red.
Calhoun at once resigned the vice-presidency and took his seat in the
Senate, prepared to defend the attitude of his state. But Jackson did
not wait for that. Seeing that here was an opportunity to strike his
enemy, he ordered troops to South Carolina, and threatened to hang
Calhoun as high as Haman--a threat which he very possibly would have
attempted to carry out had not hostilities been averted by the genius
for compromise of Henry Clay. From that time forward, Calhoun became the
high priest of the doctrine of state rights and the great defender of
slavery. He fought inch by inch the growing sentiment against it; he
knew it was a losing fight, and almost the last words uttered by his
dying lips were, "The South! The poor South! God knows what will become
of her!"

* * * * *

The great triumvirate left no successors to compare with them in
prestige or power. Two survivals from the war of 1812 were still on the
scene, Thomas Hart Benton and Lewis Cass. Benton was a North Carolina
man who had removed to Nashville, and at the outbreak of the war,
enlisted under Andrew Jackson, and got into a disgraceful street fight
with him, in the course of which Jackson was nearly killed. Strange to
say, that doughty old hero chose to forget the matter long years
afterwards, when Benton was in the Senate--a Union senator from the
slave state of Missouri.

Cass also served through the war, but at the North; was involved in
Hull's surrender of Detroit and broke his sword in rage at the disgrace
of it; and was afterwards governor of Michigan and Jackson's secretary
of war; then, in 1848, Democratic nominee for President and defeated
because of Martin Van Buren's disaffection; finally, in 1857, Buchanan's
secretary of state, resigning, in 1860, because that shilly-shally
President could not make up his mind to send reinforcements to Bob
Anderson at Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor. A man who played many
parts, filled many positions, and filled them well, Cass's name deserves
to be more widely remembered than it is.

In those days, a strange, pompous and ineffective figure was flitting
across the stage, impressing men with a respect and significance which
it did not possess, its name, Stephen A. Douglas, nicknamed "The Little
Giant," but giant in little else than power to create disturbance.
Perhaps no other man ever possessed that power in quite the same degree;
nor possessed in a greater degree t