he President's toast. It was a declaration of war.

The Nullifiers had quite miscalculated Jackson's attitude. He was a
Southerner by birth, but a frontiersman by upbringing, and all the
formative influences of his youth were of the West. It has been noted
how strongly the feeling of the West made for the new unity, and in no
Westerner was the national passion stronger than in Jackson. In 1814 he
had told Monroe that he would have had the leaders of the Hartford
Convention hanged, and he applied the same measure to Southern as to
Northern sectionalism. To the summoning of the Nullifying Convention in
South Carolina, he replied by a message to Congress asking for powers to
coerce the recalcitrant State. He further told his Cabinet that if
Congress refused him the powers he thought necessary he should have no
hesitation in assuming them. He would call for volunteers to maintain
the Union, and would soon have a force at his disposal that should
invade South Carolina, disperse the State forces, arrest the leading
Nullifiers and bring them to trial before the Federal Courts.

If the energy of Jackson was a menace to South Carolina, it was a grave
embarrassment to the party regularly opposed to him in Congress and
elsewhere. That this party could make common cause with the Nullifiers
seemed impossible. The whole policy of high Protection against which
South Carolina had revolted was Clay's. Adams had signed the Tariff of
Administrations. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, the leading orator of
the party and the greatest forensic speaker that America has produced,
had at one time been a Free Trader. But he was deeply committed against
the Nullifiers, and had denounced the separatist doctrines which found
favour in South Carolina in a speech the fine peroration of which
American schoolboys still learn by heart. Webster, indeed, whether from
shame or from conviction, separated himself to some extent from his
associates and gave strenuous support to the "Force Bill" which the
President had demanded.

But Clay was determined that Jackson should not have the added power and
prestige which would result from the suppression of Nullification by the
strong hand of the Executive. His own bias was in favour of a strong and
unified Federal authority, but he would have made Congress that
authority rather than the President--a policy even less favourable than
Jackson's to State Rights, but more favourable to the Parliamentarianism
in which