Second Reply to Hayne

Summary

Daniel Webster's Second Reply to Hayne was delivered in the United States Senate on 26 and 27 January 1830, during a debate that began with a modest resolution from Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut about limiting the sale of public lands in the West. Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina had turned the debate into an attack on New England, accusing it of selfishness toward the West and of disloyalty during the War of 1812, and had defended the doctrine, associated with Vice President John C. Calhoun, who was presiding, that a state may declare a federal law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it. Webster's answer ran over two days and fills about thirty thousand words in the 1879 edition. He opens with the image of a storm-tossed mariner taking his bearings and asks that the resolution be read, noting that Hayne had discussed everything except the public lands. He then answers personal thrusts, including Hayne's use of Banquo's ghost from Macbeth, defends Nathan Dane and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and sets out New England's view that the states are united and that a Senator must regard the good of the whole. He recalls South Carolina's own earlier support for the tariff of 1816 and for internal improvements, and answers the charges against New England with a short, famous tribute to Massachusetts and its battlefields. The heart of the speech is constitutional. Webster asks whose agent the federal government is, answers that it is the people's, not the creature of the state legislatures, and argues that the supremacy clause and the judicial power together are the keystone of the arch. He imagines a South Carolina nullifier trying to stop duties at a custom-house and shows that the doctrine ends in force. The peroration refuses to look beyond the Union into the abyss and closes with the flag inscribed Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable. The speech was printed and distributed in great numbers and its last sentences became standard schoolroom recitation.

Top Lessons

• Who is sovereign over the Constitution

  Webster's central question is whose agent the national government is. By answering that it was erected by the people rather than by the state legislatures, he concludes that no single state can sit as judge over federal law, and that disputes must go to the courts, to elections, or to amendment. The argument shows how a constitutional question turns on a prior question of origins.

• Answering an opponent without losing the subject

  Hayne's speech ranged widely and grew personal. Webster opens by recalling the actual resolution, answers the personal charges with wit rather than anger, and then moves the whole debate to the ground he chose, the nature of the Union. The structure is a model of regaining control of an argument.

• Union and liberty held together

  Webster rejects the slogan Liberty first and Union afterwards, insisting that each depends on the other. His peroration presents the Union not as a cage for liberty but as the only ground on which American liberty had been secured, from Bunker Hill to the Constitution.

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