The "Force Bill" was to be accepted by the Calhoun men; but a new and final tariff measure was to take the place of the one upon which Jackson had set his heart. The famous compromise law of 1833 was the result. This gave the planters a reduction to twenty per cent, a lower rate than Jackson had offered, but the reductions were to be made gradually during a period of ten years, thus giving time for the industrial men to readjust their affairs without great losses. There was one joker in the scheme which the Southerners seem to have winked at: that which exempted the wool-growers of the Middle States and the West from the reductions. The author of the American System now hotly urged the men who a year ago would defy the "South, the Democratic party, and the Devil" to undo all their work. On March 1, three days before the close of the session, both the President's "Force Bill" and Clay's compromise tariff passed.
Meanwhile South Carolina, acting on Calhoun's advice, had postponed the enforcement of her nullifying ordinance, and now, as Congress adjourned, the former Vice-President, ill and greatly discouraged, hurried by rapid stages to Columbia to make sure that the crisis should be brought to a peaceful close. The convention was reassembled; an embassy from Virginia was on the ground urging peace, and, as was natural, the ordinance was repealed. The planters had really won a victory and the rising industrial groups understood this both at the time and later, when they clamored for the restoration of their privileges. The cotton and tobacco men, producing the larger part of the national exports, had shown their strength. Their opponents, the manufacturers and the bankers of the East, with a much greater income, were as yet not so strong as the planters. The West and the South were their markets, and concessions must be made; the Union was to them essential, while to the South, selling its huge crops in European markets, it was less important. As yet the West, with its hero the master in Washington, had obtained none of the reforms for which it had so long striven. Benton and his friends looked to the next Congress for results. Would they be disappointed?
_The Messages and Papers of the Presidents_ (1900), vol. _II_, gives Jackson's official statements. Bassett's and Parton's biographies, already mentioned, are still very serviceable. There is no full biography of Clay, but C. Colton's _The Private Life of Henry Clay_ contains some of Clay's letters. Carl Schurz's _Henry Clay_ and T. H. Clay's _Henry Clay_, already noted, offer some good information. The best source for Calhoun is J. F. Jameson's _The Correspondence of John C. Calhoun_ (1899). G. Hunt's _Life of Calhoun_ (1908), in _American Crises_ series, is excellent, while D. F. Houston's _Critical Study of Nullification_, already referred to, and W. E. Dodd's _Calhoun_, in _Statesmen of the Old South_ (1911), offer still further information as to Calhoun and nullification. C. H. Van Tyne's _Letters of Daniel Webster_ (1902) supplies information about Webster which is lacking in the older _Works_ by Everett (1851) or F. Webster (1857). H. C. Lodge's _Daniel Webster_, in _American Statesmen_ series and J. B. McMaster's _Daniel Webster_ (1902) are the standard biographies. Thomas H. Benton has told his own story in his _Thirty Years' View_ (1854), though Roosevelt's _Thomas Hart Benton_, in the _American Statesmen_, and W. M. Meigs's _Thomas Hart Benton_, in the _American Crises_ series, are good brief portraits. William McDonald's _The Jacksonian Democracy_ (1906), in the _American Nation_ series, is an excellent general survey, while E. Stanwood's _American Tariff Controversies_ (1903) is the best account of the tariff disputes.