with slavery. It concerned Free Trade, a very respectable issue, but so
clearly a minor issue that to break up a great country upon it would have
gone beyond the limit of solemn frivolity, and Calhoun must be taken to
have been forging an implement with which his own section of the States
could claim and extort concessions from the Union. A protective tariff
had been passed in 1828. The Southern States, which would have to pay
the protective duties but did not profit by them, disliked it. Calhoun
and others took the intelligible but too refined point, that the powers
of Congress under the Constitution authorised a tariff for revenue but
not a tariff for a protective purpose. Every State, Calhoun declared,
must have the Constitutional right to protect itself against an Act of
Congress which it deemed unconstitutional. Let such a State, in special
Convention, "nullify" the Act of Congress. Let Congress then, unless it
compromised the matter, submit its Act to the people in the form of an
Amendment to the Constitution. It would then require a three-fourths
majority of all the States to pass the obnoxious Act. Last but not
least, if the Act was passed, the protesting State had, Calhoun claimed,
the right to secede from the Union.

Controversy over this tariff raged for fully four years, and had a
memorable issue. In the course of 1830 the doctrine of "nullification"
and "secession" was discussed in the Senate, and the view of Calhoun was
expounded by one Senator Hayne. Webster answered him in a speech which
he meant should become a popular classic, and which did become so. He
set forth his own doctrine of the Union and appealed to national against
State loyalty in the most influential oration that was perhaps ever made.
"His utterance," writes President Wilson, "sent a thrill through all the
East and North which was unmistakably a thrill of triumph. Men were glad
because of what he had said. He had touched the national
self-consciousness, awakened it, and pleased it with a morning vision of