Sir, let me recur to pleasing recollection-let me indulge in refreshing remembrance of the past-let me remind you that in early times no states cherished greater harmony, both of principle and feeling, than Massachusetts and South Carolina. Would to God that harmony might again return! Shoulder to shoulder they went through the revolution-hand in hand they stood around the administration of Washington, and felt his own great arm lean on them for support. Unkind feeling, if it exist, alienation and distrust are the growth, unnatural to such soils, of false principles since sown. They are weeds, the seeds of which that same great arm never scattered."- Webster's Speeches, 1830.

IT has been the high mission of Mr. Calhoun, through a public life of nearly forty years duration, to oppose with his great intellect, extraordinary reasoning powers, and far-seeing political sagacity, every attempt at centralization by which the powers of the federal constitution could be enlarged, the integrity of state sovereignty infringed, or the rights of minorities be ultimately destroyed. In the performance of this patriotic duty, no man has been more rancorously assailed, or studiously misrepresented. It has been the fashion at times, by those incapable of comprehending the full scope of his eminently national views, to accuse him of sectionality, of a desire to sustain only the interests of a section, or to promote merely the welfare of a locality regardless of national progress. It is always the fate of those whose intellectual eminence gives them a clearer view of the future, than that which the less elevated crowd around them can command, to incur the reproaches of those whose wishes are thwarted by announced truths that they cannot comprehend. Such men live in after ages, when time and progress have reached the events which their forecast early discerned. Mr. Calhoun commenced his career in 1812, in common with a number of new men, freed from those restraints of party and hereditary association, which the events preceding the year of 1812 had dissolved. At the first session of the Twelfth Congress Mr. Calhoun entered upon his Congressional duties as a mein

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ber of the Committee on Foreign Relations, and his first speech in defence of the war measures projected by the committee presented in maturity those extraordinary powers which have continued to distinguish his late efforts. There are the same short and clipped sentences, the same disregard of oratorical trappings, the same simplicity and almost boldness of diction; but there are also displayed, in maturity almost startling, those remarkable powers of reasoning which have made his speeches the most admirable political arguments of the age. Fixing his sight steadily on the mark, he travels up to it with a rapidity and a directness which it requires the utmost attention to follow. Very often parenthetical to the unthinking hearer, sometimes obscure, the most parenthetical or obscure of his arguments fail not to vindicate their strength when they receive what they demand-the full attention of the student. There is a clearness of perception of the true principles of political economy, then looked upon very much as a black letter science, that gives an earnest of that remarkable force of analysis which has since been exhibited by him.

It is undoubtedly the case that the views of Mr. Calhoun in relation to a tariff have undergone a change since that period; and it is to be remarked, that precisely those who accuse him of instability, charge him with sectionality, when in truth the apparent instability is the highest evidence of his eminent nationality. Up to the Declaration of Independence, there were comparatively no manufactories in the United States. From that moment they began to grow, and during the embargo and war, they received a fictitious position. By the embargo-on the propriety of which, Mr. Calhoun differed from his political friends-the manufacturing interests completely sheltered from foreign competition, had been fostered to extraordinary luxuriance; that is to say, they obtained very high prices for very poor articles. There was not a single manufacturing interest, in consequence, which was not allowed to exist in undisturbed monopoly. The vineyard was so walled in by the mighty arm of government, as to exclude the feeblest breath of trans-Atlantic rivalry.

On the return of peace, the southern planting interest would have greatly profited by the immediate opening of the trade. But Mr. Calhoun reflected, as a national statesman, that the manufactures had sprung up on the hot-bed growth of close monopoly occasioned by war; that it was not their fault that they were so situated, and concluded, therefore, that they should not be punished for unavoidable circumstances; there was also a debt of $150,000,000 to be paid; and Mr. Calhoun consented, on behalf of the South, that for these great national purposes, the South should submit to a high tariff, as well to discharge that debt, as to uphold those Eastern manufactories, whose factitious position was an incendent of war. For these eminently national objects, he thought it right, that not only the South, but all the consumers, should submit for a while longer to war-taxes. In the succeeding twenty years, a complete change took place in the state of affairs. In all that period the manufacturers at first given a support from generous motives, constantly increased their demands. The operation of the bank, the high taxes and protective policy, had caused the public danger to run from disunion to centralization. In 1814, outward pressure and inward weakness produced, in the minds of a great mass of people, a tendency to a policy by which the arm of the General Government could be strengthened. In 1833, the treasury was free from debt, the authority of the Federal Government was supreme, and the general tendency of

1850.]

Centralization.

power no longer centrifugal, became centripetal. In 1814, the danger At the one period, it was was disunion, in 1833, consolidation. necessary to raise ten millions beyond the current wants of the government for the purpose of sinking the national debt; at the other, the income was so exuberant as to allow a margin for the annual distribution of ten millions among the States. In such a position of affairs the manufacturers, who had received an average tariff of 16 per cent. in 1816, procured one of 46 per cent. in 1828, and were still unsatisfied in their demands a scheme of internal improvements was on foot, (of so gigantic a nature,) that the bills then before Congress asked $200,000,000. The disbursement of such a sum by the Federal Government would strengthen The whole the demands for more, and weaken the capacity to resist. government was on the point of merging into a great moneyed despotism, fatal to the interest of all producers. It was while Mr. Calhoun occupied the offices of Secretary of War and of Vice-President, that the great change of which we have spoken had gradually been taking place; and when once more he took his seat in the national legislature, the question was brought up for determination whether the tendency to consolidation, which the Tariff and Distribution Bill had evinced, should be fully developed, or whether the old constitutional balance should be restored.

On such a question Mr. Calhoun could only be found among the foremost in restricting federal encroachment as he formerly had been to support its weakness.

No one who knew his purity of character or purpose, who recollected that twenty years had passed since he entered into the political arena, and that, in that long period, there had not been a speck on his fair and honorable fame; no one who had stood by him in the calamities of the war of 1812, or the perils of the re-action of 1816, could then believe that he harbored in his heart for an instant a reservation to the oath he had taken. There were many who may have looked upon him as an ambitious and dangerous man, but we question whether there were any who knew his character and knew his history, who doubted, no matter how mistaken they might have considered his notions of the unconstitutionality of the tariff of 1828, the full sincerity of his attachment to the limited constitution under which the Union exists.

The greatest excitement then prevailed, and Mr. Calhoun, in order to bring up the true merits of the controversy between South Carolina and the Federal Government, had offered a series of resolutions, built on the foundation of the celebrated Kentucky Resolutions of 1708, affirming the people of the several States to be united by means of a constitutional compact, and "the union of which the said compact is the bond, is a The Force Bill had just union between the States ratifying the same." been reported, and it was the effort of the State-Rights Senators to obtain the temporary postponement of the bill till the resolutions could have been discussed and decided. Such, however, was not the plan of the committee by whom the Force Bill had been reported; and in accordance with their wish, the Senate laid the resolutions on the table, and voted to After a long and most able discussion, during proceed with the bill. the progress of which almost every Senator expressed his views, with the exception of Mr. Webster and Mr. Calhoun, to whom, almost involuntarily, the eyes of all were directed as in reality the champions of the two hostile systems, Mr. Calhoun entered at large into the reasons which in

duced him to oppose the bill as unjust and unconstitutional in its bearings. He was followed by Mr. Webster, in a speech most elaborate in its construction, and powerful in its influence-predicated, however, not on the bill before the Senate, but on the resolutions introduced by Mr. Calhoun, on the State-Rights controversy. Under such circumstances, the privilege belonged to Mr. Calhoun, as the author of the resolutions which had then been brought on the carpet, of vindicating the principles on which they were founded, and he triumphantly maintained the doctrine which has since been adopted, even at the extreme north, that the Constitution is a compact between sovereign states. We derived one great benefit from the State-Rights controversy, and that is the revival of the great fundamental truths on which our Constitution rests; and we cannot refrain from feeling satisfied that the South, these truths being vindicated, should subsequently have waived the constitutionality of the tariff, and have appealed to the good sense and justice of the Union for its repeal. To the resistance which Mr. Calhoun offered at the time to the growing oppression of class legislation, is the nation indebted for its present high state of prosperity. Mr. Webster at that epoch had also his triumphs. His second speech on Mr. Foot's resolutions was pronounced by Chancellor Kent, as one of those great triumphs which pertain to peace, as there are others which pertain to war. It was in that speech, that the hope was expressed as contained in the clause we have quoted at the head of this article. Twenty years have again elapsed, and that hope, we trust from recent events, is about to be fulfilled. Again has the increased strength of the federal government threatened to merge into a military, as before into a moneyed depotism, and again has Mr. Calhoun vindicated the purity of our system by defending the rights of the minority, and this time we find Massachusetts and South Carolina drawing together, "shoulder to shoulder." Mr. Webster now comes forth in the vigor of his great intellect, and sustains the rights of the South guarantied to them by that compact, the principles of which Mr. Calhoun so ably elucidated in 1833. Mr. Webster now admits the compact, and boldly and unanswerably advocates the fulfillment of its terms to the letter.

To those who look back upon the disastrous state of affairs that pervaded these thirteen disunited and disorganized states, when they came out of the war of Independence, the rivalries, jealousies, disputes, religious antipathies, sectional prejudices, and threatened wars, rife in all quarters, and reflect that those states like the tribes of savages were upon the point of devastating each other by internal strife until they again should have become the prey of their watchful foreign enemies, it appears almost miraculous, that from such discordant elements should have stood forth that immortal body of men, whose wisdom and sagacity, divesting them of dogmas and fanatical prejudices, were to construct an enduring bond of union, founded on respect for the rights and opinions of all its membersa bond which should accommodate all interests, compromise all differences, settle all disputes, and allay all local asperities, permitting the citizens of all the states to blend in perfect harmony while pressing forward in that "pursuit of happiness," which has raised the common country to the foremost position among the nations of the earth. When we consider that our present unparalleled prosperity, the admiration of the world, the refuge of the oppressed, and the only hope of progress, has been created, as it were, out of the elements of dissolution by the spirit of our Constitution,