first had been forced on New England had partly brought about this change, and when (1828) the Protectionists succeeded in getting Congress to pass a still more strict tariff law much illfeeling was caused in the South, and the people cried out that the North was getting rich at their expense.

In the election of the same year (1828) the Democrats were successful, and General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, was chosen President, and John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina, VicePresident. Although both were Southerners, and both belonged to the same party, Mr. Calhoun was much more extreme in his views than General Jackson. He was a very able man, pure in his private life, and strongly devoted to what he considered

the true interests of his State, which he believed had certain sovereign rights which had never been given up to the Union. Though he had favored the tariff in 1816, he became strongly opposed to it when he saw that it was injuring his State. When the tariff law of 1828 was passed, he brought forward the doctrine of nullification-that is, the right of a State to nullify or make null and of no force, within its limits, any act of Congress which it might consider unconstitutional. This, it will be remembered, is the same ground taken in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1799. During the next session of Congress this doctrine was declared by Robert Young Hayne, Senator from South Carolina, who made a very able speech in defence of it. Daniel Webster, then Senator from Massachusetts, made in reply the most celebrated speech of his life. He denied that any State or States have the right of nullification or can interfere in any way with a law of the United States; that the laws of Congress are the supreme law of the land, and higher, of course, than the law of any State. This speech of Mr. Webster's was more read throughout the country than any other speech ever made before it, and it was generally thought, excepting among the defenders

1832.]

NULLIFICATION.

15

of extreme State Rights, to have killed forever the doctrine that a State has the right to nullify a law of the United States.

President Jackson did not believe in a high tariff, and he was ready to aid South Carolina in any legal way to secure a change in the tariff laws; but while they were the laws he determined that they should be obeyed, and he let it be known that he would put down any attempt at disunion. There had long been ill-feeling between him and Mr. Calhoun, and it soon grew to an open quarrel. At a dinner given in Washington in honor of Jefferson's birthday some of the toasts seeming to the President to suggest nullification, he arose and gave as a toast, "Our Federal Union: it must be preserved." As soon as it had been drunk, Vice-President Calhoun stood up and gave another to "Liberty, dearer than the Union."

In 1832 a new tariff bill was passed by which the high duties laid on foreign goods by the

ANDREW JACKSON.

tariff of 1828 were lessened, but Mr. Calhoun and his followers were still dissatisfied, and claimed that Congress had no right to lay duties for protection -that is, to favor home manufactures. Acting under his advice, the Legislature of South Carolina determined to assert what was believed to be the right of the State to nullify the law. A convention was held at Columbia (1832), and the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were declared to be "null, void, and no law, nor binding. upon South Carolina, her officers and citizens." The other States were warned that any attempt at force would be followed by the secession of South Carolina from the Union. The people of the State began to make preparations for resistance, and it looked as if civil war must follow. But President Jackson loved the Union as strongly as Calhoun loved his own State. He saw that the act of South Carolina meant disunion. "If this thing goes on," he said, "our country will be like a bag of meal with both. ends open. Pick it up in the middle or endwise, and it will

each State had a right to settle for themselves, but a feeling had gradually grown up that slavery was not consistent with Christianity. When James Monroe was President (1821), a young Quaker named Benjamin Lundy began to publish in Ohio an anti-slavery periodical, which was for a time the only one of the kind in the United States. It did not attract much attention, and was even printed for a time in Tennessee, and afterward in Baltimore. In 1828 Lundy made the acquaintance of a printer named William Lloyd Garrison, who became his assistant editor. Garrison, not satisfied with Lundy's schemewhich was to free the blacks gradually-began in Boston, in 1831, a weekly paper named "The Liberator," in which he urged immediate emancipation. This paper, the last number of which was published in December, 1865, after slavery had been abolished, was so bold in its denunciation of slavery that Mr. Garrison was threatened with assassination, and several times narrowly escaped mob violence. But his paper gradually grew in influence and in circulation, and as it did so aroused more and more a bitter feeling between the Garrisonians, as his followers were called, and those who were opposed to his teachings.

About this time (1833) there was formed in Philadelphia an association called the American Anti-Slavery Society, with Arthur Tappan for its President. It declared that slavery was a sin which no human constitution could protect, and that there was a higher law (meaning the law of God) than the Constitution, which men ought to obey before any human laws. The Society set about stirring up agitation on the subject by printing books, pamphlets, and papers, and sending them to all parts of the country. Branches of the Society were formed in other States, and many petitions for the abolition of slavery were sent to Congress. But as Congress had no right to act in the matter, no attention was paid to these petitions, and so strong was the feeling against the Abolitionists, as they came to be called, that President Jackson recommended in a message to Congress that their pamphlets and papers should not be allowed to pass through the United States mails. In Northern cities their meetings were broken up, their printing-offices destroyed, and many of their prominent men were mobbed, and at Alton, Illinois, one person named Lovejoy was killed. But this persecution only made the Abolitionists more persistent,

1833-35.]

THE ABOLITIONISTS.

19

and they grew in strength and in numbers, and soon became a political power in the Northern States.

The Southern people began to look upon the acts of the Abolitionists as an unjustifiable interference with their rights. Slavery, they said, was an institution solely under the control of the States in which it existed, and with which the people of other States had no right to meddle. If it was wicked to hold slaves, they alone were responsible for the sin, and not the people of the Free States. But the Abolitionists replied that it was sinful to live under a government which permitted slavery, and that if slavery could not be abolished it was the duty of the Free States to separate from the guilty Slave States; and some of them even went so far as to petition Congress for a dissolution of the Union.

These acts of the Abolitionists brought about a great change in public opinion in the South in regard to slavery; the Border States gave up their ideas of gradual emancipation, and people began to praise slavery as a great good rather than an evil. Those who upheld this view gradually grew in strength, and before long there was a party in the South as strongly in favor of slavery as the Abolitionists of the North were against it. It was argued that slavery was a Bible institution, and that it was a blessing to both master and slave; that the people of the Southern States were the guardians of the slaves, who were a helpless race, unfit for taking care of themselves, and no greater calamity could befall the blacks than the loss of the protection which they enjoyed under the patriarchal system of slavery; that the Abolitionists were misguided fanatics, and the worst foes of the negroes, whose character fitted them for dependence and servitude rather than for freedom; and that slavery, instead of being abolished, ought to be extended so that other parts of the country might enjoy its benefits.

Many good people in the Northern States sympathized with the South in the defence of its domestic institutions, and opposed by all means in their power any agitation of the subject. Still there was a strong feeling that, although slavery should not be interfered with in the States where it already existed, its extension should be resisted by all rightful means. This feeling soon showed itself when the republic of Texas asked to be admitted into the Union.

In 1835 the people of Texas rose in rebellion against Mexico, to which it then belonged. Many of the inhabitants of Texas were people from the Southern States, who had been slave-holders at home; but as slavery had been abolished by Mexico in 1824, they had no right to keep slaves there. As soon, however, as they had won their independence from Mexico, they established slavery in Texas and asked to be annexed to the United States. The people of the Southern States were very anxious for the admission of Texas as a State, for its soil and climate were well fitted for slave labor. But the ablest men in the Northern States were opposed to its admission because it would give more political power to the South and would bring on a war with Mexico, and for a time they were successful in keeping Texas out of the Union.

The National Republicans had about this time taken the name of Whigs, and in the election of 1839 they succeeded in electing William Henry Harrison, of Ohio, for President over Martin Van Buren, who had then served one term as President; John Tyler, of Virginia, was at the same time elected VicePresident. In this election the Abolitionists appeared for the first time as a party, under the name of the Liberty Party; but they polled less than eight thousand votes (7,609) in all the States.

President Harrison died in a month after his inauguration, and Vice-President Tyler thus became President. Mr. Tyler had been elected as a Whig, but he was really a believer in a strict construction of the Constitution-that is, he thought that the central government had only such powers as were given it by the Constitution, and he soon broke with his party. The Southerners, by no means discouraged at their failure to get Texas into the Union, again urged its admission, and Mr. Tyler favored it in his message to Congress (1843). Great opposition was made to it by the Free State members, but the Southerners finally prevailed and Texas came into the Union as a slave State.

In the next election the Democrats were successful, and James K. Polk, of Tennessee, was elected President over Henry Clay, of Kentucky, the Whig candidate. In this election the Abolition Party polled 62,300 votes. The annexation of Texas brought on a war with Mexico, as had been foreseen, but our