r these circumstances Senator Foote, of Connecticut,
voicing the fears of his section, introduced December 29, 1829, his
famous resolution which contemplated the discontinuance of the federal
land sales and the substantial curbing of the growing West. It was a
blow at Benton and Jackson which was at once accepted by all the West as
a challenge. The representatives of all three sections were deeply
interested. Benton took the lead in the discussion which followed, and
he urged once more his preemption and graduation bills. In the former
he would guarantee the prior claims of squatters on lands they had
already unlawfully taken up; in the latter he meant to regulate the
price of public lands according to quality and location. In both the
object was to make the way of the pioneer easy; and the West supported
him solidly. Whether the South would keep its tacit pledges in the face
of Jackson's non-committal attitude on the tariff was the query of all
until Hayne, an intimate friend of Calhoun and the recognized spokesman
of his section, arose on January 19, 1830, and took the strongest ground
on behalf of Benton and the West, and attacked the East for its
long-continued resistance to westward expansion. The next day Webster
made reply, and the debate between the two representative men continued
to the end of the month. The importance to the present-day reader of
this discussion consists in the revelation of the directly opposing and
hostile attitudes of South and East on the great problems then before
the country: (1) the South would support the West in its policy of easy
lands and rapid development; the East would resist that policy; (2) the
East would appeal to the nationalist sentiment of the interior and the
West on behalf of its program of protection to industry, while the South
would resist that program even to the extent of declaring national
tariff laws null and void. Hayne and Benton showed in their speeches the
substantial solidarity of the alliance of South and West. Webster
undertook to break that alliance by his powerful appeal to the feelings
of Western men who loved the Union, which the New Englander sought to
show to be in especial danger. What was really on trial was the American
system, the Tariff of 1828. It was a serious national crisis, as Calhoun
wrote in May following: "The times are perilous beyond any that I have
ever witnessed; all the great interests of the country are coming into
conflict." The prot