equally the benefit and burden of the Union." The issue between the president and the vice-president was now complete, and the Jacksonian Democracy was squarely committed against nullification. Jackson had risen to the occasion as only a strong and a great man could rise, and his few, telling words, finely contrasting at every point with Calhoun's utterances, rang throughout the whole country, and will last as long as our government. One result, at least, the Nullifiers accomplished,--they completely put an end to the Jefferson birthday celebrations. The South Carolinians had no intention of flinching from the contest which they had provoked, even when they saw that the North and West were united against them, and though the tide began to set the same way in their sister states of the South; North Carolina, among the latter, being the first and most pronounced in her support of the president and denunciation of the Nullifiers. The men of the Palmetto State have always ranked high for hotheaded courage, and they soon showed that they had wills as fiery as that of Jackson himself. Yet in the latter they had met an antagonist well worthy of any foeman's steel. In declining an invitation to be present at Charleston, on July 4, 1831, the president again defined most clearly his position in favor of the Union, and his words had an especial significance because he let it be seen that he was fully determined to back them up by force if necessary. But his letter only had the effect of inflaming still more the minds of the South Carolinians. The prime cause of irritation, the tariff, still remained; and in 1832, Clay, having entered the Senate after a long retirement from politics, put the finishing stroke to their anger by procuring the passage of a new tariff bill, which left the planter states almost as badly off as did the law of 1828. Jackson signed this, although not believing that it went far enough in the reduction of duties. In the presidential election of 1832, Jackson defeated Clay by an enormous majority; Van Buren was elected vice-president, there being thus a Northern man on the ticket. South Carolina declined to take part in the election, throwing away her vote. Again, it must be kept in mind that the slave question did not shape, or, indeed, enter into this contest at all, directly, although beginning to be present in the background as a source of irritation. In 1832 there was ten-fold more feeling in the North against Masonry, and secret societies generally, than there was against slavery.