1833 Nullification Crisis

The 1833 Nullification Crisis

In 1828, Congress passed a high import tariff that South Carolina labeled the Tariff of Abominations.  South Carolina threatened to nullify the law.  Congressional debates ensued, most famously in 1830 between S.C. senator Robert Y. Hayne and Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster.  (full text of the debate)

Hayne had accused the New England states a threat to liberty and said he cherished liberty above Union.  This led to Webster's most famous statement:

      "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable."  Daniel Webster, January 27, 1830.

[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.


Democrat Andrew Jackson had been elected president in 1828.  His vice president was South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun.  When the tariff came up again in 1832, South Carolinians had expected Jackson to veto the high tariff.  When he didn't, Calhoun resigned the vice-presidency in order to run for the Senate in the 1832 election.   

In November 1832 the S.C. Nullification Convention met.  The convention declared that the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional and unenforceable within the state of South Carolina after February 1, 1833.  They said that attempts to use force to collect the taxes would lead to the state’s secession.  Robert Hayne, now governor,  established a 2,000-man group of mounted minutemen and 25,000 infantry who would march to Charleston in the event of a military conflict.  These troops were to be armed with $100,000 in arms purchased in the North.

The issue came to a head in 1833 and President 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.  


Andrew Jackson.  Proclamation on Nullification, 12/10/1832:

"So obvious are the reasons which forbid this secession, that it is necessary only to allude to them.  The Union was formed for the benefit of all.  It was produced by mutual sacrifice of interest and opinions.  Can those sacrifices be recalled?  Can the States, who magnanimously surrendered their title to the territories of the West, recall the grant? (etc...)   No one believes that any right exists in a single State to involve all the others in these and countless other evils, contrary to engagements solemnly made.  Everyone must see that the other States, in self-defense, must oppose it at all hazards.

Your pride was aroused by the assertions that a submission to these laws was a state of vassalage, and that resistance to them was equal, in patriotic merit, to the opposition our fathers offered to the oppressive laws of Great Britain....  Eloquent appeals to your passions, to your State pride, to your native courage, to your sense of real injury, were used to prepare you for the period when the mask which concealed the hideous features of DISUNION should be taken off.

But the dictates of a high duty oblige me solemnly to announce that you cannot secede.  The laws of the United States must be executed.  I have no discretionary power on the subject - my duty is emphatically pronounced in the Constitution.  Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent their execution, deceived you - they could not have been deceived themselves.  They know that a forcible opposition could alone prevent the execution of the laws, and they know that such opposition must be repelled.  Their object is disunion, but be not deceived by names; disunion, by armed force, is TREASON.  Are you really ready to incur its guilt?

During the crisis, James Madison, then in his 80s, also condemned the idea of secession (Madison had taken a different position during the ratification of the Constitution)