Forty-eight in the total of seventy-three pages of print filled by this speech are taken up with a defense of New England against the Southern charges of sectionalism and disloyalty.  Few utterances of the time are more familiar than the sentences bringing this part of the oration to a close:  “Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomium of Massachusetts; she needs none.  There she is.  Behold her, and judge for yourselves.  There is her history; the world knows it by heart....  There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever.”  If this had been all, the speech would have been only a spirited defense of the good name of a section and would hardly have gained immortality.  It was the Union, however, that most needed defense; and for that service the orator reserved his grandest efforts.

From the opening of the discussion Webster’s object had been to “force from Hayne or his supporters a full, frank, clear-cut statement of what nullification meant; and then, by opposing to this doctrine the Constitution as he understood it, to show its utter inadequacy and fallaciousness either as constitutional law or as a practical working scheme."[10] In the Southerner’s First Reply Webster found the statement that he wanted; he now proceeded to demolish it.  Many pages of print would be required to reproduce, even in substance, the arguments which he employed.  Yet the fundamentals are so simple that they can be stated in a dozen lines.  Sovereignty, under our form of government, resides in the people of the United States.  The exercise of the powers of sovereignty is entrusted by the people partly to the National Government and partly to the state Governments.  This division of functions is made in the federal Constitution.  If differences arise, as they must, as to the precise nature of the division, the decision rests—­not with the state legislatures, as Hayne had said—­but with the federal courts, which were established in part for that very purpose.  No State has a right to “nullify” a federal law; if one State has this right, all must have it, and the result can only be conflicts that would plunge the Government into chaos and the people ultimately into war.  If the Constitution is not what the people want, they can amend it; but as long as it stands, the Constitution and all lawful government under it must be obeyed.

The incomparably eloquent peroration penetrated to the heart of the whole matter.  The logic of nullification was disunion.  Fine theories might be spun and dazzling phrases made to convince men otherwise, but the hard fact would remain.  Hayne, Calhoun, and their like were playing with fire.  Already they were boldly weighing “the chances of preserving liberty when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder”; already they were hanging over the precipice of disunion, to see whether they could “fathom the depth of the abyss below.”  The last powerful words of the speech were, therefore, a glorification of the Union: