to defend their posts against any persons whatsoever; troops were ordered from Fortress Monroe; and General Scott was sent to take full command and to strengthen the defenses as he found necessary.  The South Carolinians were to be allowed to talk, and even to adopt “ordinances,” to their hearts’ content.  But the moment they stepped across the line of disobedience to the laws of the United States they were to be made to feel the weight of the nation’s restraining hand.

“The duty of the Executive is a plain one,” wrote the President to Joel R. Poinsett, a prominent South Carolina unionist; “the laws will be executed and the United States preserved by all the constitutional and legal means he is invested with.”  When the situation bore its most serious aspect Jackson received a call from Sam Dale, who had been one of his dispatch bearers at the Battle of New Orleans.  “General Dale,” exclaimed the President during the conversation, “if this thing goes on, our country will be like a bag of meal with both ends open.  Pick it up in the middle or endwise, and it will run out.  I must tie the bag and save the country.”  “Dale,” he exclaimed again later, “they are trying me here; you will witness it; but, by the God of heaven, I will uphold the laws.”  “I understood him to be referring to nullification again,” related Dale in his account of the interview, “and I expressed the hope that things would go right.”  “They shall go right, sir,” the President fairly shouted, shattering his pipe on the table by way of further emphasis.

When Jackson heard that the convention at Columbia had taken the step expected of it, he made the following entry in his diary:  “South Carolina has passed her ordinance of nullification and secession.  As soon as it can be had in authentic form, meet it with a proclamation.”  The proclamation was issued December 10, 1832.  Parton relates that the President wrote the first draft of this proclamation under such a glow of feeling that he was obliged “to scatter the written pages all over the table to let them dry,” and that the document was afterwards revised by his scholarly Secretary of State, Edward Livingston.  With Jackson supplying the ideas and spirit and Livingston the literary form, the result was the ablest and most impressive state paper of the period.  It categorically denied the right of a State either to annul a federal law or to secede from the Union.  It admitted that the laws complained of operated unequally but took the position that this must be true of all revenue measures.  It expressed the inflexible determination of the Administration to repress and punish every form of resistance to federal authority.  Deep argument, solemn warning, and fervent entreaty were skillfully combined.  But the most powerful effect was likely to be that produced by the President’s flaming denial—­set in bold type in the contemporary prints—­of the Hayne-Calhoun creed:  “I consider the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.”