After the purchase of Louisiana came that of Florida, also enlarging the territory of the Union and curtailing the relative power in it of each of the old States. The charter of a second United States Bank was granted by the party that in the first Congress had opposed it and claimed to be strict constructionists of the Constitution. Madison justified his assent on the ground of the general approval and the opinion of the Supreme Court establishing its constitutionality.[90] Historically there is no attempt to maintain, no assertion of, the doctrine of the Kentucky resolutions from the time they were passed until the debate in the Congress of 1830. The only trace of them is in the resolutions frequently passed by the Legislatures of States, which are mere opinions beyond their legislative powers, that certain laws of the government were unconstitutional and therefore null and void. If unconstitutional, they were and are null and void, but no State ever treated them as null and void. The United States Government, by its judiciary, however, took cognizance of all State laws in conflict with its laws and authority, and maintained uniformly its national supremacy. [90] Madison’s letter, 4 Elliot’s _Debates_, 615. CHAPTER VI. CALHOUN, JACKSON, AND NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. In 1811, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a young man not of the age of thirty years, took his seat as a member of the national House of Representatives, and at once became a leader in public affairs. He was one of the Committee on Foreign Relations. On the 12th of December he said what was the road the nation should tread “to make it great and to produce in this country not the form but the real spirit of union.”[91] In March, 1815, he voted for a high tariff and said: “He believed the policy of the country required protection to our manufacturing establishments.”[92] He also reported the bill to incorporate a United States Bank, and supported it in a speech on its constitutionality.[93] Webster, on the contrary, opposed the tariff bills, not however on the ground of their unconstitutionality. In December, 1816, Calhoun moved “that a committee be appointed to inquire into the expediency of setting apart a permanent fund for internal improvement”; on December 23d, he reported a bill setting aside the bonus paid by the United States Bank, $1,500,000 and future dividends from bank stock, “as a fund for constructing roads and canals.”[94] In his speech supporting it he said: “that the extent of our republic exposes us to the greatest of all calamities, next to the loss of liberty, and even to that in its consequences, _disunion_.” “Probably not more than twenty-five or thirty members, in the total number of one hundred and seventy, regarded the constitutional difficulty as fatal to the bill.”[95] Madison, however, consistent and persistent in his strict construction of the Constitution, vetoed it. [91] H. Adams, vol. vi., p. 143.