388 DANIEL WEBSTER 



deal ; but he assailed the theory of the Constitution 

 maintained by Calhoun and his followers, according 

 to which nullification was a right the exercise of which 

 was compatible with loyal adherence to the Constitu- 

 tion. His course of argument was twofold: he sought 

 to show, first, that the theory of the Constitution as a 

 terminable league or compact between sovereign states 

 was unsupported by the history of its origin, and sec- 

 ondly, that the attempt, on the part of any state, to act 

 upon that theory must necessarily entail civil war or 

 the disruption of the Union. As to the sufficiency 

 of his historical argument, there has been much differ- 

 ence of opinion. The question is difficult to deal with 

 in such a way as to reach an unassailable conclusion, 

 and the difficulty is largely due to the fact that in the 

 various ratifying conventions of 1787-1789 the men 

 who advocated the adoption of the Constitution did 

 not all hold the same opinions as to the significance of 

 what they were doing. There was great divergence 

 of opinion, and plenty of room for antagonisms of 

 interpretation to grow up as irreconcilable as those 

 of Webster and Calhoun. If the South Carolina doc- 

 trine distorted history in one direction, that of Mr. Web- 

 ster certainly departed somewhat from the record in 

 the other ; but the latter was fully in harmony with the 

 actual course of our national development and with 

 the increased and increasing strength of the sentiment 

 of union at the time when it was propounded with 

 such powerful reasoning and such magnificent elo- 

 quence in the " Reply to Hayne." As an appeal to 

 the common sense of the American people, nothing 

 could be more masterly than Mr. Webster's demon- 

 stration that nullification practically meant revolution ; 



