Herman Belz's The Webster-Hayne Debate on the Nature of the Union is the first document collection included in Liberty Fund's series of Liberty Classics. This is a fitting acknowledgment of the debate's importance in American history. Although once well-known, modern Americans have all but forgotten these debates and their underlying principles. This neglect reflects both the failure of historical education and the near-total victory of Daniel Webster's nationalist narrative. So ingrained has been this nationalist triumph that, for most Americans today, the real dispute is not whether the federal government has supreme authority but how it should use that power. Despite this dominance, issues such as the decriminalization of marijuana, the Tenth Amendment resolutions passed by state legislatures in recent years, and the tug-of-war between states and the federal government over education demonstrate that the long-neglected ideas espoused by Robert Y. Hayne remain relevant to diagnosing where the American experiment in self-government went wrong.
With Belz, Liberty Fund could not have picked a better editor. A prolific constitutional scholar, including co-authorship of what is still the standard textbook in American constitutional history, Belz spent his career explaining and defending the ideas of ordered liberty. With the Webster-Hayne Debate, Belz brings his formidable knowledge to bear in his brief, informative introductory essay. Belz points out that while Webster and Hayne were the obvious antagonists in the debates, they were not the only participants. Beginning in January of 1830, twenty-one of the then forty-eight members of the Senate spoke on this issue and delivered a total of sixty-five speeches among them. Nor was this debate a scripted, timed, and oft-boring spectacle like those common in today's Senate. Like the rolling snowball that creates an avalanche, the debates began over the seemingly innocuous question of what to do with western land sales and then morphed into an examination over the nature of the American union. Occurring over a three-month period, the debates addressed nearly every major political issue of the day including federal and state relations, the nature of judicial and executive power, the political wrangling and jockeying over the implications of the American system, the recent election of Andrew Jackson, the nullification controversy, and the growing sectional divide between North and South. The speeches Belz included in this volume all feature these topics.
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