Now the combatants rallied and the battle thickened at one point, now around another.

At Washington the tide rolls in with resounding fury about the right of petition and the freedom of debate, then through the free States it surges and beats around the right of free speech and the freedom of the press.

Storm clouds are flying from the East and from the West, flying out of the North and out of the South.

Everywhere the chaos of the winds has burst, and the anarchy of the "live thunder." Benton with his customary optimism from a Southern standpoint, rejoiced in the year 1836 that the people of the Northern States had "chased off the foreign emissaries, silenced the gabbling tongues of female dupes, and dispersed the assemblies, whether fanatical, visionary, or incendiary, of all that congregated to preach against evils that afflicted others, not them, and to propose remedies to aggravate the disease which they pretended to cure." Calhoun's pessimism was clearer eyed.

The great nullifier perceived at once the insuppressible nature of the Abolition movement and early predicted that the spirit then abroad in the North would not "die away of itself without a shock or convulsion." Yes, it was as he had prophesied, the anti-slavery reform was, at the very moment of Benton's groundless jubilation, rising and spreading with astonishing progress through the free States.