There were no less than three speeches of Hayne’s--one of them, the second, running through two days--and the same number of replies by Webster. The debate took place in the Senate in January, 1830; it arose on an amended resolution originally offered by Mr. Foote as to the expediency of limiting or hastening the sales of the public lands. South Carolina was then threatening to declare the existing tariff null and void, and to pass laws preventing the United States from collecting duties in its ports. Hayne urged that the government should dispose of the public lands and after paying the national debt with the proceeds should get rid of the remainder, so that there should not be a shilling of permanent revenue; he looked with alarm on the consolidation of the government. To get the support of the West against the East, he accused the East of a narrow policy towards the West as to the public lands and the tariff, “the accursed tariff,” as he termed it, which kept multitudes of laborers in the East to the detriment of the West. In his second speech, Hayne not only attacked the East and its policy as to the public lands and support of the tariff, but went further and “carried the war into Africa,” as he styled it, reading speeches, pamphlets, and sermons, showing, as he claimed, the disloyalty of New England in the war of 1812. He maintained that the United States had exceeded the powers granted to it by the Constitution in making the existing tariff, which protected the manufacturing industry of the East, only a section of the country, and compelled the non-manufacturing States to pay tribute to it; that the United States government was a compact between independent sovereign States; that each of the States, being an independent sovereign, had a right in its own sovereign capacity to decide whether laws made by the United States exceeded the powers given it by the Constitution, and if a State held a law made by the United States was not authorized by the Constitution, it could treat it as null and void; that the existing tariff was a clear and palpable violation of the Constitution, and that South Carolina could and would pass laws forbidding and preventing the collection in its territory of the duties levied under it. Before taking up Webster’s constitutional argument, we will give a brief account of his answer to the attack made on himself and the East. Webster, in his great speech, the second in reply to Hayne, alluding to Hayne’s allegation that he, Webster, had slept upon his first speech, said, “he must have slept upon it, or not slept at all”: and he assured him that he did sleep on it and slept soundly.