What Hath God Wrought (60 page)

Ironically, the South Carolina low country was simultaneously the area where slaves enjoyed the greatest autonomy and the area where masters were most fanatically devoted to slavery. In parts of the low country the ratio of blacks to whites reached ten to one, and no place were the barriers against any criticism of slavery more formidable. South Carolina had been founded in the seventeenth century by colonists from Barbados and had long maintained ties of trade and culture with the British West Indies; now, planters read in their newspapers that Parliament would soon abolish slavery in the British Empire. Nullification might be a useful resource if Congress should ever try to follow that example.

On November 24, 1832, South Carolina’s Nullification Convention passed an ordinance declaring that the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were both unconstitutional and that “it shall not be lawful” after February 1, 1833, “to enforce payment of duties imposed by the said acts within the limits of this state.” The deadline was later extended; its purpose was to provide time for Congress to repeal the protective features in the tariff under this new ultimatum. The ordinance concluded with a threat to secede if the federal government attempted to coerce the state.
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Carrying out the mandate of the ordinance, South Carolina’s state legislators commenced preparations for resistance to federal authority, including raising twenty-five thousand volunteer militiamen, though they expected to avoid armed conflict. They summoned Robert Hayne back from Washington to become governor of the state and elected Calhoun to replace him in the Senate, showing that (despite the threat of secession) the most extreme Radicals would not be in charge. Accordingly, Calhoun resigned his lame duck vice presidency on December 28, 1832, and took his seat on the Senate floor.
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The nullifiers felt encouraged by Jackson’s support for South Carolina’s Negro Seamen Law and for the Georgians in their defiance of the Cherokees’ treaty rights, both of which might well be considered forms of nullification. But they were wrong to think he would support them this time. Jackson was the last person to back away from a confrontation, and he took nullification as a patriotic and personal challenge from a man he had already come to distrust and loathe. The president regarded the nullification movement the same way he did the national bank, as a conspiracy against republican liberty prompted and led by a demagogue’s ambition. Though he and Calhoun were both Scots-Irish cotton planters born in South Carolina, and both considered themselves heirs of Jeffersonian Republicanism, they actually differed significantly in temperament and outlook. Calhoun represented a mature slaveholding aristocracy and conceived himself its philosopher-statesman. Jackson thought and spoke as an outsider to aristocracy. He typified the slaveholding man-on-the-make made good, an old soldier rather than a philosopher. Like Calhoun he was preoccupied with sovereignty, but to him it represented not a theory but a matter of deeply felt personal authority. As commander in chief, Old Hickory would not tolerate mutiny. Calhoun and Jackson shared an old-fashioned concept of manly honor that required vindication at any cost. The most serious constitutional crisis faced by the American republic between the adoption of the Constitution and the Civil War was also a showdown between two resolute individual men.

Jackson’s response to the nullification crisis stands as his finest hour. He combined firmness with conciliation. The firmness appeared unmistakably in his historic presidential proclamation on December 10. Nullification, the president told the people of South Carolina, was “in direct violation of their duty as citizens of the United States” and “subversive of its Constitution.” In Jackson’s straightforward logic, nullification was tantamount to secession. The president must execute the law; resistance to such execution would have to be forcible. Calhoun’s arguments for peaceful nullification were specious, Jackson declared. “Do not be deceived by names. Disunion by armed force is
treason
.”
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The proclamation drew upon the legal acumen of Secretary of State Edward Livingston, who had faced the foe with Jackson eighteen years before at New Orleans. Besides exposing the impracticality of nullification, it defended the constitutionality of protective tariffs and refuted Calhoun’s theory that states retained complete sovereignty within the Union. To many contemporaries, including the dying John Randolph, it seemed Jackson had forsaken the Old Republican faith and endorsed the nationalism of Daniel Webster and John Marshall. Back in 1830, as senator from Louisiana, Livingston had endorsed a synthesis of nationalism and state rights based on a theory of divided sovereignty, shared by both state and national authority; this was the standard doctrine in the Democratic Party and would remain so for many years to come. But in December 1832, Jackson insisted that his proclamation endorse the unqualified principle of national sovereignty.
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In the face of South Carolina’s challenge, Jackson responded with both toughness and responsibility. The commander in chief reinforced the garrisons of Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney in Charleston harbor and dispatched two armed revenue cutters to the scene. People both within and without South Carolina started to fear civil war. Eight thousand armed South Carolina Unionists enrolled, ready to answer a presidential call to oppose the state militia. The president ordered General Winfield Scott to prepare for military operations, but like Lincoln a generation later he cautioned that if violence broke out, the federal forces must not be the aggressors.
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To deter the nullifiers from attacking the Unionists in their midst, Jackson warned a South Carolina congressman that “
if one drop of blood be shed there in defiance of the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man of them I can get my hands on to the first tree I can find.”
When Robert Hayne ventured, “I don’t believe he would really hang anybody, do you?” Thomas Hart Benton replied, “Few people could have believed that he would hang Arbuthnot and shoot Ambrister…I tell you, Hayne, when Jackson begins to talk about hanging, they can begin to look out for ropes!”
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In January 1833, the president asked Congress for power to deal with the emergency, notably by shifting the collection point for customs duties to offshore federal ships and forts, beyond the range of the nullifiers’ control. Angry Carolinians dubbed it “the Force Bill,” though the measure actually rendered an armed clash between state and federal authorities less likely. At the same time Representative Gulian C. Verplanck of New York, a Democratic free-trader, introduced a drastic tariff reduction backed by the administration, which would immediately cut duties in half. Jackson wanted to make sure of the loyalty of the rest of the cotton South, and on the tariff issue he was willing to compromise.

The really critical aspect of the situation would be the response of the other southern states to South Carolina’s initiative. Only with their support could a single state make nullification a viable precedent. In the end, this support did not come. Not even Mississippi and Louisiana, where the percentage of slaves in the population was almost as high as in South Carolina, came to their sister state’s aid, for neither shared her attitude toward the Tariff of 1832. Enjoying newly cultivated, rich soil, southwestern cotton-growers did not feel as hard pressed as those in South Carolina, while Louisiana sugar-growers actually favored protectionism. So no call went out for a new constitutional convention to settle the validity of tariff protection. Instead, legislatures in eight southern states passed resolutions condemning South Carolina’s nullification. Most disappointing of all to the nullifiers, Virginia’s Governor Floyd, Calhoun’s longtime friend, failed to persuade that commonwealth’s legislature to support them. Sharply divided along the same East-West line revealed by the post–Nat Turner debate, the Virginia legislature ended up passing a compromise resolution critical of both nullification and the president’s proclamation against it.

During the crisis, vice president–elect Van Buren exerted less influence than usual over administration policy. As architect of the Tariff of Abominations, Van Buren had much to answer for. Ironically, the state legislature that gave Jackson the hardest time was that of New York. Van Buren’s Bucktail Democrats proved such ardent state-righters that the president wound up depending for support in New York on Antimasons, National Republicans, and dissident Democrats.
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While Jackson’s willingness to coerce South Carolina if necessary undoubtedly worried southerners and doughfaces, his new support for tariff reduction, his record on Indian Removal, his professions of faith in strict construction, and his undoubted devotion to slavery and white supremacy combined to reassure them. His Force Bill provoked eloquent congressional oratory on state and national sovereignty, but little serious opposition. The Force Bill passed the House with more than a three-quarters majority (149 to 48) and the Senate with but one dissenting vote (though nine southern senators, including those from South Carolina, stayed away).
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For the time being at least, the slaveholding South appeared content to rely for protection on normal politics, with a sympathetic president representing the will of a majority of the electorate, rather than on a novel and drastic theory about state sovereignty. The Carolinian pursuit of nullification as a remedy for hypothetical future injustices seemed to most southerners, however much they disliked protectionism, a quixotic quest after an abstraction. The way Calhoun operated as South Carolina’s ambassador in the negotiations that followed vindicated this judgment. For the sake of abstractions, honor, and promises about the future, he would forgo many of the tangible tariff concessions he could have extracted.

Calhoun scorned to accept Verplanck’s bill because it came from the administration. Instead, he preferred to work out a settlement with Henry Clay, although this meant dealing with someone far more seriously committed to the tariff than Jackson. Clay took Adams’s tariff as their basis for discussion. To placate northern sheep raisers and mill owners, he removed Adams’s major concession to the South and put the duties on raw wool and cheap woolen cloth back up again. The resulting tariff he agreed to lower by tiny increments over the next eight years, then finally in 1842 lowering it substantially to 20 percent across the board. What did Calhoun get out of this? He was promised that the process would eventually lead to a tariff where all rates would be fixed ad valorem, so no particular products were being “protected,” and one could claim that the whole tariff structure existed for revenue only. In fact, however, many articles that did not compete with domestic producers were allowed in entirely free of duty, which would hardly have been the case if the tariff had really been for revenue only. Calhoun signed off on the deal, although South Carolinians earlier had claimed a 12.5 percent tariff should suffice for revenue. Instead of the Verplanck bill, the nullifiers got Adams’s compromise measure minus its most important concession, plus promises—which, however, a future Congress might rescind. Clay had driven a successful bargain, granting (as he explained privately) “a nominal triumph” to Calhoun, “whilst all the substantial advantages have been secured to the Tariff States.”
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Congress passed both Jackson’s Force Bill and Clay’s Compromise Tariff of 1833 on the same day, March 1. Together they resolved the nullification crisis. Jackson and Clay were both strong nationalists, but they demonstrated very different styles of political leadership. Jackson’s deserved reputation for violence, often an embarrassment, had in this case served the national interest when combined with his responsible actions. Henry Clay’s consummate skills as a negotiator proved as valuable in the end. Together, the two leaders presented the “olive branch and sword” (or, less elegantly, the “carrot and the stick”) to the nullifiers. A substantial body of northeastern congressmen, led by Daniel Webster, voted against the compromise tariff, on the grounds that the Force Bill alone sufficed and that South Carolina was not in a strong enough bargaining position to deserve even a symbolic reward for its conduct. In Columbia the Nullification Convention reconvened on March 11, declared victory, repealed nullification of the federal tariff duties, and then, in a final gesture of defiance, nullified the (now moot) Force Act.
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Clay also got another measure through Congress on March 1, his Distribution Bill. This, an early example of revenue-sharing, “distributed” federal revenues to the states for internal improvements, education, and African colonization, with the money to come from public land sales. The Distribution Bill would have enacted a major portion of the American System, and also operated indirectly to prevent the tariff from being reduced below 20 percent, since without land proceeds, the federal government would need the tariff revenue. Whether the Distribution Bill was an integral part of the compromise settlement depended on whom one asked. Clay viewed it so, as a measure to help reconcile northerners to future tariff reductions. Jackson decided it was not, and pocket-vetoed it. Earlier in his presidency, he had favored distribution, but that was before the plan carried Clay’s label. Jackson’s previous support for distribution had reconciled his sympathy for farmers needing internal improvements with his strict interpretation of the Constitution. Now, however, to sign the Distribution Bill would acknowledge that Clay deserved credit for a comprehensive resolution of the nullification crisis. This was too much to bear, so Old Hickory chose another way to please the West: selling the public lands to settlers as cheaply as possible. His new stance aligned him with Benton, who had been so loyal an administration supporter. Calhoun had been bitterly opposed to the Distribution Bill; its veto meant he emerged from the settlement with a somewhat better deal. Internal improvements would be left to the private sector and unplanned, ad hoc subsidies; the cause of African colonization, having missed its best funding opportunity, withered away.
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