The Tariff Act Nullification Crisis - 1833
In 1828, Congress passed a high import tariff that South Carolina labeled the Tariff of Abominations. They threatened to nullify the law.
[I]t cannot be shown, that the Constitution is a compact between State governments. The Constitution itself, in its very front, refutes that idea; it, declares that it is ordained and established by the people of the United States. So far from saying that it is established by the governments of the several States, it does not even say that it is established by the people of the several States; but it pronounces that it is established by the people of the United States, in the aggregate. . . . . They undertook to form a general government, which should stand on a new basis; not a confederacy, not a league, not a compact between States, but a Constitution; a popular government, founded in popular election, directly responsible to the people themselves, and divided into branches with prescribed limits of power, and prescribed duties. They ordained such a government, they gave it the name of a Constitution, therein they established a distribution of powers between this, their general government, and their several State governments.
The Union itself is too full of benefit to be hazarded in propositions for changing its original basis. I go for the Constitution as it is, and for the Union as it is.
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The Tariff Nullification issue came to a head in 1833. South Carolina began assembling arms and militia Andrew Jackson convinced Congress to expand presidential powers to use the U.S. army in South Carolina. Congress agreed, passing the Force Bill and also lowered the tariff and the issue subsided.
"I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, 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." Andrew Jackson
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| Andrew Jackson |
Andrew Jackson's Proclamation on Nullification, 12/1832
Letter of Andrew Jackson to Reverend A J Crawford
I have had a laborious task here, but nullification is dead; and its actors and courtiers will only be remembered by the people to be execrated for their wicked designs to sever and destroy the only good Government on the globe, and that prosperity and happiness we enjoy over every other portion of the world. Haman's gallows ought to be the fate of all such ambitious men who would involve their country in civil war, and all the evils in its train, that they might reign and ride on its whirlwinds and direct the storm. The free people of these United States have spoken, and consigned these wicked demagogues to their proper doom. Take care of your nullifiers; you have them among you; let them meet with the indignant frowns of every man who loves his country. The tariff, it is now known, was a mere pretext—its burden was on your coarse woolens. By the law of July, 1832, coarse woolen was reduced to five per cent, for the benefit of the South. Mr. Clay's bill takes it up and classes it with woolens at fifty per cent., reduces it gradually down to twenty per cent., and there it is to remain, and Mr. Calhoun and all the nullifiers agree to the principle. The cash duties and home valuation will be equal to fifteen per cent, more, and after the year 1842, you pay on coarse. woolens thirty-five per cent. If this is not protection, I cannot understand; therefore the tariff was only the pretext, and disunion and a southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro or slavery question....
James Madison:
While Calhoun’s "Exposition” claimed that nullification was based on the reasoning behind the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, 79 year old James Madison in an August 28, 1830 letter to Edward Everett, intended for publication, disagreed. Madison wrote, denying that any individual state could alter the compact:
| Can more be necessary to demonstrate the inadmissibility of such a doctrine than that it puts it in the power of the smallest fraction over 1/4 of the U. S. — that is, of 7 States out of 24 — to give the law and even the Constn. to 17 States, each of the 17 having as parties to the Constn. an equal right with each of the 7 to expound it & to insist on the exposition. That the 7 might, in particular instances be right and the 17 wrong, is more than possible. But to establish a positive & permanent rule giving such a power to such a minority over such a majority, would overturn the first principle of free Govt. and in practice necessarily overturn the Govt. itself. |
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