The Webster-Hayne Debate

In The Webster-Hayne Debate, Christopher Childers examines the context of the debate between Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and his Senate colleague Robert S. Hayne of South Carolina in January 1830. Webster’s “Second Reply to Hayne” became a canonical text in subsequent decades, as the conception of a sacred union became a common trope in the Northern states. After the U.S. Civil War Webster’s call for “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” came to define the nation. Conventional interpretations of the debate’s background focus on the growing tensions between South Carolina and the federal government and John C. Calhoun’s nullification theory. Childers’s contribution lays in his straying from the nullification-centered narrative. While he does devote attention to this topic, the book focuses on the debate’s deeper background, dating back to the War of 1812 and the Missouri Crisis. Of the book’s five chapters, the first two focus on the road taken by Massachusetts and South Carolina since the end of the war. Webster began as a supporter of the Hartford Convention while Calhoun was an ardent supporter of the war and aggressive nationalism. It seemed unlikely that a decade and a half later Webster would vilify sectionalist rhetoric while Calhoun celebrated a radical version of states’ rights. What brought about the change? Childers emphasizes the rise of Boston’s industrial class and its alliance with economic nationalist Henry Clay of Kentucky, formerly a political foe. Childers portrays the Missouri Crisis as the turning point that reoriented many members of the Deep South from economic nationalism to political sectionalism, as they considered federal and Northern power as a danger to the institution of slavery.

Alliance · Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Economic history · Genealogy · Nationalism · Nullification · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Supporter · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law