In 1829, a Connecticut senator floated the idea of putting an indefinite limit on the sale of lands in the west and the surveying of new land. A Missouri senator protested that this was just a ploy on the part of the northeast states to keep people from moving west so they'd stay put and work in the northern factories for peanuts.

The topic of the tariff of 1828 and nullification was still on everyone's mind, and it got dragged into the discussion in the Senate. South Carolina senator Robert Hayne (probably on secret orders from John C. Calhoun) gave a speech proposing that the tariff be lowered, ditto the price of western land. He thought that all the money the government made from the high sale prices of land was creating a huge treasury with which the feds could create all kinds of mischief. Maybe they'd want to open public schools or something outrageous like that.

Enter Daniel Webster, who you certainly don't want to mess with in a debate. He got up in the face of Senator Hayne, rebutting his arguments and piling on criticism of the south. The north was interested in the welfare of the whole nation; just think of what all those federal dollars could do—build universities, roads, canals. The south was protecting its own turf, and how selfish is that? Opposing education? Ridiculous.

Plus, Webster hinted, today it's tariffs; tomorrow, who knows, you might be questioning the whole idea of the Union. By this time, visitors packed the Senate hoping to see Hayne take it to Webster. Hayne accused Webster of being a power-hungry nationalist bent on sowing division between the south and west. It was Webster who was going down the Union-destroying path. It was the states who had the right to decide what was and wasn't Constitutional, not the federal government or the Supreme Court.

This went on for a couple of days. Webster ended his speech with the famous ringing statement, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable" (source).

In the end, nothing really changed. The Nullies still wanted to Nullify and the Unionists still wanted to enforce the tariff. But John Quincy Adams told Martin Van Buren that he thought the debate was "the most important one that has taken place since the existence of the Government. The two doctrines are now before the nation" (source).

Probably because of his legendary skill as an orator and his victory over the Devil, most history books conclude that Webster won the debate. But recent scholarship suggests that the reaction fell predictably along party lines (some things never change), and because the North eventually won the debate (via the Civil War) they're the ones who got to write history.

The debate laid out all the issues underneath the Nullification Crisis of 1832, and foreshadowed that South Carolina indeed meant business.