Five days later, Senator Wilkins, of the Judiciary Committee, presented the famous “Force Bill,” and one of the most violent debates in history began. On the following day, Calhoun submitted a set of resolutions setting forth his views of the constitutional question involved, in the hope of thereby directing the debate into that channel. But the Senate was in no temper for such a discussion and pushed forward to the debate on the main and pressing question. The Calhoun resolutions were speedily tabled. Wilkins led off in the debate, and others followed, one on the heels of the other, until at length John Tyler took the floor to deliver the speech which, after that of Calhoun, was the most forceful attack to be made upon the measure. Reading his speech to-day one wonders how the Republic outlived the Jackson Administrations. Dire calamity was predicted as a result of his every action. He saw Carolinians again driven “into the morasses where Marion and Sumter found refuge,” with their cities and towns leveled to the dust, and their daughters clothed in mourning, with “helpless orphans” made of their “rising sons.” But, he continued, “I will not despair. Rome had her Curtius, Sparta her Leonidas, and Athens her band of devoted patriots; and shall it be said that the American Senate contains not one man who will step forward to rescue his country in this, her moment of peril? Although that man may never wear an earthly crown or sway an earthly scepter, eternal fame shall weave an evergreen around his brow, and his name shall rank with the proudest patriots of the proudest climes.” With the closing sentence, Tyler turned significantly to Henry Clay, who sat an interested spectator. Throughout this memorable debate he was to remain mute. The great orator and party leader was making sympathetic gestures to the extreme State-Rights men of the South. Even at this time, and knowing Tyler’s views, he was writing to his friend, Francis Brooke: “Will he [Tyler] be reëlected? We feel here some solicitude on that point, being convinced that under all circumstances, he would be far preferable to any person that could be sent.”[577] And such was his partisan hate of Jackson that the second leader of the party Opposition, John M. Clayton, in speaking in support of the Force Bill, could not refrain from an exhibition of boorishness and bigotry in coupling his advocacy of the Jackson measure with a sneer at Jackson. “My support of the measure,” he said, “is predicated on no servile submission to any Executive mandate, on no implicit and unlimited faith in any man.... I will not be deterred from the adoption of this measure by any consideration of the source from which it has emanated.”