Quite a different type, and in some respects a greater genius, was George McDuffie. His career was a mingling of romance and tragedy. A child of poverty, the protégé of a Calhoun,[406] he had while yet in college been regarded “as a young man of extraordinary talents,” albeit at that time “he had not that passionate and eloquent declamation which he was afterwards to display in Congress.”[407] After hearing his great speech on the tariff in 1827, Josiah Quincy, who heard him, described him as “the most sensational orator of the time.”[408] In the fight against the Panama Mission, Sargent thought him “decidedly the most violent and aggressive speaker arrayed against the Administration.”[409] His passionate and impulsive nature frequently led to personal encounters; and in reaching an understanding of his irritable and sour disposition, it is profitable to know that just before entering Congress he had been wounded in the spine in a duel, and never afterwards knew a day free from personal discomfort. This wound, which ultimately killed him, changed a good-tempered and jovial man into the irritable, morose, and nervous creature known to history.[410] The indifference of the protectionists to the interests of the South, and the intemperate attacks of the abolitionists upon the Southern people, acted upon the diseased genius as an irritant and drove him to extremes. Even so, he rejected Nullification as a remedy, and insisted that the sole recourse of the Southerners was revolution.[411] Intellectually honest, morally clean, physically ailing, he put such of himself as he cared for the world to see into his public acts. He withdrew into himself--taciturn, lonely. “A spare, grim looking man, who was an admirer of Milton, and who was never known to smile or jest,” as Perley Poore describes him.[412] His health gone, his life uncertain, an idolized wife taken from him within a year, his leader’s aspirations wrecked, his section threatened, it is not strange that he poured forth on Andrew Jackson such torrents of eloquent vituperation. VII Standing not on ceremony, McDuffie hastened to report a bill, accompanied by an elaborate report in the nature of an indictment of the protective system, which “ought to be abandoned with all convenient and practical despatch, upon every principle of justice, patriotism and sound policy.” The bill provided an immediate reduction of duties on all articles except iron, steel, salt, cotton-bagging, hemp and flax, and on everything made of cotton, wool, and iron, to a basis of twenty-five per cent ad valorem. On the excepted articles the reduction was to be gradual, tumbling to twenty-five per cent at once, to eighteen and three quarters per cent on June 30, 1833, and to twelve and a half per cent one year later.