Nullification, Secession, Webster’s Argument, and the Kentucky and Virginia‪…‬

Robert E. Lee called secession “nothing but revolution”—yet decades later, writers still claimed the Constitution gave each state the right to leave. Caleb William Loring opens by asking what Daniel Webster’s famous clash with Robert Hayne really established.

Writing in the late nineteenth century, Loring revisits the fierce Senate debate of January 1830, when South Carolina threatened to nullify federal tariff laws. Webster faced Hayne’s defense of state sovereignty, and the argument reaches beyond one speech: was the Union a national government, or merely a compact its members could abandon? Loring challenges claims that Webster’s account was historically mistaken, insisting that the Constitution’s origins matter as much as the outcome of war. If the states could nullify a law, where would that principle lead—and could the Union hold?

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