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Rh Calhoun in 1830, and he had been led to do so more easily because of the appearance of the doctrine of (q.v.), which was generally attributed, correctly enough, to the authorship of Calhoun. Asserting, as the Republican party of 1798 had done, the sovereign powers of each state, Calhoun held that, as a means of avoiding secession and violent struggle upon every occasion of the passage of an act of Congress which should seem unconstitutional to any state, the state might properly suspend or

“nullify” the operation of the law within its jurisdiction, in order to protect its citizens against oppression. The passage of the Tariff Act of 1832, which organized and systematized the protective system, forced the Calhoun party into action. A state convention in (q.v.) on the 24th of November 1832 declared the Tariff Act null, and made ready to enforce the declaration.

173. But the time was past when the power of a single state could withdraw it from the Union. The president issued a proclamation, warning the people of South Carolina against any attempt to carry out the ordinance of nullification; he ordered a naval force to take possession of Charleston harbour to collect the duties under the act; he called upon Congress for additional executive powers, and Congress passed what nullifiers called the “bloody bill,” putting the land and naval forces at the disposal of the president for the collection of duties against “unlawful combinations”; and he is said to have announced, privately and profanely, his intention of making Calhoun the first victim of any open conflict. Affairs looked so threatening that an unofficial meeting of “leading nullifiers” agreed to suspend the operation of the ordinance until Congress should adjourn; whence it derived the right to suspend has never been stated.

174. The president had already asked Congress to reduce the duties; and many Democratic members of Congress, who had

yielded to the popular clamour for protection, were very glad to use “the crisis” as an excuse for now voting against it. A compromise Tariff Act, scaling down all duties over 20% by one-tenth of the excess every two years until 1842, when the remaining excess over 20% should be dropped, was introduced by Clay and became law. Calhoun and his followers claimed this as all that the nullification ordinance had aimed at; and the ordinance was formally repealed. But nullification had received its death-blow; even those Southern leaders who maintained the right of secession refused to recognize the right of a state to remain in the Union while nullifying its laws; and, when protection was reintroduced by the tariff of 1842, nullification was hardly thought of.

175. All the internal conditions of the United States were completely altered by the introduction of railways. For twenty

years past the Americans had been pushing in every direction which offered a hope of the means of reconciling vast territory with enormous population. Stephenson's invention of the locomotive came just in time, and Jackson's two terms of office marked the outburst of modern American life. The miles of railway were 23 in 1830, 1098 in 1835, some 2800 in 1840, and thereafter they about doubled every five years until 1860.

176. A railway map of 1840 shows a fragmentary system, designed mainly to fill the gaps left by the means of communication

in use in 1830. One or two short lines run back into the country from Savannah and Charleston; another runs north along the coast from Wilmington to Baltimore; several lines connect New York with Washington and other points; and short lines elsewhere mark the openings which needed to be filled at once—a number in New England and the Middle states, three in Ohio and Michigan, and three in Louisiana. Year after year new inventions came in to increase

and aid this development. The anthracite coal of the Middle states had been known since 1790, but no means had been devised to put the refractory agent to work. It was now successfully applied to railways (1836),

and to the manufacture of iron (1837). Hitherto wood had been the best fuel for iron-making; now the states which relied on wood were driven out of competition,

and production was restricted to the states in which nature had placed coal alongside of iron. Steam navigation across

the Atlantic was established in 1838. The telegraph came next, S. F. B. Morse's line being erected in 1844. The spread of the railway system brought with it, as a natural development, the rise of the American system of express companies, whose first phases of individual enterprise appeared in 1839. No similar period in American history is so extraordinary for material development as the decade 1830-1840. At its beginning the country was an overgrown type of colonial life; at its end American life had been shifted to entirely new lines, which it has since followed. Modern American history had burst in with the explosiveness of an Arctic summer.

177. The steamboat had aided Western development, but the railway aided it far more. Cities and states grew as if the

oxygen of their surroundings had been suddenly increased. The steamboat influenced the railway, and the railway gave the steamboat new powers. Vacant places in the states east of the Mississippi were filling up; the long lines of emigrant waggons gave way to the new and better methods of transport; and new grades of land were made accessible. Chicago was but a frontier fort in 1832; within a half-dozen years it was a flourishing town, with eight steamers connecting it with Buffalo, and dawning ideas of its future development of railway connexions. The maps change from decade to decade, as mapmakers hasten to insert new

cities which have sprung up. Two new states, Arkansas and Michigan, were admitted (1836 and 1837). The population of Ohio grew from 900,000 to 1,500,000, that of Michigan from 32,000 to 212,000, and that of the country from 13,000,000 to 17,000,000, between 1830 and 1840.

178. With the change of material surroundings and possibilities came a steady amelioration of social conditions and a

development of social ideals. Such features of the past as imprisonment for debt and the cruel indifference of old methods of dealing with crime began to disappear; the time was past when a state could use an abandoned copper mine as its state prison, as Connecticut had formerly done (see, Connecticut). The domestic use of gas and anthracite coal, the introduction of expensive aqueducts for pure water, and the changing life of the people forced changes in the interior and exterior of American dwellings. Wood was still the common building material; imitations of Greek architecture still retained their vogue; but the interiors were models of comfort in comparison with the houses even of 1810. In the “new” regions this was not yet the case, and here social restraints were still so few that society seemed to be reduced almost to its primitive elements. Western steamers reeked with gambling, swindling, duelling and every variety of vice. Public law was almost suspended in some regions; and organized associations of counterfeiters and horse-thieves terrorized whole sections of country. But this state of affairs was altogether temporary, as well as limited in its area; the older and more densely settled states had been well prepared for the change and had never lost command of the social forces, and the process of settling down went on, even in the newer states, with far more rapidity than could reasonably have been expected. Those who took part in the movements of population in 1830-1840 had been trained under the rigid forms of the previous American life; and these soon re-asserted themselves. The rebound was over before 1847, and the Western states were then as well prepared to receive and digest the great immigration which followed as the older states would have been in 1830.

179. A distinct American literature dates from this period. Most of the publications in the United States were still cheap

reprints of foreign works; but native productions no longer followed foreign models with servility. Between 1830 and 1840 Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Bancroft and Prescott joined the advance-guard of American writers—Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Drake,