Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/281

 CHAPTER VIII

NULLIFICATION SUSPENDED (1833)

Congress was in session while South Carolina was making her hostile preparations. The ordinance of nullification, together with the acts of the legislature providing the means for carrying it into force, was to become effective on February 1, 1833, unless, of course. Congress before that date repealed the protective features of the tariff. Everybody eagerly watched for indications of such action.

William Drayton carefully sounded the members of Congress and found that with a few exceptions from the South and West they were opposed to nullification as "an absurd and mischievous paradox." Several members of the Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia delegations, with some few from other states, contended for the right of peaceable secession by a sovereign state, but a large majority of Congress regarded the right as "merely a revolutionary one, the practical exercise of which the United States might and ought to suppress &hellip; by physical