Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 40.djvu/21

Rh So ended the matter for the time. The sword was threatened but not drawn, and South Carolina's peaceable remedy for an oppressed sectional minority prevailed. And mark this: State nullification or State veto, as here preached by Hayne and Calhoun and practiced by their native State, was a qualified nullification only, a fact too often entirely overlooked; an interposition of the State's sovereignty pending an appeal to a three-fourths decision of the confederated States in general convention. It was, in effect, a federal referendum. (b) It was strictly conservative of true constitutional principles. For, let us repeat, a prime object of the federal constitution was the protection of the rights of the minority.

This struggle of the early 'thirties of the nineteenth century was, as Calhoun averred at the time, (28) a contest between power, or the North, and liberty, or the South. Calhoun drew a close parallel between that contest and that other of 1776, with Northern unjust taxation of the South in 1833 bearing a marked analogy to the British unjust taxation of the American colonies in 1776.

That both of these contentions of South Carolina (i. e., qualified nullification, with secession in reserve) were sound, historically and constitutionally sound, we have just seen. That the contrary contention of Webster was unsound, unconstitutional and unhistorical, must necessarily follow. Daniel Webster has been called the "Expounder of the Constitution." (29) I respectfully submit that great "Confounder of the Constitution" would be a more fitting title. His admirer and biographer, and a successor to him in the federal Senate from Massachusetts, Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge, says of Webster's argument here, (30) "The weak places in his armor were historical in their nature." Of Webster on a somewhat similar occasion the same writer says, (31) "But the speech is strongly partisan and exhibits the disposition of an advocate to fit the constitution to his particular case." Likewise, Webster's apologist, von Holst, discussing this very debate with Calhoun, sadly confesses (32) that, "To his and his country's harm, the