ion,
and which furnished the ground upon which President Jackson afterward
stood in denouncing and crushing it out with the strong arm of the
Government.

In that great debate Mr. Hayne's propositions were that the Constitution
is a "compact between the States," that "in case of a plain, palpable
violation of the Constitution by the General Government, a State may
interpose; and that this interposition is constitutional"--a proposition
with which Mr. Webster took direct issue, in these words: "I say, the
right of a State to annul a law of Congress cannot be maintained, but on
the ground of the inalienable right of man to resist oppression; that is
to say, upon the ground of revolution. I admit that there is an
ultimate violent remedy, above the Constitution and in defiance of the
Constitution, which may be resorted to when a revolution is to be
justified. But I do not admit that, under the Constitution, and in
conformity with it, there is any mode in which a State Government, as a
member of the Union, can interfere and stop the progress of the general
movement by force of her own laws under any circumstances whatever."
Mr. Webster insisted that "one of two things is true: either the laws of
the Union are beyond the discretion and beyond the control of the
States, or else we have no Constitution of General Government, and are
thrust back again to the days of the Confederation;" and, in concluding
his powerful argument, he declared that "even supposing the Constitution
to be a compact between the States," Mr. Hayne's doctrine was "not
maintainable, because, first, the General Government is not a party to
the compact, but a Government established by it, and vested by it with
the powers of trying and deciding doubtful questions; and secondly,
because, if the Constitution be regarded as a compact, not one State
only, but all the States are parties to that compact, and one can have
no right to fix upon it her own peculiar construction."

While the comparatively miserable condition of the cotton-growing States
of the South was attributed by most of the Southern Free Traders solely
to the Protective Tariff of 1828, yet there were some Southerners
willing to concede--as did Mr. Hayne, in the Senate (1832)--that there
were "other causes besides the Tariff" underlying that condition, and to
admit that "Slaves are too improvident, too incapable of that minute,
constant, delicate attention, and that persevering industry which are