The tariff of 1828 exasperated the divisions between North and South. Many southerners led by Calhoun began to talk abut the right of states to secede. On January 25th 1829 Rober Y. Hayne of South Carolina gave a stirring speech on behalf of state sovereignty. The next day before a packed Senate Senator Daniel Webster gave a stirring speech - the last lines of the speech were:
When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shing on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluteddd, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as "What is all this worth?" nor those other words of delusion and folly, "Liberty first and Union afterwards"; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, plazing on all it sample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true Am erican heart, - Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseperable!

 

---