Nullification crisis
The Nullification Crisis nearly tore the United States apart in 1832 and 1833, before a single shot was fired. South Carolina declared two federal tariffs unconstitutional and simply void within its borders, daring the federal government to enforce them. President Andrew Jackson responded by threatening to hang the first man he could lay hands on engaged in what he called treasonable conduct, upon the first tree he could reach. The questions at stake were not merely about import duties. They were about whether any state could unilaterally cancel a federal law, whether the Union itself was a permanent arrangement, and whether the tension between Southern institutions and the federal government's power could be managed without bloodshed. What followed was a collision of giants: Calhoun against Jackson, South Carolina against Washington, and the theory of state sovereignty against the logic of a unified nation.
Thomas Jefferson planted the seed of nullification in the Kentucky Resolutions of the late 1790s, arguing that when the federal government assumed powers not delegated to it, a state's rightful remedy was to nullify the offending act within its own borders. James Madison wrote the companion Virginia Resolutions, asserting that states had both the right and the duty to interpose against dangerous exercises of federal power. Yet Madison himself later drew back from that position. As chairman of a Virginia legislative committee, he insisted in a published report from 1800 that state declarations carried no legal force on their own. When the nullification crisis arrived, Madison wrote to Edward Everett in a letter dated the 28th of August 1830, denying that any individual state could alter the constitutional compact. He pointed out that giving seven states out of twenty-four the power to override the remaining seventeen would overturn the first principle of free government. Jefferson's own Kentucky Resolutions, Madison argued at the time of the crisis, were meant to describe a revolutionary right, not a constitutional one. The Hartford Convention of December 1814 had offered an earlier test of these theories: New England delegates, furious at Madison's war policy, debated states' rights at length but ultimately produced only a list of proposed constitutional amendments, not a declaration of nullification. That restraint showed that the doctrine remained contested even among those who invoked it.
Martin Van Buren was the chief architect of the Tariff of 1828, though Silas Wright Jr. of New York prepared its main provisions. Van Buren's calculation was openly political: the South would vote for Andrew Jackson regardless, so its interests could be safely ignored in the bill's drafting. The tariff levied heavy taxes on raw materials consumed by New England, such as hemp, flax, molasses, iron, and sail duck, and added protection for Pennsylvania iron interests as well. The aim was to deliver Pennsylvania, New York, Missouri, Ohio, and Kentucky to Jackson in the election. President John Quincy Adams signed it in early 1828. Southerners immediately called it the Tariff of Abominations. In South Carolina, the economic context made the tariff feel like a blow to a state already reeling. During the 1820s, the state's population had shrunk by 56,000 whites and 30,000 enslaved people out of a total population of 580,000, as people left for more fertile land in the west. The Panic of 1819 had devastated the low-country planter class, whose wealth rested on rice, indigo, and cotton. Competition from Gulf Coast cotton lands, which yielded more per acre, made recovery slow. George McDuffie gave the anti-tariff cause its most memorable argument with his Forty Bale theory, claiming that a 40% tariff on finished cotton goods meant the manufacturer effectively stole 40 bales out of every 100 a planter produced. The arithmetic was wrong, but the politics were powerful.
John C. Calhoun, a native South Carolinian serving as Vice President, accepted a commission from the South Carolina legislature to write a formal response to the tariff situation. In a few weeks he produced a 35,000-word draft that became the "Exposition and Protest". Completed in late 1828 and circulated in 5,000 printed copies, the document argued that the Tariff of 1828 was unconstitutional because it favored manufacturing over commerce and agriculture. Calhoun held that the tariff power existed only to raise revenue, not to shield domestic industries from foreign competition. The core of the doctrine was the power of a democratically elected state convention to veto any act of Congress it deemed unconstitutional. To deny this power, Calhoun wrote, was to give one party the exclusive right to judge the division of power, which amounted to a consolidated national government with unlimited authority. Because he still harbored ambitions of succeeding Jackson as president, Calhoun kept his authorship of the document secret, though word leaked quickly. By the 26th of July 1831, he published his Fort Hill Address openly, expanding the positions of the "Exposition". Daniel Webster, his great antagonist, acknowledged it was the ablest and most plausible, and therefore the most dangerous, vindication of that particular form of revolution. Within South Carolina, the address was overshadowed almost immediately by news of the Nat Turner insurrection in Virginia, which pushed even moderate planters toward more extreme positions.
Andrew Jackson entered office in March 1829 aware of the crisis brewing over the Tariff of Abominations. He believed some protectionism was justified for goods essential to military readiness, and he did not want the tariff reduced until the national debt was fully paid off. His first three messages to Congress addressed the issue but offered no specific relief. The open break between Jackson and Calhoun was dramatized on the 13th of April 1830, at the traditional Democratic Party dinner honoring Jefferson's birthday. Hayne toasted "The Union of the States, and the Sovereignty of the States." Jackson's toast, when his turn came, cut through all ambiguity: "Our Federal Union: It must be preserved." Senator Thomas Hart Benton later wrote in his memoirs that the toast electrified the country. A few days later, a visitor from South Carolina asked if Jackson had any message for friends back home. Jackson said that if a single drop of blood were shed in opposition to federal law, he would hang the first man he could lay hands on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree he could reach. Jackson also signed the Tariff of 1832 on the 14th of July 1832, a compromise that most Northerners and about half of Southern members of Congress supported. South Carolina was not appeased. By October 1832, Jackson was ordering the secretaries of the army and navy to rotate troops based on loyalty, directing General Winfield Scott to prepare for military operations, and positioning a naval squadron in Norfolk to be ready to move to Charleston. On the 10th of December 1832, his Proclamation to the People of South Carolina called nullification an impractical absurdity and a metaphysical subtlety in pursuit of an impractical theory, and declared the power to annul a federal law incompatible with the existence of the Union.
On the 24th of November 1832, a South Carolina state convention adopted the Ordinance of Nullification, declaring the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 unconstitutional and unenforceable within the state after the 1st of February 1833. The legislature had voted for the convention 96 to 25 in the House and 31 to 13 in the Senate. Governor Robert Hayne, who succeeded James Hamilton as governor in 1833, assembled a force of 2,000 mounted minutemen and 25,000 infantry who would march to Charleston if federal troops arrived. These troops were to be armed with $100,000 in arms purchased in the North. The enabling legislation was carefully built to avoid unnecessary confrontations. Importers could pay the tariff if they chose. Other merchants could obtain a paper bond from customs officials and then refuse payment when it came due; if their goods were seized, they could file for recovery in state court. Customs officers who refused to return goods would face civil liability for twice their value. A test oath bound all new state officials to support the ordinance. At the same time, the western part of the state and a faction in Charleston, led by Joel Poinsett and Thomas Smith Grimke, remained loyal to the Union and refused to go along with the nullifiers. James Hamilton had formally launched the nullification campaign on the 28th of October 1828 at the Colleton County Courthouse in Walterborough, and the movement's final electoral victory came in the state elections of 1832, described at the time as charged with tension and bespattered with violence, where polite debates often degenerated into frontier brawls.
Henry Clay, back in the Senate after a two-decade absence, took the lead in finding a way out. In February 1833, after consulting manufacturers and Louisiana sugar interests, he worked out a compromise that extended the nullifiers' proposed transition period from seven and a half years to nine years, with a final target rate of 20% ad valorem. After securing support from his protectionist base, Clay approached Calhoun through an intermediary. Following a private meeting at Clay's boardinghouse, negotiations moved forward. Clay introduced the tariff bill on the 12th of February 1833. A select committee consisting of Clay, Felix Grundy of Tennessee, George M. Dallas of Pennsylvania, William Cabell Rives of Virginia, Webster, John M. Clayton of Delaware, and Calhoun reported the bill on February 21. The Compromise Tariff provided that all rates above 20% would be cut by one tenth every two years, reaching 20% by 1842, and it preserved the principle that tariffs could be raised again if national interests required. The House passed the Compromise Tariff 119 to 85 and the Force Bill 149 to 48; the Senate passed the tariff 29 to 16 and the Force Bill 32 to 1, with many opponents walking out rather than voting against it. The South Carolina convention reconvened on the 11th of March 1833, repealed the Nullification Ordinance, and then, as a purely symbolic gesture, nullified the Force Bill itself. Robert Barnwell Rhett, speaking at the convention on the 13th of March, warned that the real struggle was not about the tariff at all but about the survival of slavery in the face of what he called the despotic nature of the government.
On the 1st of May 1833, Jackson predicted to those around him that the tariff had only ever been a pretext, and that disunion and a Southern confederacy were the real object. The next pretext, he said, would be the slavery question. Southern states that had long championed states' rights offered sharp rebukes to South Carolina's method. The Alabama legislature called nullification unsound in theory and dangerous in practice. Georgia pronounced it mischievous, rash and revolutionary. Mississippi lawmakers criticized South Carolina for reckless precipitancy. In the political realignment that followed, the Southern wing of the Whig Party emerged, a coalition united by opposition to Jackson's vision of federal and executive power. Former National Republicans with urban and commercial outlooks joined former nullifiers under the same banner. Richard Rush published James Madison's final written statement, two paragraphs titled "Advice to My Country", in 1850. Madison had written that the Union should be cherished and perpetuated, and warned that an open enemy to it should be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened. By 1850, Southern opinion had hardened to the point that Madison's advice was denounced as a forgery. Historian Charles Edward Cauthen traced a direct line from the nullification crisis to 1860, arguing that South Carolina's leaders had spent thirty years educating the state's population in the principles and necessity of secession, with a skill and success he called hardly inferior to the masterly propaganda of the abolitionists themselves. When South Carolina became the first state to secede in 1860, it was, Cauthen noted, more internally united than any other Southern state.
Common questions
What was the Nullification Crisis and when did it happen?
The Nullification Crisis was a sectional political confrontation between the state of South Carolina and the federal government in 1832 and 1833, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. South Carolina declared the federal Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 unconstitutional and void within its borders, and threatened secession if the federal government attempted to enforce collection by force.
Why did South Carolina nullify the tariffs during the Nullification Crisis?
South Carolina objected that the protective tariffs burdened Southern agricultural states that imported most manufactured goods while benefiting Northern manufacturers. The state was also suffering severe economic decline following the Panic of 1819, with falling cotton prices and competition from more fertile Gulf Coast lands making recovery slow. John C. Calhoun argued in his 35,000-word "Exposition and Protest" that a protective tariff was constitutionally permissible only to raise revenue, not to shield domestic industries.
What was Andrew Jackson's response to the Nullification Crisis?
Jackson signed the Tariff of 1832 as a partial compromise but refused to accept nullification as a constitutional doctrine. On the 10th of December 1832, he issued a Proclamation to the People of South Carolina calling nullification an impractical absurdity and declaring the power of any state to annul a federal law incompatible with the existence of the Union. He also sent his Force Bill Message to Congress on the 16th of January 1833, seeking authority to use military force to collect tariffs in South Carolina.
How was the Nullification Crisis resolved?
The crisis ended when Congress passed both the Compromise Tariff of 1833 and the Force Bill on the 1st of March 1833. The Compromise Tariff, negotiated chiefly by Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, reduced all rates above 20% by one tenth every two years until reaching a 20% target in 1842. South Carolina's convention repealed the Nullification Ordinance on the 15th of March 1833 but nullified the Force Bill three days later as a symbolic gesture.
What role did John C. Calhoun play in the Nullification Crisis?
Calhoun was the most effective intellectual proponent of state nullification. As Vice President, he secretly authored the "Exposition and Protest" in 1828, a 35,000-word argument that states, acting through democratically elected conventions, could veto unconstitutional federal laws. He resigned the vice presidency to run for the Senate, where he could more openly defend nullification, and later helped negotiate the Compromise Tariff of 1833 that ended the standoff.
What were the long-term consequences of the Nullification Crisis?
The crisis accelerated the formation of the Southern wing of the Whig Party, a coalition united by opposition to Jackson's definition of federal and executive power. It also intensified the connection between states' rights arguments and the defense of slavery, as Calhoun and others increasingly framed the tariff dispute as a proxy for the larger conflict over Southern institutions. Historian Charles Edward Cauthen argued that South Carolina's leaders used the three decades after the crisis to educate the state's population in the principles and necessity of secession, making it the first state to leave the Union in 1860.
All sources
6 references cited across the entry
- 1webSouth Carolina Legislature Passes the Ordinance of NullificationUniversity of Richmond