by Jon Meacham
A few days after Christmas, Connecticut senator Samuel Foot put forward a resolution to limit the sale of public lands in the western part of the country, thus checking expansion and settlement—with the added benefit, Western senators noted, of keeping the manufacturers of New England well stocked with cheap labor.
Foot’s resolution was the occasion for what became one of the most significant and wide-ranging interludes in American legislative history. From Tuesday, December 29, 1829, the day Foot introduced his resolution, to Friday, May 21, 1830, when Thomas Hart Benton brought the march of oratory to a close, nearly half of the nation’s senators entered the fray, delivering a total of sixty-five speeches. The debate, Senator Levi Woodbury said, “seems to have metamorphosed the Senate, not only into a committee of the whole on the state of the Union, but on the state of the Union in all time past, present, and to come.” Slavery, states’ rights, partisanship, presidential power—very little escaped the collective attention of Jackson’s Washington in the winter and spring of 1830. Ordinary citizens filled the two galleries; the overflow of ladies sat among the senators as convictions clashed beneath the gaze of John Calhoun, who presided from a dais flanked by four gray marble columns on each side and capped by a gilded eagle and shield. Lewis kept tabs on the speeches, heading out of the Capitol and down Pennsylvania Avenue to brief Jackson at the White House.
The debate began on Monday, January 18, when Thomas Hart Benton denounced Foot’s resolution as an unfair attack on the West. Representing Missouri’s view—the less expensive the public lands, the better, for then people, and with them power, would flow across the continent—Benton argued that a measure like Foot’s was dangerous, for such legislation would benefit one region at the enormous expense of another. And if the national government was going to target the public lands today, Benton said on the floor, then every part of the country could be at risk in due time: “The whole country may be alarmed, agitated, and enraged, with mischievous inquiries; the South about its slaves and Indians; the West about its lands; the Northeast on the subject of its fisheries, its navigation, its light-houses, and its manufactories.”
Hearing the remark about the South and the slaves, Hayne sensed an opening to lay out a states’ rights manifesto that, if triumphant, could protect slavery.
Handsome and appealing, Hayne had been shaped by the milieu of Charleston, where he had been educated, and the temper of the time in the city was sectional, even parochial. “Yankees were never in great credit here—even their consummate impudence could not gain them admission into society—but now they are in worse odor than ever,” Alexander Garden, a Revolutionary War hero in South Carolina, wrote to Charlestonian Charles Manigault in 1828. Hayne shared many of these sentiments. “Viewing the United States as one country, the people of the South might almost be considered as strangers in the land of their fathers,” Hayne said, and he warned that the tariff was producing “a spirit of jealousy and distrust.” And the tariff, of course, was prelude to abolition in the minds of many Southerners.
Hearing Benton on the eighteenth, Hayne decided to speak on the nineteenth. That day, Daniel Webster was a floor below in the Capitol, in the Supreme Court chamber arguing a case before Chief Justice Marshall. His work there done, Webster, who had no particular business in mind, walked upstairs from the usually chilly court to the Senate with, he said, “my court papers under my arm, just to see what was passing.” Amid a long address, in the context of discussing the merits of a national treasury—states’ rights advocates feared that concentrated federal funds would lead to corruption—Hayne painted an emotional portrait of the South under the tariff: “The fruits of our labor are drawn from us to enrich other and more favored sections of the Union.… The rank grass grows in our streets; our very fields are scathed by the hand of injustice and oppression.”
The answer, Hayne said, was local, not central, control. “Sir, I am one of those who believe that the very life of our system is the independence of the states, and that there is no evil more to be deprecated than the consolidation of this Government. It is only by a strict adherence to the limitations imposed by the constitution on the Federal Government that this system works well, and can answer the great ends for which it was instituted.”
LISTENING, WEBSTER GREW grim. “I did not like it,” he said. In the same way that South Carolina saw New England’s hand behind all its troubles, New England was still absorbing Thomas Cooper’s July 1827 declaration that it was time to “calculate the value of the Union.”
On this windy winter Tuesday, Webster thought of Cooper’s threats as he heard Hayne’s words. Rising the next day, Webster took the debate to a more momentous plane: that of the nature of the Union itself. That had not been Hayne’s chief point, but just as Hayne had seen an opportunity in Benton’s words, so Webster saw a chance in Hayne’s.
Alluding to the South Carolina hotheads, Webster said: “They significantly declare that it is time to calculate the value of the Union; and their aim seems to be to enumerate, and to magnify, all the evils, real and imaginary, which the Government under the Union produces. The tendency of all these ideas and sentiments is obviously to bring the Union into discussion as a mere question of present and temporary expediency; nothing more than a mere matter of profit and loss.”
In a passage evoking the prospect of a tragic civil war, Webster said: “I am a Unionist.… I would strengthen the ties that hold us together. Far, indeed, in my wishes, very far distant be the day, when our associated and fraternal stripes shall be severed asunder, and when that happy constellation under which we have risen to so much renown, shall be broken up, and be seen sinking, star after star, into obscurity and night!”
Five days later, Hayne replied to Webster, whose speech had successfully baited his foe into the larger discussion. Defending slavery, laying out the argument for nullification, singing hymns to the glory of his native state, Hayne was articulating Calhoun’s worldview, and there were reports that the vice president went so far as to pass notes down to his colleague from South Carolina.
The exchanges as the debate went forward were substantive and sincere, and both Hayne and Webster acquitted themselves well. An admiring nineteenth-century Webster biographer said that Hayne “was deficient in that weight and impressiveness which alone belong to men of greater caliber; though, while speaking, few men could exceed him in the hold with which his fluent and graceful declamation retained the attention and thrilled the feeling of an audience.”
For his part, Webster projected a palpable intensity. “His dark and deeply-set eyes seemed to be kindled by the glowing ardor of thought, and glittered beneath his heavy brows like two fiery orbs gleaming at night from the darkness of a sepulcher,” a biographer wrote.
Images of war were on everyone’s minds. “It is a kind of moral gladiatorship in which characters are torn to pieces, and arrows, yes, poisoned arrows, which tho’ not seen are deeply felt, are hurled by the combatants against each other,” Mrs. Smith said. “The Senate chamber is the present arena and never were the amphitheatres of Rome more crowded by the highest ranks of both sexes.”
The climax of the battle came on January 27, a cold Wednesday. With Donelson and Lewis in the Capitol, ready to take word back to Jackson down Pennsylvania Avenue, Webster, dressed in a Revolutionary blue coat with a white cravat, brought his most important speech to a close. He stood to Calhoun’s left, and when his eyes wandered upward they would rest on a glorious Rembrandt Peale portrait of Washington captioned PATRIAE PATER, a visual icon of the verbal creed Webster was enunciating in the crimson-draped chamber. Addressing the presiding officer, as was customary, Webster offered words that became one of the noblest passages in the American canon:
I have not allowed myself, sir, to look beyond the Union, to see what might lie hidden in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly weighed the chances of preserving liberty, when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang over the prec
ipice of disunion, to see whether, with my short sight, I can fathom the depth of the abyss below; nor could I regard him as a safe counselor in the affairs of this Government, whose thoughts should be mainly bent on considering, not how the Union should be best preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the People when it shall be broken up and destroyed. While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that, in my day, at least, that curtain may not rise. God grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind. 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 luster, 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 after-wards—but every where, 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!
Webster took his seat, his words hanging in the shocked silence of the chamber. “Mr. Webster,” a colleague said, “I think you had better die now, and rest your fame on that speech.” Hayne disagreed. “You ought not to die,” he said to his noble foe: “A man who can make such speeches as that ought never to die.”
THAT NIGHT AT the White House, in the course of the usual Wednesday levee, Webster was in the East Room. The fireplaces glowed as people thronged around Webster in his hour of glory. Hayne was there, too, and wasted no time in paying his respects once more. Seeing him come into view, Webster said, “How are you this evening, Col. Hayne?” Taking Webster’s hand with a smile, Hayne said, “None the better for you, sir!”
A gentlemanly reply—Hayne was a pleasant man—and he knew rhetorical greatness when he heard it. In a blaze of passionate imagery, Webster had led the Union forces to victory over Hayne’s states’ rights army. “I felt as if everything I had ever seen, or read, or heard, was floating before me in one great panorama,” said Webster, “and I had little else to do than to reach up and cull a thunderbolt, and hurl it at him!”
Jackson had received running reports on the scene in the Senate from Donelson and Lewis. “Been to the Capitol, Major?” Jackson had asked Lewis amid the Webster-Hayne exchange.
“Yes, General.”
“Well, and how is Webster getting on?”
“He is delivering a most powerful speech,” Lewis said. “I am afraid he’s demolishing our friend Hayne.”
Jackson was not surprised. “I expected it,” he said. In Jackson’s view, Webster had right on his side. To the president, the answer to the overarching political question—how to resolve tensions between states and regions—seemed clear enough. Let the people, if aggrieved, decide matters peaceably and democratically. Webster had underscored the role of the judiciary; Jackson tended more, as he had said in his message to Congress, toward broad national elections on the issues. Either route, though, lay within the secure borders of the Union, and did not threaten to lead, as nullification did, into an unknown future of division and weakness.
Daniel Webster of Dartmouth, distinguished member of the Supreme Court bar, legendary writer and orator, was about as unlike Andrew Jackson as anyone could be. Webster disagreed with Jackson on virtually every other major issue, including the role of executive power. Yet these two men from opposite ends of the nation found themselves allied on the country’s most fundamental question. Convinced that the Union should stand strong, with the people at its mystical center, Jackson did not believe any amount of Southern sophistry—as he saw it—could destroy America.
Webster’s achievement in the last week of January 1830 was to add the elements of emotion and imagination to a debate that had been more about law and interpretation. Abstraction was now pitted against patriotism, details against ideals, particulars against the universal. It was the kind of war Andrew Jackson fought well, and he was indebted to Daniel Webster for arming the soldiers of Union with the weapons of light and memory and hope. On the other hand, Calhoun’s forces believed that they, not Jackson and his followers, were battling for the true spirit of the Founders against the usurpations of a power-hungry president.
Webster had redefined—in some ways invented—an idea of perpetual union that appealed to a growing continental power seeking strength at home and respect abroad. For many, allegiance to the Union was now no longer a debatable point. It was a given, or ought to be—and if some failed to salute, then they had to be brought back into line.
Some were beginning to think—and speak, in the heat of the South and in the clubbiness of the Senate—in drastic terms. Calhoun and Hayne’s colleague William Smith, of South Carolina, offered to die for a nation dedicated to states’ rights and darkly suggested that as other nations had risen and fallen, so might America: “Sir … should the cupidity or the madness of the majority in Congress push them on to impose one unconstitutional burden after another, until it can no longer [be] borne, and no other alternative remains, I will then take upon myself the last responsibility of an oppressed People, and adopt the exclamation of the poet, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori; and if the exigencies of my country should ever demand it, I will be ready to shed my blood upon the altars of that country. I am attached to the Union; I wish to see it perpetuated; I wish it may endure through all time. But if the same causes exist in our Government which have overturned other Governments, what right have we to expect an exemption from the fatality of other nations?”
For his own purposes—the protection of slavery and economic relief—Smith was thinking like a European, not an American. Smith’s threat, while cast in gentlemanly terms, had an unmistakable and disturbing meaning. He hoped, he said, that the grievances of the South would be alleviated peaceably—but that if not, “it will then be time for the states to determine what are their rights, and whether they have constitutional powers to secede from the Union.”
There were no half measures left for Calhoun and South Carolina. Something serious—something outside the ordinary course of politics—would have to happen, and seemed ever more likely to happen. On Sunday, March 28, 1830, John W. Taylor, a congressman from New York, paid a call on Adams and told him, “Mr. Calhoun will be the Nullification candidate” in 1832.
THOUGH THE SENATE struggle has come down to us as the Webster-Hayne debate, it was another, now obscure figure, Edward Livingston, who was in some ways even more prophetic about American politics than either of the protagonists. Americans who are uncomfortable with reflexive partisanship and unreflective ideologies can find the intellectual and rhetorical roots of the search for a sensible center in the long-ago words of the gentleman from Louisiana who rose to speak on Tuesday, March 9, 1830. Though a lawyer and a member of a notable family—he was a brother of Robert Livingston, a member of the Continental Congress and Revolutionary War figure who had administered the first oath of office to President Washington before becoming Jefferson’s minister to France—Edward Livingston had known misfortune. Educated at Princeton, he served in the House of Representatives and was mayor of New York before he was forty. He took the fall for a New York financial scandal that bankrupted him and drove him from New York to Louisiana, where he met Jackson and began his climb back to power. In many ways a shy man, Livingston was pressed into the arena by his wife, Louise. Close to Jackson in the way his wife and daughter, Cora, were close to Emily, Livingston had been among the first (in the summer of 1815) to raise the
prospect of a Jackson presidency. Livingston’s legal training and his ambivalent view of power and position—he liked them, but hated angling for them—gave him a nuanced understanding of politics and statecraft.
Entering the debate at a late hour—Webster and Hayne were done, Smith had done his worst, really only Benton of the major figures had more to say—Livingston had the advantage of having heard and studied more than two months of arguments and counterarguments.
Livingston’s Senate speech in March 1830 consumed hour after hour. He opened by taking a satiric poke at the multiplicity of issues that had been aired. What had begun as an argument about public lands had long since set virtually everything of importance to the nation loose in the chamber. “Sir,” Livingston said, addressing the chair, “might not a hearer of our debates for some days past have concluded that … you had said to each of the speakers, ‘Sir, please to rise and speak on the disposition of the public lands; after that, you may talk to the tariff; let us know all you think on the subject of internal improvement; and, before you sit down, discuss the powers of the Senate in relation to appointments, and the right of a State to recede from the Union; and finish by letting us know whether you approve or oppose the measures of the present, or the six preceding administrations.’ ”
But Livingston saw virtue in the discursive debate. “For my own part, I think the discussion may be turned to useful purposes,” he said. “It may, by the interchange of opinion, increase our own information on all the important points which have been examined, while, not being called on for a vote, we may weigh them at leisure, and come to a conclusion, without being influenced by the warmth of debate.” But he also knew that, too often, these points were made with exaggerated invective. Superlative followed superlative. Competitive by nature, the politicians of the Senate each wanted to make their own words live longer than the previous orator’s, their own images linger a greater while.