American History, Volume 1 by Thomas S. Kidd

Author:Thomas S. Kidd [Kidd, Thomas S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, General
ISBN: 9781433644429
Google: lYaLDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
Published: 2019-04-01T16:09:49+00:00

The Nullification Crisis

As we have seen, Jackson inherited a simmering feud between southerners—especially South Carolinians—and the national government over tariff policy. In the South Carolina Exposition and Protest (1828), Calhoun had set the stage for his home state to nullify the tariff when the time was right. Calhoun was serving as Jackson’s vice president, and the tension between them spilled over at an 1830 Jefferson Day dinner. At the event Jackson proposed a toast to “our Union,” insisting that “it must be preserved.” Calhoun countered with a toast to “the Union. Next to Liberty, the most dear. May we always remember that it can only be preserved by distributing equally the benefits and the burdens of the Union.”

The feud over the tariff and nullification precipitated one of the most celebrated debates in the history of the Senate, that between Robert Hayne (South Carolina) and Daniel Webster (Massachusetts) in 1830. Hayne claimed the northern defenders of the tariff were trying to ruin southern society. Webster, by all accounts one of the greatest orators in American political history, denounced the Hayne/Calhoun view of states’ rights as a pretense for disunion. He rejected the idea that liberty had to precede union: in American history, liberty and union were inextricably linked. Webster prayed that when the time came for him to die, he would not have to look upon “fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!” Instead, he heralded the principle that is “dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” “Liberty and Union” endured as one of the great nationalist mottoes for the next three decades, and President Lincoln would call Webster’s oration the “very best speech that was ever delivered.”

Shortly after Jackson defeated his old enemy Henry Clay in the 1832 presidential election, the crisis over tariffs and nullification went to a new level of severity. Jackson had tried to moderate tariff policy, but in 1832, Congress passed another tariff that kept duties high on British textiles. Again this hurt southern cotton producers. Following through on Calhoun’s earlier threats, the state of South Carolina held a nullification convention in late 1832, declaring the 1828 and 1832 tariffs “null, void, and no law.” The state would not allow federal authorities to collect the tariff in South Carolina.

Jackson had been sympathetic to southerners’ grievances against the tariff, but now he was outraged. As president he saw nullification as a threat to the Union itself, and he believed he had no greater responsibility than to preserve the Union. He declared nullification, or “the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, [as] incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.” The nullifiers’ ultimate goal, he thundered, was disunion, and disunion was “TREASON.

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