urse made easier by Clay's "compromise
tariff" of 1833, gradually reducing duties for the next ten years, and
enlarging the free list. From all duties of over twenty per cent. by the
act of 1832, one-tenth of the excess was to be stricken off on September
30, 1835, and another tenth every other year till 1841. Then one-half
the excess remaining was to fall, and in 1842 the rest, so that the end
of the last named year should find no duty over twenty per cent.

This episode, threatening as it was for a time, drew in its train
results the most happy, revealing with unprecedented vividness to most,
both the original nature of the Constitution as not a compact, and also
the might which national sentiment had attained since the War of 1812.
The doctrine of state rights was seen to have gradually lost, over the
greater part of the country, all its old vitality. Nearly every State
Legislature condemned the South Carolina pretensions, Democrats as
hearty in this as Whigs. Jackson's proclamation against them--impressive
and unanswerable--ran thus: "The Constitution of the United States
forms a government, not a league; and whether it be formed by compact
between the States, or in any other manner, its character is the same
. . . . I consider the power to annul a law of the United States
incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by
the letter of the Constitution, and destructive of the great object for
which it was formed. . . . Our Constitution does not contain the
absurdity of giving power to make laws, and another power to resist
them. To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union is to
say that the United States are not a nation."

[Illustration: Small room with a desk, fireplace, and bookshelf.]
Calhoun's Library and Office.

The congressional debates which the nullification question evoked, among
the ablest in our parliamentary history, held the like high national
tenor. Calhoun's idea, though advocated by him with consummate skill,
was shown to be wholly chimerical. The doughty South Carolinian, from
this moment a waning force in American politics, was supported by Hayne
almost alone, the arguments of both melting into air before Webster's
masterful handling of constitutional history and law. Not questioning
the right of revolution, admitting the general government to be one of
"strictly limited," even of "enumerated, specified, and particularized
powers," the Massachusetts or