eight. On February 25th, on motion of Letcher, the bill of Verplanck, then pending in the House, was stricken out, and Clay's bill substituted for it. The bill, on the next day, passed the House by a vote of one hundred and nineteen against eighty-five.

The House then took up the Senate bill. Already the Judiciary Committee of that body had, on February 8th, denounced the message of President Jackson, and declared that the use of force towards South Carolina would be unjust and impolitic from every point of view. The committee did not pass upon the question of right, but they evidently believed that the Federal Government had no such right. The House did not carry out the views of the committee, but after waiting to see the fate of the Clay tariff bill, in the Senate, they yielded assent to the Senate force bill. When the force bill came up in the House, McDuffie asked what practical aim the bill now had, and Foster asked any member to rise in his seat who imagined any further resistence by South Carolina possible after every Senator and Representative from that State had voted for the tariff bill. Notwithstanding these objections, the passage of the two bills was tacitly regarded as a mutual concession, and the House ordered the force bill to a third reading, by a vote of one hundred and twenty-six to thirty-four. The Senate thereupon passed the tariff bill by a vote of twenty-nine to sixteen. The President signed both bills on the 2d of March, and on March 16th, South Carolina repealed the ordinance of nullification.

The people of the South saw in this settlement a victory for South Carolina. The exhibition of resistance to a Federal law by a single State had resulted

in a surrender by the Federal Government of the law in question. It is true that the passage of the force act was an assertion by the United States of the principles of the proclamation --but that assertion was weakened by a denial on the part of Jackson's intimate advisers of the apparent meaning of the proclamation, and was destroyed several years later by the adoption of substantially the very resolutions with which Calhoun had met and defied that proclamation.

A portion of Jackson's adherents objected to his course, because they saw in his proclamation the consolidation ideas of the old Federalists. The Congressional Globe met the reproaches of this faction with a long "authorized" article in which the President let it be stated that he recognized not only in the States but in the State Governments, the rights claimed in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. The article said:

"Its [the proclamation's] doctrines, if construed in "the sense they were intended, and carried out, incul"cate * that in the case of the violation of the "Constitution of the United States and the usurpation "of the powers not granted by it on the part of the "functionaries of the General Government, the State

Governments have the right to interpose and arrest "the evil, upon the principles which were set forth in "the Virginia resolutions of 798, against the alien "and sedition acts; and finally that in extreme cases of oppression (every mode of constitutional redress having been sought in vain) the right resides with the "people of the several States to organize resistance against such oppression."

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The editor of the Globe, Francis P. Blair, who was

authorized to explain away the generally understood meaning of the proclamation, proceeded in this article to say that during the debate on Foote's resolutions between Hayne and Webster, and while he was editor of a journal in Kentucky, he received from the Post Master General the speech delivered by Mr. Livingston, accompanied by a letter saying that the views contained in it were sanctioned by the President, and might be considered as exhibiting the light in which his administration considered the subject under debate. The following extracts from that speech will serve to illustrate the principles upon which the President then took his stand, and to explain the more condensed view given of them in his proclamation :

"It is a compact by which the people of each State "have consented to take from their own Legislatures "some of the powers they had conferred upon them, "and to transfer them, with other enumerated powers, "to the Government of the United States, created by "that compact."

"Yet I am far from thinking that this [Supreme] "Court is created an umpire to judge between the "General and State Governments."

"In an extreme case

* the injured State "would have a right at once to declare that it would no "longer be bound by a compact which had been thus grossly violated."

JOHN TYLER in his memoir of Roger B. Taney, say's that when the proclamation was presented to President Jackson, he disapproved the principles and doctrines contained in it. But as the conclusion suited him, he determined to issue it at once, without waiting to correct the erroneous doctrines contained in it.

The South did not believe Jackson entertained the principles of his proclamation. It was against his views and conduct in the Creek controversy. It was antagonistic to the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, which he professed to endorse. It ran counter to the above expressed views of Livingston, who is said to have written the proclamation. They attributed his course to purely personal hostility against Calhoun, and they attributed the concession of the United States on the Tariff question as a recognition of the correctness of the views of South Carolina. The condition of the public faith as to the umpire in disputes between the States and the United States was well expressed by Clay in his letter of January 17th, to Brooks: "As "to politics we have no past, no future. After forty

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years of existence under the present Constitution, "what single principle is fixed?

Internal improvements? No.

The bank? No.

The tariff? No.

"Who is to interpret the Constitution? We are as "much afloat at sea as the day when the Constitution "went into operation."

Not only did the actual victory rest with South Carolina in this controversy, but the intellectual and moral victory rested with the champion of South Carolina. On January 22d, 1833, CALHOUN introduced into the Senate his celebrated series of resolutions which gave rise to the remarkable debate between himself and WEBSTER. The first resolution against which the thunders of Webster were directed, reads as follows:

"Resolved, That the people of the several States comprising these United States, are united as parties "to a constitutional compact, to which the people of each "State acceded as a separate sovereign community, each

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binding itself by its own particular ratification; and "that the Union of which the said compact is the "bond, is a Union between the States ratifying the "same."

From this compact the other resolutions deduced the doctrine of the resolutions of '98, that in this case as in all other cases of compact among sovereign parties, without any common judge, each has an equal right to judge for itself as well of the infraction as of the mode and measure of redress. These resolutions of CALHOUN were aimed directly at the President's proclamation. Webster so accepted and so treated them. He argued that "the Constitution means a Government, and not "a compact." "Not a Constitutional compact but a "Government." "If compact, it rests on plighted faith, and the mode of redress would be to declare the "whole void." "States may secede, if a league or

"compact."

Seizing upon this admission of Webster, that a State may secede if the Constitution is a compact, Calhoun in his response called attention to the language used by Massachusetts in ratifying the Constitution. She speaks of it as a "solemn compact." He called attention to Webster's own language in his great speech three years before, upon the Foote resolutions, when he alluded to "accusations which impute to us a disposition to evade "the Constitutional compact." So complete was Calhoun's argument that Webster never offered a rejoinder. ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS, in his "War between the "States," speaks of it as "a crusher, an extinguisher, an annihilator," and says-" This speech of his was "not answered then, it has not been answered since, "and in my judgment never will be, or can be answered

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