Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/245

226 Though Virginia had but a few Nullifiers, it was said that she would not "send a man or musket to put down South Carolina" and that a resort to "violent remedies" by the general government might cause her to support South Carolina.

The majority of the Virginia statesmen, however, seem to have become too much interested in the presidential campaign and the distribution of official plums to share more than a modicum of South Carolina's agitation. Moreover, some believed honestly that the menace of the tariff would soon disappear when the sale of the public lands extinguished the national debt and rendered the tariff unnecessary and even impossible.

From Alabama came assurances to Washington that the state was sound on the nullification doctrine, in spite of superficial appearances to the contrary in a recent election of a United States senator. From his own observations Jackson