I only state the fact; and I think it will appear to be true, that among the earliest and boldest advocates of the tariff, as a measure of protection, and on the express ground of protection, were leading gentlemen of South Carolina in Congress.  I did not then, and cannot now, understand their language in any other sense.  While this tariff of 1816 was under discussion in the House of Representatives, an honorable gentleman from Georgia, now of this house,[3] moved to reduce the proposed duty on cotton.  He failed, by four votes, South Carolina giving three votes (enough to have turned the scale) against his motion.  The act, Sir, then passed, and received on its passage the support of a majority of the Representatives of South Carolina present and voting.  This act is the first in the order of those now denounced as plain usurpations.  We see it daily in the list, by the side of those of 1824 and 1828, as a case of manifest oppression, justifying disunion.  I put it home to the honorable member from South Carolina, that his own State was not only “art and part” in this measure, but the causa causans.  Without her aid, this seminal principle of mischief, this root of Upas, could not have been planted.  I have already said, and it is true, that this act proceeded on the ground of protection.  It interfered directly with existing interests of great value and amount.  It cut up the Calcutta cotton trade by the roots; but it passed, nevertheless, and it passed on the principle of protecting manufactures, on the principle against free trade, on the principle opposed to that which lets us alone.

Such, Mr. President, were the opinions of important and leading gentlemen from South Carolina, on the subject of internal improvement, in 1816.  I went out of Congress the next year, and, returning again in 1823, thought I found South Carolina where I had left her.  I really supposed that all things remained as they were, and that the South Carolina doctrine of internal improvements would be defended by the same eloquent voices, and the same strong arms, as formerly.  In the lapse of these six years, it is true, political associations had assumed a new aspect and new divisions.  A strong party had arisen in the South hostile to the doctrine of internal improvements.  Anti-consolidation was the flag under which this party fought; and its supporters inveighed against internal improvements, much after the manner in which the honorable gentleman has now inveighed against them, as part and parcel of the system of consolidation.  Whether this party arose in South Carolina itself, or in the neighborhood, is more than I know.  I think the latter.  However that may have been, there were those found in South Carolina ready to make war upon it, and who did make intrepid war upon it.  Names being regarded as things in such controversies, they bestowed on the anti-improvement gentlemen the appellation of Radicals.  Yes, Sir, the appellation of Radicals, as a term of