It was generally said and believed that Jackson had threatened to hang Calhoun as high as Haman if the law was resisted. This from Jackson was no idle threat. There had been no other President of such inflexible will. No other general ever assumed the authority he did in the Indian wars and in that of 1812. He had fought those campaigns and gained the battle of New Orleans, suffering at times agony from old wounds received in a street brawl, that would have disabled any ordinary commander. Thrice when in command he had exercised the power of punishing capitally; he had hanged Arbuthnot and Ambrister; again, he had a militiaman shot; and at the close of the war had permitted the execution of six Tennesseeans, though they pleaded in defence, and probably believed, that their time of enlistment had ended. The threat of hanging, however, did not daunt Calhoun, who declared boldly, perhaps pathetically, that Carolina alone would resist, even to death itself. Mr. Clay, as on other occasions where a great crisis had arisen, effected a compromise. A force bill to collect duties, which South Carolina strenuously opposed, was enacted by large majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives; and a bill was afterwards passed gradually reducing the import duties then levied, which Calhoun and South Carolina assented to. CHAPTER II. THE NATIONALITY OF THE CONSTITUTION. The claim of South Carolina, at the time of her threatened nullification and secession, and of the South at the period of our civil war, is, that the Constitution which the States adopted formed them into a confederacy and not a nation. It is admitted, and is not denied, that if the government established was national there can be no valid claim of a component part to treat its laws as of no validity, a nullity, or to dissolve it at its will. Indeed, Calhoun, the great expounder of the nullification and secession doctrine, considered this to be a vital matter, and always insisted that the United States was not a nation. He complained that the reporters made him say, “this Nation instead of this Union.” “I never use the word nation in speaking of the United States: I always use the word union or confederacy. We are not a nation, but a union, a confederacy of equal and sovereign States. England is a nation, Austria is a nation, Russia is a nation, but the United States are not a nation.”[9] [9] _Great Senators_, by Oliver Dyer, p. 153.