South Carolina, as early as 1828, began to issue argument and objection to the exercise of what it deemed unwarranted authority by the central government, and by 1832 the theories were formulated on which were*to rest nullifi cation and the attempted secession of later years. The principles set forth by South Caro lina were brilliantly announced by Hayne in the "great debate" with Webster in the Senate in 1830. Webster's eloquent sentences defend ing the Constitution as the supreme law of the land made deep impression on the people of the North; the inspiring oration, read in many households, put into words for those unlearned in the law fundamental notions as to the char acter of the Union and the government. Hayne's able speech made no small impression at the South; and yet, when South Carolina, two years later, sought to put into practice the principle of State sovereignty, many of the Southern States declared her theories unsound and revolutionary. The full theory of State sovereignty and the doctrine of nullification was put forward by John C. Calhoun and ex hibited in the State papers of South Carolina in declaring null and void within its limits the new tariff of 1832, which had been passed in place of the "abominable° act of four years be fore. Reduced to their lowest terms, Calhoun's theories, which were not improved in the 30 years that elapsed before they were tested on the battle-field, amount to this: The Union was a union of States, the Constitution not a law but an agreement between States; each State, being possessed of sovereign authority, must have the ultimate right to judge as to the validity of laws passed by the national govern ment ; an attempt to enforce a law declared null by a sovereign State would justify the State's retiring from the Union. These prin ciples Calhoun declared constitutional and pre servative, not destructive. The attempt of South Carolina to nullify the law of 1832 and prevent its enforcement was in part successful. Andrew Jackson, the President, a Western man without sectionalism, announced that the Union must be preserved and was ready to subdue rebellion by force. But after delay and much discussion, Congress passed two bills, one a force bill, the other providing for the gradual diminution of the tariff rates in the course of the succeeding 10 years. South Carolina with drew her nullification ordinance; if she had not won all, she had given an example of what bold assertion might accomplish.
Before speaking further of the events of Jackson's administration (1829-37) into which the discussion of the tariff and of Southern ob jection have led us, we should return to the movement which caused the election of Jackson and accounts for some of the problems of his time. In 1824 there were four Presidential can didates, Crawford of Georgia, Clay of Ken tucky, Jackson of Tennessee, and John .Quincy Adams of Massachusetts. Crawford was the "regular° candidate, but no one received a ma jority of the electoral vote, though Jackson had more votes than any other. The House, on which the choice devolved, elected Adams, partly be cause of the influence of Clay; and there was at once an outcry, heightened when Clay became Secretary of State, that a corrupt bargain had been made between Clay and Adams. It was said, too, that the will of the people had been violated by the failure to elect Jackson. The frontier general, therefore, "Old Hickory," a downright man of primitive instincts and native keenness, was chosen in 1828 as a popular representative. The National Republicans, who were now led by Clay, in the course of a few years were known as Whigs, a name adopted as a protest against the high-handed methods of Jackson. The Democratic-Republicans, shouting
for Jackson and victory, were soon known as Democrats. The party continued for years to hold the confidence and win the suffrages of the people. Except at two elections, from 1828 un til 1860, the Democrats were successful in elect ing their Presidential candidate. With Jack son, elected as he was, and borne in with acclaim as the man of the people, came a strong Western aggressive spirit; and with him, too, the spoils systems, which was partly a fron tier denial of the need of expert service, partly a sordid desire for place, partly a protest against an official class which some vaguely thought un democratic. Jackson was naturally opposed to the national bank, and toward the end of the first term of service came (1832) a great con troversy over the rechartering of that institu tion, whose corporate existence was to end in 1836. A bill for rechartering was vetoed by the President. The followers of Clay denounced the veto, declared it usurpation and appealed to the people at the polls, only to be once more defeated. The next year Jackson decided that the government moneys should no longer be deposited in the national bank, and this, the famous "removal of the deposits," was the oc casion of great excitement in Congressional circles and of much recrimination in political oratory. But Jackson's cause, wise or unwise, was successful; the bank was not rechartered, and the State banks continued for some years to hold — when they did not lose — the national funds, which were, at a later time, transferred to the independent treasury. The State banks meanwhile, stimulated by a lust for Federal de posits, grew surprisingly in number, though their available capital and special holdings did not correspondingly increase. The crude treat ment of the delicate matter of finance, a treat ment not unnatural for a frontiersman, may have had some influence in bringing on the panic of 1837, which ensued as Van Buren, Jackson's successor, took the Presidential chair. Van Buren, as Jackson's heir, had to bear the odium of the hard times that followed; but in fact the financial disasters were deep-rooted and were an inevitable consequence of the wild speculation that had been in vogue for years, during which men, otherwise not devoid of sense, bought wild land with reckless con fidence in immediate rise in value, and plotted towns on paper as if intention would by force of sheer desire transmute wishes into wealth. For three years and more the country suffered the pangs of commercial depression and, of course, in 1840 elected a Whig as President— William Henry Harrison, like Jackson a fron tiersman, whose humble log-cabin was set up as a symbol of true, simple Americanism, as over against the luxury of Van Buren, who was charged with habits of obnoxious aristocracy. The Whigs had indeed taken a shaft from the Democratic quiver, and the thousands that gathered at the mass-meetings to shout for "Old Tip," as Harrison was called, were living proof that the day had gone by when the Whigs, even in conservative New England, could look askance at the Democrats as just a little below the proper social standard. For this the elec tion of 1840, a time of shout and doggerel verse, of assertive and empty oratory, deserves notice in our political annals. It marks the final disappearance of any pretense on the part of either political party to stand above and aloof ; it marks assuredly the time when the spirit of confident Jacksonian democracy was, in politics at least, the settled spirit of the nation. The frontier, "the most American part of America)) had completed its conquest of the whole.