The Webster Hayne Debate On The Nature Of The Union

The Webster-Hayne Debate consists of speeches delivered in the United States Senate in January of 1830. The debates between Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Robert Hayne of South Carolina gave fateful utterance to the differing understandings of the nature of the American Union that had come to predominate in the North and the South, respectively, by 1830. To Webster the Union was the indivisible expression of one nation of people. To Hayne the Union was the voluntary compact among sovereign states. Each man spoke more or less for his section, and their classic expositions of their respective views framed the political conflicts that culminated at last in the secession of the Southern states and war between advocates of Union and champions of Confederacy. The key speakers and viewpoints are included in The Webster-Hayne Debate. These speeches represent every major perspective on 'the nature of the Union' in the early nineteenth century.

In January 1830, a debate on the nature of sovereignty in the American federal union occurred in the United States Senate between Senators Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Robert Hayne of South Carolina. This debate exposed the critically different understandings of the nature of the American union that, by 1830, had developed between the North and the South and would ultimately lead to civil war in 1861.

In this illuminating history, a senatorial debate about states’ rights exemplifies the growing rift within pre-Civil War America. Two generations after the founding, Americans still disagreed on the nature of the Union. Was it a confederation of sovereign states or a nation headed by a central government? To South Carolina Senator Robert Y. Hayne, only the vigilant protection of states’ rights could hold off an attack on a southern way of life built on slavery. Meanwhile, Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster believed that the political and economic ascendancy of New England—and the nation—required a strong, activist national government. In The Webster-Hayne Debate, historian Christopher Childers examines a sharp dispute in January 1830 that came to define the dilemma of America’s national identity. During Senate discussion of western land policy, the senators’ increasingly heated exchanges led to the question of union—its nature and its value in a federal republic. Childers argues that both Webster and Hayne, and the factions they represented, saw the West as key to the success of their political plans and sought to cultivate western support for their ideas. A short, accessible account of the conflict and the related issues it addressed, The Webster-Hayne Debate captures an important moment in the early republic.

"The Webster-Hayne Debate centers on the question that consumed the Early Republic: Did state sovereignty or the federal Constitution rightfully claim preeminence? Begun in 1830 during a Senate discussion of western land policy and continuing through the South Carolina legislature's nullification of a federal tariff, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina took part in a heated debate that landed on the question of union--its nature and its value in a federal republic. Christopher Childers treats this debate as an important moment in the Early Republic, one in which spokesmen for the generation that followed the founders parsed the difference between a confederation of states, any one of which could decide whether to leave the compact of 1789, and a lasting union based on the principles of the revolution"--

This book traces how early Americans imagined what a 'nation' meant during the first fifty years of the country's existence.

“War means fighting, and fighting means killing,” Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest famously declared. The Civil War was fundamentally a matter of Americans killing Americans. This undeniable reality is what Jonathan Steplyk explores in Fighting Means Killing, the first book-length study of Union and Confederate soldiers’ attitudes toward, and experiences of, killing in the Civil War. Drawing upon letters, diaries, and postwar reminiscences, Steplyk examines what soldiers and veterans thought about killing before, during, and after the war. How did these soldiers view sharpshooters? How about hand-to-hand combat? What language did they use to describe killing in combat? What cultural and societal factors influenced their attitudes? And what was the impact of race in battlefield atrocities and bitter clashes between white Confederates and black Federals? These are the questions that Steplyk seeks to answer in Fighting Means Killing, a work that bridges the gap between military and social history—and that shifts the focus on the tragedy of the Civil War from fighting and dying for cause and country to fighting and killing.

The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead, he gave the whole nation "a new birth of freedom" in the space of a mere 272 words. His entire life and previous training, and his deep political experience went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece. By examining both the address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew, and reveals much about a president so mythologized but often misunderstood. Wills shows how Lincoln came to change the world and to effect an intellectual revolution, how his words had to and did complete the work of the guns, and how Lincoln wove a spell that has not yet been broken.