and legal means he is invested with." When the situation bore its most
serious aspect Jackson received a call from Sam Dale, who had been one
of his dispatch bearers at the Battle of New Orleans. "General Dale,"
exclaimed the President during the conversation, "if this thing goes
on, our country will be like a bag of meal with both ends open. Pick
it up in the middle or endwise, and it will run out. I must tie the
bag and save the country." "Dale," he exclaimed again later, "they are
trying me here; you will witness it; but, by the God of heaven, I will
uphold the laws." "I understood him to be referring to nullification
again," related Dale in his account of the interview, "and I expressed
the hope that things would go right." "They shall go right, sir," the
President fairly shouted, shattering his pipe on the table by way of
further emphasis.

When Jackson heard that the convention at Columbia had taken the step
expected of it, he made the following entry in his diary: "South
Carolina has passed her ordinance of nullification and secession. As
soon as it can be had in authentic form, meet it with a proclamation."
The proclamation was issued December 10, 1832. Parton relates that the
President wrote the first draft of this proclamation under such a glow
of feeling that he was obliged "to scatter the written pages all over
the table to let them dry," and that the document was afterwards
revised by his scholarly Secretary of State, Edward Livingston. With
Jackson supplying the ideas and spirit and Livingston the literary
form, the result was the ablest and most impressive state paper of the
period. It categorically denied the right of a State either to annul a
federal law or to secede from the Union. It admitted that the laws
complained of operated unequally but took the position that this must
be true of all revenue measures. It expressed the inflexible
determination of the Administration to repress and punish every form