Hayne of South Carolina, January 19, 1830 Herman Belz (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000). Source: Daniel Webster, The Webster-Hayne Debate on the Nature of the Constitution: Selected Documents, ed. It is worth noting that in the course of the debate, on the very floor of the Senate, both Hayne and Webster raised the specter of civil war 30 years before it commenced. These irreconcilable views of national supremacy and state sovereignty framed the constitutional struggle that led to Civil War thirty years later. In this regard, Webster anticipated an argument that Abraham Lincoln made in his First Inaugural Address (1861).
Nullification, Webster maintained, was a political absurdity. Hayne maintained that the states retained the authority to nullify federal law, Webster that federal law expressed the will of the American people and could not be nullified by a minority of the people in a state. Hayne argued that the sovereign and independent states had created the Union to promote their particular interests. Webster argued that the American people had created the Union to promote the good of the whole. During the course of the debates, the senators touched on pressing political issues of the day-the tariff, Western lands, internal improvements-because behind these and others were two very different understandings of the origin and nature of the American Union. Hayne of South Carolina in January 1830 started out as a disagreement over the sale of Western lands and turned into one of the most famous verbal contests in American history. The Senate debates between Whig Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Democrat Senator Robert Y.
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