Smarting from this injustice, Calhoun turned his attention to the question of state sovereignty, and in February, 1833, South Carolina passed the nullification ordinance to which we have already referred.  Calhoun at once resigned the vice-presidency and took his seat in the Senate, prepared to defend the attitude of his state.  But Jackson did not wait for that.  Seeing that here was an opportunity to strike his enemy, he ordered troops to South Carolina, and threatened to hang Calhoun as high as Haman—­a threat which he very possibly would have attempted to carry out had not hostilities been averted by the genius for compromise of Henry Clay.  From that time forward, Calhoun became the high priest of the doctrine of state rights and the great defender of slavery.  He fought inch by inch the growing sentiment against it; he knew it was a losing fight, and almost the last words uttered by his dying lips were, “The South!  The poor South!  God knows what will become of her!”

* * * * *

The great triumvirate left no successors to compare with them in prestige or power.  Two survivals from the war of 1812 were still on the scene, Thomas Hart Benton and Lewis Cass.  Benton was a North Carolina man who had removed to Nashville, and at the outbreak of the war, enlisted under Andrew Jackson, and got into a disgraceful street fight with him, in the course of which Jackson was nearly killed.  Strange to say, that doughty old hero chose to forget the matter long years afterwards, when Benton was in the Senate—­a Union senator from the slave state of Missouri.

Cass also served through the war, but at the North; was involved in Hull’s surrender of Detroit and broke his sword in rage at the disgrace of it; and was afterwards governor of Michigan and Jackson’s secretary of war; then, in 1848, Democratic nominee for President and defeated because of Martin Van Buren’s disaffection; finally, in 1857, Buchanan’s secretary of state, resigning, in 1860, because that shilly-shally President could not make up his mind to send reinforcements to Bob Anderson at Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor.  A man who played many parts, filled many positions, and filled them well, Cass’s name deserves to be more widely remembered than it is.

In those days, a strange, pompous and ineffective figure was flitting across the stage, impressing men with a respect and significance which it did not possess, its name, Stephen A. Douglas, nicknamed “The Little Giant,” but giant in little else than power to create disturbance.  Perhaps no other man ever possessed that power in quite the same degree; nor possessed in a greater degree that fascination of personality which makes friends and gains adherents.

Consumed by a gnawing desire of the presidency, beaten for the nomination in 1852, destroying the serenity of the land two years later by contending that Congress had no right to limit slavery in the territories, in the vain hope of winning southern support, but finding himself instead dubbed traitor and Judas Iscariot, receiving thirty pieces of silver from a club of Ohio women, travelling from Boston to Chicago “by the light of his own effigies,” which yelling crowds were burning at the stake, and finally hooted off the stage in his own city, certainly it would seem that Douglas’s public career was over forever.