of patronage - franchises,
contracts, and jobs - became as important as the advancement of issues, and
the winning of elections sometimes became an end in itself.  To win elections,
parties needed men who wanted to win and who could win.  Prime candidates were
no longer the landed gentlemen who had dominated the early Senate - men who
felt the office should seek them rather than the other way around; instead,
many of the new members of Congress who were swept in with Jackson boasted of
their close kinship to the people and deliberately pandered to the ignorance
and prejudices of their humblest constituents.

     This new trend changed both the House and the Senate and highlighted the
differences between the two chambers.  It brought mediocrities, nonentities,
and even oddities to Congress.  Davy Crockett is perhaps the best example in
the House.  A loudmouthed braggart who boasted that he was "unlarned,"
Crockett's brief House career was totally undistinguished.  When his
constituents refused to return him in 1835, Crockett disgustedly told them, "I
am going to Texas and you can go to Hell."  Crockett did go to Texas and died
the next year defending the Alamo.

     Senators, of course, were still chosen by their state legislatures.  They
were, said Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, "the elect of the elect."  And
they were generally a cut above the representatives in ability and manners.
Reversing the trend of earlier years, the more capable and respected
representatives now tried at the first opportunity to graduate from the House
to the Senate.  When the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville visited
Washington in 1831, he was much dismayed by the "vulgar demeanor" of the House
and correctly noted, "The eye frequently does not discover a man of celebrity
within its walls."  The Senate, on the other hand, earned his praise as a body
"of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and
statesmen of note, whose language would at times do honor to the most
remarkable parliamentary debates in Europe."

     The Senate had been rising in esteem as a showcase for "eloquent
advocates" even before Jackson's inauguration.  The small, lovely chamber with
its domed ceiling had excellent acoustics, ideal for the ringing voices of
silver-tongued orators.  The senators sat at mahogany desks - many of which
are here in this chamber today - arranged in a semicircle.  Unless they were
standing committee chairmen, our predecessors in 1829 had no clerks,
assistants, or offices of their own in which to work in private.  It is hard
to imagine carrying out all of one's Senate business - studying documents,
preparing speeches, answering correspondence - at these small desks or in
nearby rooming-houses, but that is exactly what men like Webster and Calhoun
did.  Even these labors had to cease when the galleries and the floor filled
up with spectators who pushed and shoved their way in to hear a major debate
or a favorite senator declaim.  Squeezed all along the walls and standing even
among the senators' desks, these visitors heightened the drama in the little
chamber.

     In the changing Senate, however, it required more than grand oratory to
ensure legislative success.  A new and equally powerful senatorial type was
emerging with gifts rivaling those of the great speakers.  Leadership was
moving behind the scenes, retreating to the quietness of the Capitol's
hallways.  The greatest orators of the day, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts
and Henry Clay of Kentucky, were, we must remind ourselves, sometimes on the
losing side.  They were highly vulnerable to the tireless labors on the floor
and in the cloakrooms of the new-style men like Senators Felix Grundy of
Tennessee and Silas Wright of New York.

     The new style was intimate; it was one of low-pitched voices and subtle
reminders of debts owed and claimed.  It left many of the older men baffled;
defeated President John Quincy Adams, almost immediately elected to the House,
was one.  The former Harvard rhetoric professor could not account for a new
colleague's importance.  "He has no wit, no literature, no point of argument,
no gracefulness of delivery, no elegance of language, no philosophy, no
pathos, no felicitous impromptus."  As it turned out, many of those who could
not grasp the importance of the new-style manipulator were condemned to defeat
or insignificance by them.  The new era would belong to men like Martin Van
Buren of New York who knew the importance of laying sturdy behind-the-scenes
groundwork.

     Interwoven throughout this era in the Senate are several richly colored
threads.  One is the hardening sectional bitterness between North, West, and
South, seen in the careers of Webster, the northerner; John C. Calhoun, the
southerner; and Henry Clay, "Harry of the West."  Another is the attempt by
the new Democratic party to make good on its campaign promises to champion the
little man caught, said the Democrats, in the coils of the serpent-like money
interests which were draining away his life's blood.  And thirdly, there is
the spectacle of two hostile factions arising within the Democratic party
itself:  one pressing the claims of Vice President Calhoun, who would resign
that office for a Senate seat; and the other supporting Martin Van Buren, the
former New York senator.  None of these threads was separate from the others.
As the Twenty-first and Twenty-second congresses unfolded, it was clear that
at least two or three of these threads were always braided together and, as
new issues came forward, the braid would unravel and be rebraided to pick up a
new strand.

     On March 17, 1829, after confirming the new president's cabinet, the
Senate adjourned its special session.  The administration looked forward to
almost nine months of noninterference from this body until the regular session
of the Twenty-first Congress convened in December.  During that time, Jackson
set about replacing scores of longtime federal officeholders in Washington and
in the states with deserving Democrats who had worked for and supported him.
Patronage, as a device to strengthen the party, came to town with a vengeance.
The first spate of nominations Jackson sent to the Senate - a majority of
whose members were on guard against any sign of executive usurpation - roused
spirited opposition.

     Jackson got the nine-month respite he wanted during adjournment, but the
first storm of his administration broke in the Senate almost as soon as the
new Congress convened on December 7, 1829.  The enemies of Jackson in the
Senate, known as the "opposition," sought the earliest possible opportunity to
denounce the wholesale dismissals, and they turned their hostile scrutiny upon
every nomination requiring confirmation.

     A comparatively new senator, elected on the supposition that he would
support the president, stepped forth to organize and direct the fight against
the confirmation of nominees in whom Jackson was deeply interested.  That
senator was John Tyler of Virginia.  He typified those Democratic senators who
were soon to become members of the opposition.  Tyler does not readily come to
mind when we think of key senators from this period, but it would be a mistake
to underrate his importance.  He was highly respected by his colleagues, and
his dignity, courtliness, and urbanity gave him a certain social prestige.
Tall and slender, his Roman nose, firm mouth, broad and lofty brow, and honest
blue eyes combined to give him a distinction that marked him on the Senate
floor.  Tyler was of the old school of gentlemen senators.  His detachment
from the political world made it possible for him, during the famous debate on
the Foot resolution which I shall mention shortly, to entertain himself in the
Senate chamber with the reading of The Life of Byron.

     Among the Jacksonian nominations were those of, in Tyler's words, "a
batch of editors," men who had long been attached to the cause that Jackson
personified.  Having received recess appointments, most of these men were
already at their posts.  This provided Jackson's enemies with the perfect
opportunity to affront him personally.  The friends of Clay and Adams were
eager to humiliate their enemy, but the actual conspiracy behind what became
known as "massacre of the editors" originated with Tyler.

     Among the editors up for confirmation was Major Henry Lee, a half brother
of Robert E. Lee, who had been appointed consul general to Algiers.  A charge
of "moral viciousness" was the pretext used to reject him, but the fact that
he had helped with the writing of Jackson's inaugural speech was the principal
reason behind the opposition's vendetta.  Lee received news of his rejection
in Paris and died shortly thereafter.

     Isaac Hill of the New Hampshire Patriot, nominated for a minor treasury
post, presented a greater problem.  Instead of taking his defeat gracefully,
Hill was elected as a senator from New Hampshire in the next election and
lunged into the Senate that had humiliated him to lead the Jackson forces
against the opposition.  Hill's offense was ostensibly that he had printed
unkind things about Mrs. Adams during the late campaign.  That these charges
sounded rather hollow coming from men who had so recently slandered Rachel
Jackson did not escape the president's notice.

     Tyler was delighted with his work.  He wrote a friend:  "On Monday we
took the printers in hand. [Amos] Kendall was saved by the casting vote of the
Vice-President [Calhoun] . . . .  Out of those presented to the Senate, but
two have squeezed through, and that by the whole power of the government here
having been thrown in the scale."  The president was, however, less than
pleased.  The effect of the rejections was like a slap in the face, and it
aroused all the lion in his nature.  The rejections were the Senate's first
challenge to the president, and it was instantly accepted.  Jackson
renominated several of his defeated friends and marshalled his allies to ram
through their confirmations on the second try.

     The Senate's fight against Jackson had begun at the earliest possible
moment.  The president was affronted that such a fight would begin before he
had even announced a policy or a program.  The battle would continue for the
full eight years of the Jackson administration.

     To the senators of 1829-1830, events sometimes must have seemed like
onrushing ocean waves.  No sooner had one breaker, the nominations
controversy, tumbled over them when another crisis rushed in before they could
regain their footing.

     The Webster-Hayne debates began, it seems, quite by accident, but the
issues involved were like a powder keg ready to ignite at the slightest spark.
The volatile mixture included Calhoun's jealousy of Van Buren and uncertainty
over the latter's standing with Jackson, as well as the constitutionality of
the doctrine of nullification hinted at in the South after the Tariff of
Abominations in 1828 but kept under wraps until after the election.  A third
issue was the smoldering resentment over the perceived denigration of the
nation's agrarian past in favor of an industrial future, mirrored in the
contest for power between the South, West, and North.

     The inevitable spark that ignited this dangerous mixture was a resolution
introduced on December 30, 1829, by Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut.  Foot,
an anti-Jackson man, sought to have the Committee on Public Lands inquire into
the expediency of limiting the sale of western public lands and abolishing the
office of surveyor general.  Thomas Hart Benton, the champion of the West,
immediately leaped to his feet, assailing the resolution as a diabolical plan
to safeguard cheap labor in the Northeast by shutting off opportunities for
poor people to escape to the frontier.  It was, shouted Benton, nothing short
of "a most complex scheme of injustice which taxes the South to injure the
West, to pauperize the poor of the North!"

     Benton's speech drew approving nods from Vice President Calhoun, who was
then presiding.  Calhoun was undoubtedly frustrated that he could not join the
fight, but the southern states' rights cause had yet another determined
advocate in the Senate who could and did speak out - thirty-eight-year-old
Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina.  Hayne was a knight of southern chivalry
who, as a youth, like the Greeks and Romans, had studied oratory as an art.
Hayne's philosophy would bring him head to head with Senator Daniel Webster of
Massachusetts.  Though nine years Webster's junior, Hayne enjoyed an
oratorical reputation that promised the contest would not be one-sided.

     Webster's own reputation as an orator was greater than that of any living
American.  Behind him in 1830 was his Plymouth oration, which rivaled the
writings of Washington Irving as a best-seller; his Dartmouth College plea,
delivered in the old Supreme Court chamber, which had moved Chief Justice John
Marshall to tears; his Bunker Hill address, which had been translated into
several languages; and his plea for Greek independence, which had been read
around the world.

     On January 19, Hayne rose to speak on the Foot resolution.  Branching out
from Benton's rugged and rather sententious presentation, he gracefully
invited the West to unite with the South against encroachments inimical to
both sections.  His idol and his friend, Calhoun, presided and encouraged him
with a smile.  Indeed, Hayne saw the public lands question as an opportunity
to build an alliance between westerners and southerners which might help
Calhoun's presidential chances.  The leading Jackson senators, John Forsyth of
Georgia, Edward Livingston of Louisiana, and Felix Grundy of Tennessee, urged
him on.  Buoyed, he charged the Northeast with a host of sins against the
South and West, attacked the American System of high tariffs, and condemned
federalism by saying, "There is no evil more to be deprecated than the
consolidation of the government."  Hayne's blows at federalism, at New
England, at all Webster stood for, fell like hammers on an anvil.

     Apparently Webster had not caught the full force of Hayne's attack.
Wearing his customary blue coat with bright brass buttons, buff waistcoat, and
big white cravat, he had just entered the Senate chamber, having climbed the
marble stairs from the Supreme Court chamber below where he had been arguing a
case.  Webster was lounging against a pillar on the edge of the chamber, only
half-listening, when Hayne began to lambaste him.  Webster took a seat and
paid close attention.

     On the following day, Webster replied with a relatively short speech in
which he defended both Foot's proposed land policy and the tariff of 1828.
But he ended the speech by flinging the challenge back at Hayne, homing in on
two points on which the South Carolinians were most sensitive.  The first was
slavery.  By identifying anti-slavery with pro-western policy, Webster struck
at the heart of the South-West coalition that Hayne and Calhoun hoped to
forge.  His second barb was aimed at the specter of consolidation, "that
perpetual cry both of terror and delusion" which Hayne had raised.  He
deplored the tendency of some southerners habitually to "speak of the Union in
terms of indifference, or even of disparagement" and regretted that Hayne was
among them.  He branded Hayne as a politician anxious to bring the whole value
of the Union into question" as a mere question of present and temporary
expediency; nothing more than a mere matter of profit and loss.  The Union is
to be preserved while it suits local and temporary purposes to preserve it;
and to be sundered whenever it shall be found to thwart such purposes."  In
short, the "Carolina doctrine" did not sound very American to Daniel Webster.

     When Webster finished, it was clear that he had successfully shifted the
focus of debate from the specifics of public land and tariffs to the larger
issue.  What was to be debated was the future of the United States.  Hayne
took the bait.  Word went out that he would reply the next day.  By that
morning, the city was packed.  The Indian Queen, Gadsby's, and every nameless
boarding-house in Washington were jammed to the rafters with bickering
partisans jostling each other on the staircases, disputing the merits of Hayne
and Webster.

     By eight o'clock, on the morning of January 21, every seat in the Senate
chamber was filled.  All eyes were on Hayne and he knew it.  He looked boyish
and slender in the coarse homespun suit he had substituted for the hated
broadcloth of northern manufacture.  If he was tense, he barely betrayed it.
An observer noted that "he dashed into the debate like a mamluk cavalry upon a
charge."  (The mamluks had created one of the most formidable empires of the
Middle Ages in Egypt and Syria.)  In a moment, Hayne was in full swing.  He
launched into a sarcastic examination of Webster's Federalist record in
Congress, made a passionate defense of slavery, and finished with a ringing
reaffirmation of the South Carolina theory of nullification.  A glance at the
"white, triumphant face" of the vice president revealed his satisfaction with
his protege.  During much of the speech, Calhoun was bent over his desk
scrawling hasty, half-legible notes of advice and encouragement to Hayne,
which a few moments later would be carried down the aisle most ostentatiously
by one of the pages.  (Pages were a new fixture in the Senate chamber at that
time.)

[See Almost a Match for Webster: Senator Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina was
a champion of the southern states' rights cause.]

     Hayne's speech took parts of two days, January 21 and 25, 1830.  Webster
sat through the entire punishing performance.  His face a mask as unresponsive
as a sphinx, he took careful notes.  As he scribbled, it became clear to him
that, carried away by his excitement, Hayne had carelessly misstated a crucial
point of the whole nullification doctrine, laying himself open to attack.
Webster must have smiled inwardly.

     Few others caught the error.  Southerners tumbled out of the Senate
chamber flushed and ecstatic and proceeded to the taverns to toast Hayne,
nullification, and the South.  The administration's newspaper, Duff Green's
United States Telegraph, was in a frenzy of delight.  Through the aides he had
sent to the chamber to listen to Hayne's remarks, President Jackson learned of
their content almost immediately.  Though uneasy over the emphasis being
placed on nullification rather than public lands, on which he clearly
supported Benton and Hayne, Jackson professed to be pleased.  It was said that
you could tell a New England man that night by his downcast face.  But Webster
was not downcast at all.  His friends found him calm and confident, predicting
that he would "grind" Hayne "as fine as a pinch of snuff."

     The morning of January 26, the day Webster would begin his reply to
Hayne, dawned cold and clear.  Margaret Bayard Smith, doyenne of Washington
society whom I have quoted before, tells us that a biting wind filled the
streets with clouds of red dust.  She could write that day free from callers
because, she said, "everyone is thronging to the Capitol . . . to hear Mr.
Webster's reply to Col. Hayne's attack on him and his party."

     Coach after coach rolled up before the Capitol, and the sharp, frozen
ruts in the road cut into the satin slippers of the ladies as they descended
from their carriages into billows of ruffles.  There were women everywhere -
over 150 of them, one observer said.  Mrs. Smith might regret the tendency of
women to monopolize the seats in the gallery and on the floor, but that day,
by the time they had positioned themselves, there was scarcely room for a
senator to stand, much less sit.  As Mrs. Smith noted:

A debate on any political principle would have had no such attraction.  But
personalities are irresistible.  It is a kind of moral gladiatorship . . . .
The Senate Chamber . . . is the present arena and never were the amphitheaters
of Rome more crowded by the highest ranks of both sexes . . . .  Every seat,
every inch of ground, even the steps were compactly filled . . . .  The
Senators were obliged to relinquish their chairs of State to the fair auditors
. . . .

     Lewis Machen, chief clerk of the Senate, of whom I have spoken before,
confirmed Mrs. Smith's description of the day.  He tells us:

. . . the Senate Chambers and Galleries were filled almost an hour before the
time at which the Senate assembled.  To accommodate the ladies who thronged
the vestibules, not only the lobbies and passages below were filled with
chairs, but even Senators had the gallantry to yield their seats; and, still,
many were seen standing during the whole of the day.  When Mr. Webster
commenced his reply I never witnessed a more breathless attention.  Amidst the
visible excitement which prevailed, he arose.

     Mr. President, Webster's reply to Hayne must still be ranked as one of
the greatest addresses ever made in the Senate.  With a packed chamber hanging
on his every word and the ladies hanging on the very edges of their seats,
Webster delivered what might well be considered the most powerful, most
eloquent plea for the American Union any man has ever made.  He spoke from
twelve pages of notes; with much extemporizing, it took him several hours,
spread over two days, to finish.  Machen tells us that he spoke for three
hours the first day.  A Webster partisan, he claimed that "the missiles
discharged against him fell harmless at his feet, or were returned with deadly
energy."

     His deep voice filling the chamber like an organ's chords, Webster
proceeded to examine and demolish Hayne's arguments, one by one.  Simply by
commending the anti-slavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, he
had pushed Hayne into accusing the nonslaveholding states of harboring plots
to destroy the South.  Webster was able to reply quite correctly that he had
not uttered "a single word which any ingenuity could torture into an attack on
the slavery of the South."  Hayne's sensitivity on the subject was, said
Webster, typical of that of southern politicians who sought "to unite the
whole South against Northern men, or Northern measures" on the basis of a
feeling "at too intense a heat to admit discrimination or reflection."
Although he admitted that the federal government had no power to interfere
with slavery in the states, Webster refused to agree with Hayne that the
morality of the institution was a matter of political abstraction which
statesmen could safely ignore.  "I regard domestic slavery as one of the
greatest of evils, both moral and political.  But though it be a malady, and
whether it be curable, and, if so, by what means I leave it to those whose
right and duty it is to inquire and decide."

     During his assault on Clay's American System, Hayne had contemptuously
implied that the people of South Carolina had no legitimate interest in canals
or roads in other states.  But Webster skillfully picked up this point and
turned it around so as to appeal to the patriotic sentiment of the people in
all the states:

"What interest," asks he [Hayne], "has South Carolina in a canal in Ohio?"
Sir, this very question is full of significance.  It develops the gentleman's
whole political system, and its answer expounds mine . . . .  On that system,
it is true, she has no interest.  On that system, Ohio and Carolina are
different Governments and different countries, . . .  On that system, Carolina
has no more interest in a canal in Ohio than in Mexico . . . .  Sir, we
narrow-minded people of New England do not reason thus . . . .  In our
contemplation, Carolina and Ohio are parts of the same country; States, united
under the same General Government, having interests, common, associated,
intermingled . . . .  We do not impose geographical limits to our patriotic
feeling or regard; we do not follow rivers and mountains, and lines of
latitude, to find boundaries, beyond which public improvements do not benefit
us . . . .  Sir, if a rail-road or canal, beginning in South Carolina, and
ending in South Carolina, appeared to me to be of national importance and
national magnitude, . . . if I were to stand up here, and ask what interest
has Massachusetts in rail-roads in South Carolina, I should not be willing to
face my constituents.

     This last point carried special weight, because Hayne and the other
senators knew that, only a few days earlier, Webster had presented a petition
from the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company, asking the federal
government to subscribe to its stock on the grounds that its projected road
would aid the national welfare.

     Listening intently as Webster took on South Carolina was Vice President
Calhoun, who presided in the chair as "tense as a coiled spring."  Indeed, as
Mrs. Smith noted, this was as much a conflict between personalities as issues,
and the real principals involved were not Hayne and Webster, but Calhoun and
Webster.  As the strength of Webster's argument dawned on him, Calhoun's
restlessness became "very evident."  The plea for internal improvements
nettled him beyond endurance.  Forgetting his position, his feelings gave way,
and time and again he tried to interrupt Webster.  Webster noted Calhoun's
distress and deliberately stared first at the vice president and then at Hayne
as he issued a pointed Shakespearean warning to both:

A barren scepter in their gripe,

Thence to be wrenched by an unlineal hand.

No son of their's succeeding.

     Webster was most effective when he talked of constitutional power and
appealed to national pride and sentiment.  He began his refutation of Hayne's
constitutional position by distinguishing it from the right of revolution
which, he said, every American would admit.  Hayne interrupted to give his
consent to this interpretation.  But Webster then proceeded to show how it was
wrong in principle and bound to be disastrous in practice.  The federal
government, he claimed, was not the limited creation of sovereign states but a
popular government with powers derived directly from the people and spelled
out by the Constitution:

I hold it to be a popular Government, erected by the people; those who
administer it, responsible to the people; and itself capable of being amended
and modified, just as the people may choose it should be.  It is as popular,
just as truly emanating from the people, as the State Governments.  It is
created for one purpose; the State Governments for another.  It has its own
powers; they have theirs.  There is no more authority with them to arrest the
operation of a law of Congress, than with Congress to arrest the operation of
their laws.  We are here to administer a constitution emanating immediately
from the people, and trusted, by them to our administration.

     Who was to decide the constitutionality of state or federal laws?  The
answer was clearly given in the Constitution itself in the two clauses which
made the Constitution, as Webster said, "the supreme law of the land" and
extended the judicial power "to all cases arising under the Constitution and
laws of the United States."  To proceed on the opposite assumption - that the
states were sovereign and could decide to obey or disobey federal laws at
their pleasure - was to take a giant step toward civil war.  Webster
eloquently contrasted this bloody prospect with the harmony of the early
Republic when Massachusetts and South Carolina had united to throw off British
tyranny.  "Would to God that harmony might again return!  Shoulder to shoulder
they went through the Revolution, hand in hand they stood round the
administration of Washington, and felt his own great arm lean on them for
support."

     As the eulogy to the Union reached its zenith, men and women in the
gallery wept openly.  Webster's dark skin warmed and his eyes burned as if
touched by fire.  Even Calhoun revealed the emotions he tried so hard to
conceal.  Love and pride of country - these were things he could understand,
too.  By the time Webster concluded, with lines many a schoolboy would
thereafter have to memorize, there was hardly a dry eye in the chamber.  Here
is what he said:

When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven,
may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once
glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent
with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!  Let their last
feeble and lingering glance, rather, behold the gorgeous ensign of the
republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high
advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a
stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto
no such miserable interrogatory as What is all this worth?  Nor those other
words of delusion and folly, Liberty first and Union afterwards:  but
everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its
ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind
under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American
heart - Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!

     A few hours later, the contending giants met again at a White House
levee.  "How are you this evening, Colonel Hayne?" asked Webster graciously.
"None the better for you, sir," said the southerner with a smile.  Within a
few weeks, Webster's speech was being sold everywhere and was in greater
demand than any other congressional speech in American history.  Webster's own
son, Fletcher, wrote to his father that "I never knew what the Constitution
really was, till your last short speech.  I thought it was a compact between
the states."  What should be clear, however, is that Webster's speech was as
much political as it was philosophical.  Daniel Webster was a very shrewd man.
His debate with Hayne did much more than nationalize his reputation; it gave
him a base of popular support from which he might reasonably seek the
presidency.  A speech which was powerful enough to draw praise from old
adversaries like James Madison and from competitors like Henry Clay could
inspire reverence and awe among his New England constituents.

     In the tumult that followed Webster's speech, whatever was left of the
Benton-Hayne theme of an alliance between the South and the West evaporated.
Ultra-nationalist western senators in the chamber had thrilled to the
patriotic fervor of Webster's words.  Foot's original, nearly overlooked
resolution, which had unleashed this avalance of rhetoric, was eventually
defeated.  But the question being raised throughout Washington was how the
president, a southerner, and a westerner stood?  A correspondent from
Jackson's home state wrote that Webster was now known "in every log house" in
western Tennessee as "the champion of the Union."  How did Old Hickory feel
about that?

March 4, 1982.

     Mr. President, yesterday, I was unable to complete my statement.  I
discussed at some length the Webster-Hayne debate, and I wish now to continue
my statement, "The Senate Comes of Age:  1829-1833."

     There were reports that after Hayne had made his first speech, the
president had sent him a congratulatory note.  Jackson was, no doubt, kindly
disposed toward the argument Hayne had begun by criticizing eastern
capitalists.  But this was before the senator from South Carolina had been led
by Webster into open advocacy of the right of a state to sit in judgment upon
an act of Congress.  Since Webster's famous second reply, Old Hickory had kept
his own counsel to the great frustration of both sides and to Calhoun's
particular exasperation.

     Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, Felix Grundy of Tennessee, and other
administration senators not from the southern branch of the Democratic party
believed that, for the benefit of his pro-tariff constituents, Webster had
overstressed the perils of the situation.  On the Senate floor, Benton came to
Hayne's defense.  Though the president neither applauded nor criticized
Benton, southerners took his silence as boding well.  They should not have
been so naive.  Instead, they should have listened more closely to the speech
of Senator Edward Livingston of Louisiana a few days later for clues to the
president's true feelings.  Livingston was an intimate friend of the president
and was destined soon to leave the Senate for the cabinet.  In his speech,
Livingston sought to return the debate to its original ground but also offered
a brilliant defense of the Union against nullification.  If the personal views
of Jackson are to be found in Senate speeches, they are in this speech by
Livingston, not in those by Hayne.

     After waiting impatiently for more than a month for a sign from the White
House, the South Carolinians decided on a scheme to force the issue.  Here
Calhoun and Hayne put their own heads into a trap.  The occasion was to be the
first Democratic party Jefferson Day Dinner on April 13, 1830.  The place was
Washington's Indian Queen Hotel, known by the luridly painted picture of
Pocahontas swinging in front.  Calhoun's men planned the evening, and, by
scheduling twenty-four toasts, all of which were in praise of nullification,
hoped to associate that doctrine with Jefferson and, most importantly, the
guest of honor, Andrew Jackson.  They scheduled Jackson to offer the first
voluntary toast after the twenty-four.

     That night, light blazed from the Indian Queen's windows and was
reflected through the sparkling decanters of whiskey.  The air was filled with
the scent of turkey, partridges, and pickled oysters - and heavy with
suspense.  At each plate lay the program listing the twenty-four speakers.
The meaning was clear.  The Pennsylvania congressional delegation entered,
took one look, and left.

     At the White House, Jackson and Van Buren, his secretary of state,
considered what their course of action should be.  The conspirators'
intentions were clear.  How to show by his toast that Jackson was familiar
with their intent and to demonstrate his determination to preserve the Union
at all hazards was the puzzle.  They settled on a plan.  "Thus armed," wrote
Van Buren, "we repaired to the dinner with feelings on the part of the old
Chief akin to those which would have animated his breast if the scene of this
preliminary skirmish in defense of the Union had been the field of battle
instead of the festive board."

     Benton arrived to find the hall alive with excitement.  Dinner was
served.  From the head and foot of the central table, Calhoun and Jackson eyed
each other.  As each course was served, the tension mounted.  Hayne began the
speeches with a flowery reiteration of his challenge to Webster.  Then came
the twenty-four toasts.  Jackson sat impassively, betraying nothing of his
intentions.  Finally, it was time for the volunteer toasts, and Jackson
stiffly arose amid cheers.  So many diners were on their feet that the
diminutive Van Buren could not see and so climbed onto his chair.

     Andrew Jackson looked straight into the eyes of John C. Calhoun and said,
"Our Federal Union:  It must be preserved."  Utter silence followed.  "A
proclamation of martial law in South Carolina and an order to arrest Calhoun
where he sat," said Isaac Hill, "could not have come with more blinding,
staggering force."  Jackson raised his glass, a signal the toast was to be
drunk standing.  As a man, the room arose, Calhoun with the rest.  Slowly
Calhoun's hands closed around the stem of his glass.  Hill reported that "his
glass trembled in his hand and a little of the amber fluid trickled down the
side."  Calhoun drank with the rest, while Jackson continued to stare at him.
For a moment more, the white-haired president stood there, and then walked
away to talk with Benton.  Finally, all were reseated.  The toastmaster called
upon the vice president.  Calhoun arose slowly.  He lifted his glass.  He
picked up the challenge, surrendering nothing.  Slowly, but clearly, he said,
"The Union - next to our Liberty most dear."  Within five minutes, the room
had cleared, men fleeing from the scene as from a battle.

     From then on, the already strained relations between the president and
his vice president went from bad to worse.  Calhoun sagged under the strain.
A visitor to the Senate gallery found the South Carolinian "more wrinkled and
careworn than I had expected from his reputed age.  His voice is shrill and to
my ear disagreeable.  His manners have in them an uneasiness, a hurried,
incoherent air."  Calhoun, forty-eight years of age, was indeed uneasy.  Once
more, Van Buren had scored over his rival in the contest to ride Old Hickory's
popularity into the presidency.

     Calhoun sat uncomfortably in the vice president's chair in the Senate
chamber, wishing for the end of the session and release.  Before relief came
with the close of the first session of the Twenty-first Congress on May 31,
however, the Senate and the president locked horns once again.  Despite his
strong stand for the supremacy of the Union, Jackson had given ample evidence
that on other issues he would support the exercise of national authority only
in limited areas.  One of these limited areas was that of internal
improvements.

     The House and Senate were indulging in an orgy of so-called pork barrel
legislation that provided federal aid to individual projects.  The logrolling
was fast and furious on Capitol Hill.  Would Senator A support Senator B's
bill for a highway in his state?  The trading of votes and cooperation, either
for the passage or defeat of bills, would, in time, become a basic and
complicated part of congressional procedure in the movement of legislation
through committees and on the floors of both houses.  But in 1830, Jackson and
his followers were disgusted by the raid on the federal treasury and the
mileage such efforts gave to Henry Clay and his American System.

     Jackson told Van Buren to watch Congress and bring to the White House the
first vulnerable bill to meet his eye.  By the end of April, Van Buren told
the president that he had found the victim - a measure to authorize the
government to subscribe $150,000 worth of stock to build a sixty-six-mile
turnpike from Maysville to Lexington, Kentucky, Henry Clay's state.  The bill
had passed the House and would soon pass the Senate.  Van Buren sat down to
help Jackson write his first veto message, justifying the action by noting
that the road lay entirely within one state.  Despite a great deal of bluster,
Clay's supporters in the Senate could not override the veto and had to leave
for home on a crestfallen note.  Jackson vetoed twelve measures during his
administration - two more than all his predecessors combined.  As the session
finally closed, Henry Clay fumed in the West; Calhoun angrily presided over
the Senate, nursing his wounds; and Webster still basked in the glory of his
recent speeches.  It had been a busy five months for the senators, and they
gladly went off for a seven-month rest.

     During the second session of the Twenty-first Congress, the national
spotlight shifted away from the Senate, but, with the opening of the
Twenty-second Congress on December 5, 1831, the full glare focused on the
senators once again.

     In October 1831, Henry Clay sat in the library of Ashland, his Kentucky
estate, reading a letter from Daniel Webster which went as follows:

You must be aware of the strong desire manifested in many parts of the country
that you should come into the Senate.  The wish is entertained here as
earnestly as elsewhere.  We are to have an interesting and arduous session.
Everything is to be attacked.  An array is preparing much more formidable than
has ever yet assaulted what we think the leading and important public
interests.  Not only the tariff, but the Constitution itself, in its elemental
and fundamental provisions, will be assailed with talent, vigor, and union.
Everything is to be debated as if nothing had ever been settled.  It would be
an infinite gratification to me to have your aid, or rather, your lead.  I
know nothing so likely to be useful.  Everything valuable in the government is
to be fought for and we need your arm in the fight.

     Webster's message was clear.  The opposition was gearing up for a major
battle with the obstinate president whose candidacy for reelection in 1832 was
almost assured.  To combat the Democrats, the opposition needed a strong
leader and it turned to Clay, whose own nomination for the presidency was also
a foregone conclusion.

     Clay responded to the call to carry the fight into the enemy's camp.  In
the face of a ferocious Jackson press attack, Clay was elected to the Senate
by a small majority of the Kentucky legislature and set off for Washington in
November.  He arrived, observed Margaret Bayard Smith, "borne up by the
undying spirit of ambition, looking "well and animated," to be received with
"the most marked deference and respect."

     Henry Clay was the consummate politician.  Few have been his equal.  Few
have ever approached his effect upon a partisan audience.  Fluent and, at
times, capable of passages of inspired eloquence; a master of sarcasm and
ridicule; his was the oratory that moves men to action.  Webster and Calhoun
spoke in abstractions; Clay spoke the language of the people.  Webster and
Calhoun inspired respect; Clay, love.

     This was the militant figure that strode down Pennsylvania Avenue to take
his place at the head of the Senate opposition when the Twenty-second Congress
convened on December 5, 1831.  Five days later, the National Republicans held
their nominating convention in Baltimore and offered him the high office he
long had sought.

     As Clay surveyed his colleagues in the Senate, he must have rejoiced at
his advantage.  At his side was Webster with all the prestige of his great
name.  Still presiding, though he knew his days as vice president were
numbered, was John C. Calhoun, whose break with the president was now
complete.  There also was Hayne, obviously no friend of Webster's, but out to
revenge the wounds inflicted on his mentor in the chair by the president,
willing to join with the opposition now.  Also in Clay's camp were John
Middleton Clayton of Delaware and Thomas Ewing of Ohio, the latter a robust
partisan and able debater.  And, while they were of the states' rights
persuasion and hostile to the tariff and internal improvements, Clay could
scarcely fail to catch the signals that the erudite Littleton W. Tazewell and
John Tyler of Virginia were sending out to make it known that they were ripe
for opposition.

     Against him, Clay could count John Forsyth of Georgia and, of course,
Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri.  These two were aided by Senators Felix Grundy
and Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee, Isaac Hill of New Hampshire, and Mahlon
Dickerson of New Jersey.

     Clay and his opposition faced off against the Jackson men.  The
Kentuckian was a dominant figure in the debate that winter.  An impatient
listener, he was wont to sit at indifferent ease reading or eating sticks of
striped peppermint candy, a procedure varied by occasional restless wanderings
over to the snuffbox that stood on the center table.  When he spoke, his
telling arguments and effective gestures compelled the attention of his
listeners.

     Skirmishing began almost at once.  But Clay was looking for an issue on
which to leap.  A less provocative message than that with which Jackson opened
the Twenty-second Congress, however, could hardly have been penned.  For lack
of a better scapegoat, the opposition seized upon the nomination of Van Buren
as minister to England.  At least on this issue, Clay knew that Calhoun's and
Hayne's hatred of the Red Fox of Kinderhook (Van Buren) would keep them in the
opposition's fold.

     Van Buren had resigned as secretary of state in 1831, when Jackson's
entire cabinet was overhauled.  In June of that year, Jackson had named him to
the London mission, too late for the Senate to act upon the appointment.  By
January 1832, his confirmation was at the mercy of his foes, and a pettier
story of party politics is scarcely found in the Senate's history.  None
really doubted Van Buren's ability or questioned his integrity.  The Calhoun
faction acted out of spite; Clay, Webster, and Clayton acted out of partisan
spleen.  Calhoun's men took the tack that Van Buren had plotted the disruption
in the cabinet and engineered the quarrel between the president and the vice
president.  Clay and Webster and their followers denounced him as a spoilsman
and thundered against Van Buren's part as secretary of state in the
negotiations on the West India trade, where he repudiated previous U.S.
policies.

     When the nomination reached the Senate, nothing was done for five weeks.
The leaders of the opposition were carefully preparing their speeches for
publication and wide distribution because they did not have copying machines
in those days.

     The venom behind the procrastination was finally revealed in a resolution
entrusted to an obscure member, Senator John Holmes of Maine, to recommit the
nomination with instructions to investigate the disruption of the cabinet and
whether Van Buren had "participated in any practices disreputable to the
national character.  This cavalier measure was withdrawn without action but
then the grander orators began.  One after another, with a poor simulation of
sorrowful regret over the necessity of injuring an amiable man, a former
senator at that, they poured forth protest against the nomination.  Clay,
Webster, Clayton, Ewing, Hayne, and seven others recited their elaborately
prepared harangues under the approving eye of Calhoun in the chair.


     Only four replies were made, the principal one by John Forsyth, the
accomplished de facto floor leader of the administration.  Forsyth bitterly
assailed the partisan crucifixion and sarcastically commended the fine public
spirit of the senators who voluntarily brought such distress upon themselves
in the public good.  Forsyth's barbs hit home.  Hayne later admitted that he
had spoken and voted against his judgment at the behest of party alone.  John
Tyler noted that he finally voted for confirmation, "not that I liked the man
overmuch," but because he could find no principle to justify his rejection and
did not care to join "the notoriously factious opposition . . . who opposed
everything favored by the Administration."

     We should not be surprised that so few Jackson men came to Van Buren's
defense.  Many of them rightly saw that in his defeat could come his victory.
Benton, who did not participate in the Senate debate, was of this view.
Benton believed that though "rejection was a bitter medicine, there was health
at the bottom of the draught."  Freshman Senator William Marcy of New York, a
firm friend of Van Buren, agreed.  "There would have been some difficulty in
enlisting the popular feeling in his [Van Buren's] favor, but the blow aimed
at Van Buren, Old Hickory will receive, and the two are and will be
identified."

     When the vote was finally taken for confirmation, it ended in a
pre-arranged tie.  In triumph, Vice President Calhoun cast the deciding vote
for rejection, ending, he was sure, his rival's career.  Within earshot of
Benton, Calhoun gloated, "It will kill him, sir, kill him dead.  He will never
kick, sir, never kick."  Benton knew differently.  Said he, "You have broken a
Minister, and elected a vice president."  Marcy wrote happily to London to
inform Van Buren, jokingly pretending to be transmitting evil news.  Van Buren
returned to the United States a political martyr.  In May, the Democrats chose
him as Jackson's vice-presidential running mate.

     One might think that the presidential election would overshadow all other
events in 1832.  Instead, a new crisis, really a long smoldering crisis,
suddenly came to a head more quickly than anyone had expected.  Ever since the
tariff of 1828 - the so-called Tariff of Abominations - South Carolina, with
Calhoun at the helm aided by Hayne, had been nursing the doctrine of
nullification.

     To try to conciliate the South, Jackson had asked Congress to revise the
harsh 1828 tariff.  And, indeed, a new, milder tariff did pass Congress on
July 14, 1832, with southern support.  Those who thought the threat had passed
failed to reckon on the determination of South Carolina and John C. Calhoun.
In August, Calhoun wrote a public letter to South Carolina Governor Hamilton
defending nullification.  The governor then called a state convention which
met in Columbia in November and adopted an ordinance nullifying the tariff and
prohibiting the collection of any duties within the state beginning February
1, 1833.  The legislature passed laws to enforce the ordinance.  President
Jackson responded by alerting United States forces in South Carolina and by
issuing his famous proclamation condemning nullification and asserting the
supremacy of the federal government.

     As Christmas 1832 approached, threats of war and secession were heard on
every side.  Charleston, South Carolina, looked like a military depot.
Realizing that Jackson already considered him a traitor, Calhoun allowed
himself to be chosen by the South Carolina legislature to fill the Senate seat
of Hayne, who willingly stepped aside and was elected governor.  A few days
later, Calhoun resigned the vice-presidency.  (By then, it was clear that
Jackson and Van Buren had won the November elections.  The electoral vote
would be 219 for Jackson, 49 for Clay.)

     Calhoun addressed a hurried note to Secretary of State Edward Livingston:

Sir, having concluded to accept a seat in the United States Senate, I herewith
resign the office of Vice President of the United States.

     To this extraordinary document, neither the secretary nor the
administration paid any attention.  It was so completely ignored that Calhoun
finally wrote Livingston to see if he had received it.  Even the Senate
disdained to recognize the withdrawal of its presiding officer.  Business
continued as usual as Calhoun prepared to leave South Carolina to carry his
state's battle onto the floor of the Senate.

     Calhoun was literally taking his life into his hands when he left
Charleston.  There were rumors that Jackson had sworn to hang him.  Loyal
followers accompanied him as far as the Virginia line into Washington but even
they began to drift off as the border was reached.  Only a few curious
spectators saw him enter his old boardinghouse.  The mail that awaited him,
full of drawings of skulls and coffins, did little to quiet his nerves.

     Crowds lined the streets the next morning, January 4, 1833, to watch him
head off to the Senate.  The Capitol was packed, and curious friends and foes
thronged the Senate gallery.  Calhoun entered the chamber, deathly pale but
calm.  The chamber was just as he had left it with the familiar sound of
scratching quill pens, knuckles rapping sand off the wet ink, the rustle of
newspapers tossed down as he passed.  As the new senator from South Carolina
sat down, several southerners came to shake his hand, but many former friends,
as they sometimes will, hung back.  Some deliberately avoided his gaze.  And,
my, what a gaze from the piercing, black eyes of Calhoun!  When he strode
forward to be sworn in, his colleagues watched in wonder as the Great
Nullifier solemnly swore to "uphold, defend, and protect the Constitution of
the United States."

     Calhoun held his peace in the Senate until Jackson's Force bill, designed
to enable the president to use the army and navy to enforce revenue laws,
arrived in mid-January.  He sprang to his feet.  His words were exceedingly
bitter.  In youth, he told the Senate, he had "cherished a deep and
enthusiastic admiration of this Union."  He had looked "with rapture" on the
federal system, but always knew that, in the last resort, the body that
delegated the power could regain the power.  And now, for merely daring to
assert the state's constitutional rights, "We are threatened to have our
throats cut, and those of our wives and children."  He stopped suddenly and
told his already startled colleagues, "No, I go too far.  I did not intend to
use language so strong."  An amazed correspondent for Baltimore's Patriot
noted, "Mr. Calhoun spoke under a degree of excitement never before witnessed
in a parliamentary body.  His whole frame was agitated."

     When another senator hastily assured Calhoun that the government would
appeal to South Carolina's sense of justice and patriotism, Calhoun retorted,
"I am sorry that South Carolina cannot appeal to the sense of justice of the
General Government."  When several senators called him to order, Calhoun again
"begged pardon for the warmth with which he had expressed himself."  But he
could never take back his words.  The stage was set for another memorable
debate in the Senate, and, this time, the principals would be, not Hayne
acting as a surrogate for the silent vice president, but the former vice
president himself up against Daniel Webster.

     That Daniel Webster should represent the administration in this dramatic
confrontation had a delicious irony for the swarthy New Englander.  Almost
simultaneously, he was battling Jackson on the bank issue.  Webster and
Jackson had not even been on speaking terms for more than a year, but astute
senators were aware that Webster was being wooed to take up the
administration's part on this issue.  Senator Tyler of Virginia, a Calhoun
supporter, wrote home in January, "I dined at the Palace [White House] . . . a
few days since and found Mr. W. there in all his glory."

     The great debate began in mid-February 1833.  Calhoun had introduced
three resolutions which stated that the United States existed by virtue of a
constitutional compact through which each state retained its sovereignty and
could judge for itself whether or not the laws of the United States should
apply in its case.  The resolutions also included a specific denial that the
people of the United States were or had ever been "one union."  He set the
stage dramatically for his opening salvo to defend his resolutions and condemn
the Force bill.  Pushing some chairs down to both ends of a long desk which
stood in the front of the chamber, he enclosed himself in a sort of cage where
he could pace up and down as he spoke.  Close observers noted how rapidly he
had aged in the past few months.  His dark eyes were sunken; his short-clipped
hair, brushed back from a broad forehead, was streaked with gray.  To some,
the gaunt figure looked "the arch traitor like Satan in Paradise."  To others,
he was a great patriot with his back against the wall, battling fiercely in
defense of violated liberties.

     Calhoun's speech, which consumed two days, was uncharacteristically
emotional and vindictive.  He attacked the president and his friends.  He
attacked Webster and New England.  He claimed that the Force bill declared war
against South Carolina.  "It decrees a massacre of her citizens . . . .  It
enables him [Jackson] to subject every man in the United States . . . to
martial law . . . and under the penalty of court-martial to compel him to
imbrue his hand in his brother's blood."  All the while, Webster's head was
bent over a paper on which he busily took notes.

     At the end of the first day, in the midst of "the tempest and whirlwind
of his [Calhoun's] oratory," a voice screamed from the gallery, "Mr.
President, I am being squeezed to death!" The almost unbearable tension
snapped and the Senate, except for Calhoun, rocked with laughter and adjourned
until the next day, when Calhoun took up his thread again for another hour
before stopping.

     As soon as Calhoun finished, Webster arose to speak.  He had to pause for
the cheering from the New Englanders in the gallery to subside.  Standing in
the wings were Jackson's intimates, ready to speed down Capitol Hill to the
White House with news of the confrontation.  Webster's speech was essentially
a replay of his part in the Hayne debate.  It was late in the evening when he
concluded his masterful argument on the proposition that "the Constitution is
not a compact between sovereign States."  Brushing aside personalities,
scarcely referring to any speech made during the debate, he stuck to his
subject and spoke earnestly, without passion.

     Long before Webster finished, the lights had been lit in the chamber
where the crowd remained densely packed.  With his conclusion, the galleries
rose and cheered.  Outraged, Senator George Poindexter of Mississippi demanded
an immediate adjournment.  The victory was Webster's.  The president was
delighted.  Jackson wrote to a friend that "Calhoun was in a state of
dementation - his speech was a perfect failure; and Mr. Webster handled him
like a child."

     On February 24, the Force bill came to a vote.  With the beginning of the
calling of the roll, Calhoun and all the enemies of the measure, with the
single exception of John Tyler, arose and filed from the Senate chamber.  A
few moments earlier, Clay had left the chamber on an unknown errand.  The
Force bill passed 32 to 1; the navy was Tyler's.

     Troops stood ready to march into South Carolina to wrest the federal
revenues from their coffers, but all sides hoped that there was still time for
an eleventh-hour compromise.  At the same time the Force bill was moving
through Congress, a compromise tariff bill was keeping pace with it.
Administration supporters had introduced a measure for the immediate lowering
of the tariff.  Neither Henry Clay nor Calhoun wanted to see this bill pass,
for it would permit Jackson and Van Buren to take credit for settling - and
winning - the issue.  Instead, Clay formulated his own compromise tariff bill,
and Calhoun reluctantly agreed to support it.

     Clay introduced his modified tariff bill on February 13, 1833, declaring,
"I have ambition, the ambition of being the humble instrument in the hands of
Providence to reconcile a divided people."  As the "humble instrument" sat
down, Calhoun arose and stiffly announced his support.  The galleries
thundered with applause.  By March 1, the measure had passed both houses of
Congress.  The new tariff bill and the Force bill were both signed into law by
Jackson on March 2, the last day of the Twenty-second Congress.

     The nullification crisis was finally over.  South Carolina suspended the
nullification ordinance after the new tariff passed.  Both sides claimed
victory.  What lessons had the three giants of the Senate learned from the
experience?  Calhoun, sullen and bitter, now knew that no state standing by
itself could successfully carry out the doctrine of nullification.  The South
would have to unite if it was to stand at all.  Webster was frustrated.  He
had supplied the brilliant arguments, but Jackson was getting most of the
credit for routing the Nullifiers.  And Clay had turned the crisis to his
advantage, when, after staying out of it until the very end, he had negotiated
a genuine compromise and bolstered his sagging political stock.

     Even while the burning issue of nullification was before the Congress,
the drama of another major dilemma continued to grow apace.  This was the
issue of the Second Bank of the United States.  The question of the bank was
very complicated and, at the end of the Twenty-second Congress, it still hung
fire.  But since it affected the Senate and the election of 1832, I intend to
touch on it here briefly before I close.

     The issue between the president and his opponents in Congress was the
renewing of the Second Bank of the United States whose existing, twenty-year
charter was due to expire in 1836.  In his first message to Congress, in
December 1829, Jackson had revealed his basic antagonism to the bank and
suggested an investigation into its dealings.  Along with his supporters in
the House and Senate, most notably Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson viewed the bank
as a national monster, established unconstitutionally and run privately and in
a dictatorial fashion by its president, the aristocratic Nicholas Biddle of
Philadelphia.  The bank existed, claimed Benton and others, for the benefit of
the privileged commercial interests of the Northeast to the detriment of the
government and the agrarian interests of the South and West.

     To many others, however, Clay and Webster among the leaders, the memory
of the country's near-fiscal collapse during the War of 1812, after the demise
of the First Bank of the United States, had not faded.  To them, the bank was
the source of the nation's stability, and, since this group still held a slim
majority in both houses, Congress paid little attention to Jackson's call for
an investigation.  Jackson, however, meant business and, in his next annual
address to Congress in 1830, recommended that the Second Bank of the United
States be replaced with a new government bank that would be a branch of the
treasury.

     Thomas Hart Benton took up the president's cause in the Senate.  On
February 2, 1831, he tried to introduce a resolution against recharter of the
bank.  Despite a fiery speech that lasted several hours, Benton was denied
permission even to present his resolution.  His words were not wasted,
however; pro-Jackson presses circulated his speech widely, and the anti-bank
argument began to make an impact on the electorate.  Meanwhile, Clay, fighting
mad over the Maysville Road veto, returned to the Senate to lead the fight for
the bank and to give Benton a run for his money.

     Confident of a majority in the current Congress and wary of increased
Jackson strength in the next, supporters of the bank decided to apply at once
- four years early - for a renewal of the charter.  The move led to frantic
scrambling in both the House and Senate.  In the House, a freshman
representative and pro-Jackson man from Georgia, Augustin Clayton, recited a
list of fifteen charges against the bank.  These charges had been written down
for him by Senator Benton on a small piece of paper that Clayton kept wrapped
around his finger to refresh his memory as he spoke.  Benton had his own
problems in the Senate, Isaac Bassett tells us:

While Mr. Benton was making some remarks on the United States Bank bill, an
incident occurred in the Senate Chamber.  A piece of iron, part of a
horseshoe, was thrown from the gallery into the body of the Chamber, passing
near the head of Senator Benton.  The person who threw, hastily withdrew from
the gallery but was followed and apprehended by Mr. Shackford, the Doorkeeper.
After being detained a little while, he was released by order of the Vice
President.  He was found to be deranged.

     Even crib sheets could not save the anti-bank forces.  On June 11, 1832,
the Senate voted 28 to 20 for recharter; on July 3, the House concurred, 107
to 86.  For seven days, it looked as if the Clay forces had made a shrewd,
early move.  But, on July 10, the House and Senate received Jackson's stinging
veto of the bank recharter.

     Clay and Benton faced off in the chamber that very hot July - no air
conditioning in those days - to debate the president's veto.  Benton rose to
defend the president and, in the course of his harangue, charged that Clay's
attack wanted courtesy and decorum.  Clay took the remarks personally and
retorted savagely, pointedly telling Benton that when "some senators" rose to
speak, "the galleries are quickly emptied, with whatever else the Senate
chamber may then be filled."  The Kentuckian professed himself at a loss to
determine which of the Missourian's opinions of Jackson one was to take for
the correct one and made caustic allusion to the fight between Jackson and the
Benton brothers that had taken place years before.  Certainly, Clay sneered,
"I never complained of the President beating a brother of mine after he was
prostrated and lying apparently lifeless."  Benton flung back taunt for taunt.
Aspersion brought aspersion until, somewhat belatedly, the chair called for
order.

     Finally, the question was put on the passage of the bank bill.  By a vote
of 22 for and 19 against, the Senate failed to override the veto.  It was
Friday, July 13, 1832, and a black day for Henry Clay.

     Jackson viewed his overwhelming presidential election victory over Clay
in the fall of 1832 as a mandate to proceed against the bank.  In September
1833, he announced that the government would begin removing its deposits from
the bank and placing them in selected state banks.  Chastened but not undone,
Biddle, meanwhile, began a campaign of restricting loans and tightening credit
to create financial distress and arouse protests that would force the
president to change his policy.

     When the new Congress convened in December 1833, Webster, Clay, and
Calhoun were at the forefront of the battle to save the bank.  Day after day,
they held up important Senate business to read "distress memorials."  In time,
delegations of hard-pressed businessmen began to show up to lobby their
senators and representatives.  Webster and the other opponents of the
administration welcomed them - Webster even once ushering a group of thirty
men onto the floor of the Senate, placing them in various spots around the
chamber while he read aloud their petition.

     Thus, it was clear at the opening of the Twenty-third Congress that the
bank issue would not go away; indeed, it would continue to escalate until it
resulted in the first and only Senate censure of a president.  The dramatic
story of the censure of Andrew Jackson is so compelling that I would like to
save it for my next statement on the history of the Senate.  The years we have
just reviewed, 1829 through 1833, which included the Webster-Hayne debates,
the rejection of Van Buren, the nullification crisis, and the opening salvos
of the bank war, have been far busy enough for now.