Webster-Hayne Debates

-- Excerpted from Clarence Carson's A Basic History of the United States: The Sections and the Civil War, 1826-1877, Chapter 3, page 35-36 --

Daniel Webster of Massachusetts now entered the debate, and thereafter it was between Hayne and Webster.  Webster was already famed as a master of oratory, and in this debate he also demonstrated his understanding of how important it is to decide the issues.  He shifted the debate to the question of preserving the union by charging that the tendency of certain ideas being advanced in the South was to break up the union.  Hayne rose to the bait and entered into a lengthy defense of state sovereignty, of the rights of the states, and of the importance of maintaining the constitutional balance.  Thus, these debates became a dress rehearsal in 1830 of the issues that would rise again and again over the next 30 years and eventually erupt into civil war.

As the debate moved toward its crescendo, it became a spectator event as well.  No only were the galleries of the Senate chamber packed but also the Senate seats and all the space surrounding them.  So many Congressmen came to hear the debates that the House of Representatives lacked a quorum to do business.

Probably, the crucial point made by Hayne was that it was the Northern leaders, not Southern positions that were provoking disunion.  When they attempted to use the general government for their own special purposes, such as with the protective tariff, theirs was the provocation of disunion.  Hayne put it this way:

" Who then . . . are the true friends of the Union?  Those who would confine the federal government strictly within the limits prescribed by the Constitution; who would preserve to the States and the people all the powers not expressly delegated, who would make this a federal and not a national Union, and who, administering the government in a spirit of equal justice, would make it a blessing and not a curse.  And who are its enemies?  Those who are in favor of consolidation; who are constantly stealing power from the States, and adding strength to the federal government; who, assuming an unwarrantable jurisdiction over the States and the people, undertake to regulate the whole industry and capital of the country. . . . "

It took Webster two afternoons of speaking to give what is known as his "Second Reply to Hayne."  He took on Hayne's position that the states had a right to resist what they interpreted as unconstitutional acts by the federal government.  That would amount, Webster said, to the right of the states to dissolve the union.  Thus, he returned time after time to the theme of preserving the union, finishing with this stirring peroration:

" I have not allowed myself, sir, to look beyond the Union, to see what might lie hidden in the dark recess behind. . . .  When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!  Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted nor a single star obscured . . . ; but everywhere spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart, --Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable. "

The debate did not, of course, resolve the questions at issue.  Debates rarely do. . . .  As for the sectional and constitutional issues raise, the debate aggravated rather than settling these.  Undoubtedly, Webster did clothe the position opposed to nullification of state sovereignty with a patriotic aura which, if accepted, made further discussion superfluous.  Twenty different editions of Webster's speech were published within a few months, and it circulated by the thousands over the country.  It became the best known speech that had ever been delivered to Congress.

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