Hayne's Reply to Webster (Speech on Foot's Resolution)

Summary

Robert Y. Hayne's speech on Foot's resolution is the South Carolina side of the Webster-Hayne debate, the most celebrated exchange in the history of the United States Senate. In December 1829 Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut proposed an inquiry into limiting the sale of public lands in the West. Hayne spoke on January 19, 1830, arguing that the land system drained the new states and that the lands should be used to build up flourishing communities rather than hoarded as a federal treasure. Daniel Webster replied the next day, and Hayne answered him on January 21 and 25 in the speech stored here. He begins by complaining that Webster has turned a modest remark about western policy into an attack on the South. He shows from Webster's own speech of 1825 that the Massachusetts Senator once held the views on the lands he now condemned, and contrasts New England's old hostility to western appropriations with its sudden friendliness after 1825. He warns that tying citizens to the federal government by money, through debt, stocks, tariffs and land sales, corrupts free government, and says he would found the Union on the affections of the people. Answering Webster's comparison of free Ohio with slaveholding Kentucky, he defends the South's institutions as an inheritance it met as a practical duty and contrasts the condition of the enslaved with the poverty of free Black communities in Northern cities. He then turns to consolidation, which he calls the worst of evils, traces the National Republicans back to the Federalists of 1798, and mocks Webster's change from free trader in 1824 to supporter of the tariff of 1828. A long middle section compares the records of the sections: South Carolina's sacrifices in the Revolution and its support of the War of 1812, set against New England's resistance to that war, the sermons of its clergy, and the Hartford Convention of 1814. Hayne closes with the constitutional argument. The Union is a compact among sovereign states; where no tribunal stands above the parties, each must judge for itself whether the compact has been broken; and this Carolina doctrine is simply the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and Madison's Report of 1799, which he quotes at length. The 1853 printing ends with notes and extracts on the Hartford Convention. Webster answered on January 26 and 27 with his Second Reply.

Top Lessons

• The compact theory of the Union in its own terms

  Hayne argues that the Constitution was made by the states, each acting in its sovereign capacity, and that parties to a compact with no common superior must judge for themselves when it is broken. He presents this not as a novelty but as the doctrine of Jefferson and Madison in 1798. Understanding the argument as its defenders understood it is the necessary first step in weighing Webster's reply.

• Affection or interest as the bond of a nation

  Hayne objects that debt, tariffs, and land policy tie citizens to the government by money, a bond he says would hold them equally to a despot. He wants a Union held by equal justice and the affections of the people. The argument raises a lasting question about what kind of attachment a free government should seek from its citizens.

• History as argument between the sections

  Much of Hayne's speech is a comparison of records: who sacrificed in the Revolution, who supported the War of 1812, who met at Hartford in 1814. He uses this history to show that South Carolina's loyalty cannot be doubted even as it asserts the right of interposition. The speech shows how sectional memory had become a weapon in constitutional debate.

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