inherited the constitutional principles of the old Federal party,
advocated internal improvements at national expense and a high
protective tariff. The State Rights party, which was strongest at the
South, opposed these views, and in 1832 South Carolina claimed the
right to "nullify" the tariff imposed by the general government. The
leader of this party was John Caldwell Calhoun, a South Carolinian, who
in his speech in the United States Senate, on February 13, 1832, on
Nullification and the Force Bill, set forth most authoritatively the
"Carolina doctrine." Calhoun was a great debater, but hardly a great
orator. His speeches are the arguments of a lawyer and a strict
constitutionalist, severely logical, and with a sincere conviction in
the soundness of his case. Their language is free from bad rhetoric;
the reasoning is cogent, but there is an absence of emotion and
imagination; they contain few quotable things, and no passages of
commanding eloquence, such as strew the orations of Webster and Burke.
They are not, in short, literature. Again, the speeches of Henry Clay,
of Kentucky, the leader of the Whigs, whose persuasive oratory is a
matter of tradition, disappoint in the reading. The fire has gone out
of them.

Not so with Daniel Webster, the greatest of American forensic orators,
if, indeed, he be not the greatest of all orators who have used the
English tongue. Webster's speeches are of the kind that have power to
move after the voice of the speaker is still. The thought and the
passion in them lay hold on feelings of patriotism more lasting than
the issues of the moment. It is, indeed, true of Webster's speeches,
as of all speeches, that they are known to posterity more by single
brilliant passages than as wholes. In oratory the occasion is of the
essence of the thing, and only those parts of an address which are
permanent and universal in their appeal take their place in literature.