This proposal circulated in a few days from Maine to New Orleans by the power of the printing-press: the opponents of the tariff adopted it with enthusiasm; meetings were formed on all sides, and delegates were named.

The majority of these individuals were well known, and some of them had earned a considerable degree of celebrity.

South Carolina alone, which afterwards took up arms in the same cause, sent sixty-three delegates.

On October 1, 1831, this assembly, which according to the American custom had taken the name of a Convention, met at Philadelphia; it consisted of more than two hundred members.

Its debates were public, and they at once assumed a legislative character; the extent of the powers of Congress, the theories of free trade, and the different clauses of the tariff, were discussed in turn.
At the end of ten days' deliberation the Convention broke up, after having published an address to the American people, in which it declared: I.That Congress had not the right of making a tariff, and that the existing tariff was unconstitutional; II.