received of resistance to the Government in South Carolina, he (Calhoun) would be arrested on a charge of treason. At the same time, however, important concessions were made to South Carolina, by which the threatened conflict was avoided. In February, Henry Clay introduced in Congress a compromise tariff bill, by which the existing duties were to be decreased each year until they reached a minimum of twenty per cent. in 1842. Accordingly, each party in

the controversy claimed to have triumphed; and the crisis passed, without finally and formally settling the question of nullification.

THE SLAVERY AGITATION.

During Jackson's administration slavery became the chief question of politics. Texas achieved her independence, and the question of her annexation to the United States as a slave State caused an exciting and angry contest. In the House of Representatives, John Quincy Adams began his famous crusade for the right of petition, and the contest over petitions for the abolition of slavery convulsed the House. In all these years of stormy debate, Calhoun was always the defender of slavery. He made no apologies, but proclaimed it a righteous, just, and beneficial institution; and he regarded all efforts to abolish or restrict it, or to prevent the catching and return of fugitives, as an interference with the rights of the slave States which would justify their secession from the Union.

MISS MARTINEAU'S SKETCH.

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Miss Harriet Martineau, who visited the United States at this time, has recorded in her "Retrospect of Western Travel" her impressions of Mr. Calhoun. She writes:

"Mr. Calhoun followed, and impressed me very strongly. While he kept to the question, what he said was close, good, and moderate, though delivered in rapid speech, and with a voice not sufficiently modulated. But when he began to reply to a taunt of Colonel Benton's, that he wanted to be President, the force of his speaking became painful. He made protestations which it seemed to strangers had better have been spared, that he would not turn on his heel to be President,' and that 'he had given up all for his own brave, magnanimous little State of South Carolina.' While thus protesting, his eyes flashed, his brow seemed charged with thunder, his voice became almost a bark, and his sentences were abrupt, intense, producing in the auditory a sort of laugh which is squeezed out of people by an application of a very sudden mental force.

"Mr. Calhoun's countenance first fixed my attention; the splendid eye, the straight forehead, surmounted by a load of stiff, upright, dark hair, the stern brow, the inflexible mouth,—it is one of the most remarkable heads in the country."

Miss Martineau's sketch of the three great statesmen of the time is especially interesting :—

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"Mr. Clay sitting upright on the sofa, with his snuff-box ever in his hand, would discourse for many an hour in his even, soft, deliberate tone, on any one of the great subjects of American policy which we might happen to start, always amazing us with the moderation of estimate and speech which so impetuous a nature has been able to attain. Mr. Webster, leaning back at his ease, telling stories, cracking jokes, shaking the sofa with burst after burst of laughter, or smoothly discoursing to the perfect felicity of the logical part of one's constitution, would illuminate an evening now and then. Mr. Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born and could never be extinguished, would come in sometimes to keep our understanding on a painful stretch for a short while, and leave us to take to pieces his close, rapid, theoretical, illustrated talk, and see what we could make of it. We found it usually more worth retaining as a curiosity, than as either very just or useful.

"I know of no man who lives in such utter intellectual solitude. He meets men and harangues by the fireside as in the Senate; he is wrought like a piece of machinery, set going vehemently by a weight, and stops while you answer; he either passes by what you say, or twists it into a suitability with what is in his head, and begins to lecture again."

Miss Martineau also saw Calhoun in South Carolina, where he was the political teacher and guide, and the acknowledged chief:—

"During my stay in Charleston, Mr. Calhoun and his family arrived from Congress, and there was something very striking in the welcome he received, like that of a chief returned to the bosom of his clan. He stalked about like a monarch of the little domain, and there was certainly an air of mysterious understanding between him and his followers."

The agitation of the slavery question, from 1835 to 1850, was chiefly the work of this one man. "The labors of Mr. Garrison and Mr. Wendell Phillips," says Parton, "might have borne no fruit during their lifetime, if Calhoun had not made it his business to supply them with material, mean to force the issue upon the North,' he once wrote; and he did force it. The denial of the right

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of petition, the annexation of Texas, the forcing of slavery into the Territories, -these were among the issues upon which he hoped to unite the South in his favor, while retaining enough strength at the North to secure his election to the Presidency. Failing in all his schemes of personal advancement, he died in 1850, still protesting that slavery is divine, and that it must rule this country or ruin it.” Calhoun's life came to an end in March, 1850, before the Compromise Bill of that year had once more postponed the "irrepressible conflict." On the 4th

of March his last speech was read in the Senate by a friend, he then being too weak to deliver it. Three days afterward, when Webster delivered his famous "7th of March speech," Calhoun literally rose from his dying bed that he might be present, and sat for the last time in his accustomed seat, his rigid face and intense gaze giving him a weird and unearthly aspect. On the 24th of the same month he died; and his ashes were taken to Charleston, there to mingle with the soil of the State to which he had given a life's devotion, and which had rewarded him with unfailing love and honor.