1831

by Louis P. Masur

  Madison’s defense of the tariff and opposition to nullification did not stop those who tried to use the Founding Father to justify their purposes. Opponents of federal authority even claimed that Madison supported the right to secede from the Union, a step beyond nullification. The exasperated Virginian wrote in response, “I know not whence the idea could proceed that I concurred in the doctrine … . Take the linch-pins from a carriage, and how soon would a wheel be off its axle.” The idea that disunion was preferable to union perplexed him: “If the States cannot live together in harmony under the auspices of such a Government as exists, and in the midst of blessings such as have been the fruits of it, what is the prospect threatened by the abolition of a common Government, with all the rivalships, collisions, and animosities inseparable from such an event?”44

  Whatever Madison, a former president, thought, it was the opinions of Jackson, the current president, that mattered. But disappointment awaited any South Carolinian who hoped that Jackson would oppose the tariff because he had declared the Bank of the United States unconstitutional and vetoed the Maysville Road Bill, which would have appropriated federal funds to construct a road in Kentucky, on the grounds that it would lead to “the destruction of state rights.” Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, was an ardent nationalist when it came to the progress of the country, and he had consistently supported protective duties. Voting as a senator in favor of the Tariff of 1824, he explained that, as long as it “embraces the design of fostering, protecting, and preserving within ourselves the means of national defense and independence, particularly in a state of war, I would advocate and support it.” As South Carolina’s opposition to the Tariff of 1828 intensified, Jackson never wavered from supporting its constitutionality (“the States have delegated their whole authority over imposts to the General Government without limitation or restriction”). As president, he called for a “judicious” and “expedient” modification of tariff rates, but he defended the government’s policy against attack.45

  Jackson believed that the reduction of duties would “annihilate the Nullifiers as they will be left without any pretext of Complaint.” “If they attempt disunion,” reasoned Jackson, “it must be because they wish it, and have only indulged in their vituperations against the Tariff for the purpose of covertly accomplishing their ends.” Jackson had always made it clear that, though he would oppose “all encroachments upon the legitimate sphere of State sovereignty,” he would defend the preservation of the union at all costs. When the attorney general for South Carolina declined to bring suit against two merchants who refused to pay duties on imported goods, Jackson considered impeaching him for malfeasance and condemned “all who are engaged in this act of intended Treason against our Government … . The union shall be preserved.” Jackson justified his decision to run for re-election on the belief that “it is now necessary for the preservation of the Union.” In February, he explained to Robert Hayne, senator from South Carolina, that he never believed “that a state has the power to nulify the Legislative enactments of the General Government.” “In all Republics,” he declared, “the voice of a majority must prevail; oppose it, and disagreement, difference and danger will certainly follow. [A]ssert that a state may declare acts passed by congress inoperative and void, and revolution with all of its attendant evils in the end must be looked for and expected.”46

  Discussions of the tariff and nullification led commentators to ponder whether the United States could survive as a nation. Embedded in these issues ran the fault lines along which the republic would either develop or crumble: federal versus state power, the meanings of the Constitution, the future direction of the nation, and the tensions between majority rule and minority dissent. The traveler Thomas Hamilton invited readers to “look for a moment at this Union. In Florida and Louisiana they grow sugar; in Maine there is scarcely sun enough to ripen a crop of maize. The people of these States are no less different than the productions of their soil. They are animated by no sentiment of brotherhood and affinity. Nature has divided them by a distance of two thousand miles; the interests of one are neither understood nor cared for in the other. In short, they are connected by nothing but a clumsy and awkward piece of machinery, most felicitously contrived to deprive both of the blessing of self-government. What is gained by this? A certain degree of strength, undoubtedly, but not more than might be produced by an alliance between independent States, unaccompanied by that jealousy and conflict of opposing interests, which is the present curse of the whole Union.”

  Not only were Americans unattached to the Union, thought Hamilton, they were barely attached to their immediate region: “An American is not a being of strong local attachments, and the slightest temptation of profit is always strong enough to induce him to quit his native State, and break all the ties which are found to operate so powerfully upon other men.” No wonder that in a matter of ten years, observed J. M. Peck, author of a best-selling guide for emigrants to the West, “what was then frontier, is now thrown into the middle of States and Territories.” Under such conditions of mobility, restlessness, and rootlessness, few observers believed that a nation such as the United States could remain knitted together.47

  Tocqueville also had his doubts about the republic’s survival. Time and again he observed that Americans had little attachment to the country as a whole. In one conversation he told a citizen, “Your country is composed of little, almost entirely separate nations.” “That is even truer than you realize,” replied the informant. “Not only does each State form a nation, but each town in the State is a little nation. Each ward of a town is a little nation and has its own particular interests, government, representatives, in a word its own political life.”

  Among Americans as a people, Tocqueville observed, “restlessness of character seems to me to be one of the distinctive traits.” A former American diplomat explained: “The land never stays in the hands of the one who clears it. When it begins to yield a crop, the pioneer sells it and again plunges into the forest. It would seem that the habit of changing place, of turning things upside down, of cutting, of destroying, has become a necessity of his existence.” The American, thought Tocqueville, cares only for himself: he is “devoured by the longing to make his fortune; it is the passion of his life; he has no memory that attaches him to one place more than another, no inveterate habits, no spirit of routine; he is the daily witness of the swiftest changes of fortune, and is less afraid than any other inhabitant of the globe to risk what he has gained in the hope of a better future.” America, he declared, presented “the spectacle of a society marching along all alone, without guide or support, by the sole fact of the cooperation of individual wills. In spite of anxiously searching for the government, one can find it nowhere, and the truth is that it does not, so to speak, exist at all.”48

  Tocqueville would take the undigested interviews and insights of his journey in 1831 and transform them into a penetrating analysis of an American democracy characterized by individualism, self-interest, and solitude. He observed that “the Union has never shown so much weakness as on the celebrated question of the tariff.” The reason it aroused such intense political passion, he believed, was that “tariffs favor or harm, not opinions only, but very powerful material interests.” Beaumont noted that “the sole interest which absorbs the attention of every mind is trade. It’s the national passion.” “Money is the god of the United States,” he proclaimed. The “passion to get rich,” wrote Tocqueville, “leads and dominates all the others.” No wonder, then, that the tariff debate might prove fatal to the nation.49

  The inflammatory arguments over protection troubled Tocqueville, and he was equally disturbed by a call on the part of opponents of the tariff for a free-trade convention to condemn the government’s policy. Tocqueville initially saw such conventions as an assault upon the operations of legitimate government and an expression of the sovereignty of the people run amok. He believed that popular conventions challenged the rule of law an
d threatened public order. But by the time he returned to France and completed Democracy in America, he had changed his mind. Voluntary associations and political conventions, he came to believe, tied together otherwise disconnected citizens and served as a check by minority interests upon the power of majorities.

  The Free Trade Convention met in Philadelphia between September 30 and October 7. The idea for the convention had emerged only three months earlier, when Henry Sedgwick of Massachusetts and New York issued a call for such a gathering. “There is a danger,” he warned, “that the restrictive system, under the delusive name of the American system may be fixed upon the nation as its permanent policy … . The country is in a state of thick darkness upon this subject of almost vital importance.” Carried by the press from Maine to New Orleans, the proposal generated excitement across the nation. When the convention opened at the Musical Fund Hall, more than 150 delegates from fifteen states gathered to discuss ways of “procuring the repeal of the Restrictive System.” Among the delegates were Albert Gallatin from New York, Thomas Dew from Virginia, and Thomas Pinckney from South Carolina.

  Though the delegates agreed that the tariff was oppressive, other issues threatened to divide them. Initially, they could not decide whether to vote as states or individuals. To vote as states would equalize the disparity in representation. For example, more than forty delegates came from South Carolina, whereas eighteen came from Massachusetts. But because the effects of the tariff were sectional in nature, delegates feared that voting by state would place local interests above the general principle of free trade that they had come to reaffirm. Furthermore, a collective vote would deny the opportunity of members within a state delegation to voice their own opinions, thus reproducing within the convention the very tyranny of the majority to which they objected. This issue alone took up much of the first day, until a delegate reminded the body that they need not continue to debate the question of voting by individual or state, because “this body was not a Congress, but a voluntary meeting.” With that, they unanimously elected Philip Barbour of Virginia the president of the convention and moved on to drafting an “Address to the People of the United States.”

  The text of the address, however, also caused consternation. Delegates disagreed on whether or not Congress had the power to pass protective tariffs. Two South Carolinians argued vehemently that the unconstitutionality of the tariff was the “chief objection among his constituents. They can no where find, in the Constitution, an express authority given to Congress by the people of the States, to encourage manufactures by taxation.” But Albert Gallatin strenuously objected and declared he could not vote for the address if it included a statement objecting to the tariff as unconstitutional. The problem, he insisted, was not constitutionality but “the effect of the Tariff on different sections of the country, … its unavoidable tendency to demoralize the community, and gradually to alienate the affections of a whole section of these United States.” The motion to strike out that part of the address that referred to constitutional issues was defeated, 159 to 35.

  The brief address reiterated arguments that were becoming familiar. Referring to the nation as a confederacy, the document explained that the Free Trade Convention brought together “numerous, respectable, and intelligent” citizens “to consider the grievances which they suffer under the existing Tariff of duties.” As advocates of free trade, delegates affirmed “the unquestionable right of every individual to apply his labor and capital in the mode which he may conceive best calculated to promote his own interest.” They deprecated protective tariffs as a “system of taxation, which is unequal in its operation, oppressive, and unjust.” Delegates also challenged the right of the government to create such a system: “They do not doubt—they utterly deny—the constitutional power of Congress to enact it.” The tariff system, which was “grossly, fatally unwise and impolitic, since it is subversive of the harmony of the Union—which is in violation of the principles of free government, and utterly at variance with the spirit of justice and mutual concession, … such a system, if persevered in, must alienate our affections from each other, engender discontents and animosities, and lead, inevitably, and with a force which no human power can resist, to the most awful of calamities.”50

  By the end of October, a rival convention of those who supported the tariff met in New York. Calling themselves the Friends of Domestic Industry, several hundred delegates from thirteen states gathered in the Hall of the Quarter Sessions. The leaders of the convention included Alexander Everett from Massachusetts, James Tallmadge from New York, Mathew Carey from Pennsylvania, and Hezekiah Niles from Maryland. Everett, the brother of Representative Edward Everett, edited the North American Review and was a staunch defender of the principles of protection against those of laissez-faire. Tallmadge had gained national attention in 1819 when he proposed an amendment, passed in the House but defeated in the Senate, to forbid slavery in Missouri. Carey’s renown as an editor and writer dated back to the Revolution, and he continued to issue a steady stream of essays supporting American manufactures and denouncing free trade and nullification. Niles used his position in Baltimore as editor of Niles’ Weekly Register to promote economic nationalism in the upper South. One participant likened the delegates at the Free Trade and Tariff Conventions to dueling forces representing sectional interests: “The assembling of the Free Trade Convention at Philadelphia, may be regarded as the first movement of the Free Trade Army upon the enemy’s country. The Tariff Convention at New York was the rally of the Northern Forces upon finding their territory invaded.”51

  The “Address of the Friends of Domestic Industry” defended protective tariffs as constitutional. They warned that the abolition of tariffs and embrace of free-trade principles would lead the nation toward “ruin and despair.” It has been “the constant interpretation of the Constitution” that Congress has the power to use tariffs not only for revenue but for the protection of domestic industrial enterprises. The earliest legislation of the government avowed such measures, and every president and Congress since has reaffirmed them. It confounded the delegates that some Americans professed that such a power did not exist: “It is not only against the words of the Constitution, against the manifest design of the nation in establishing it, against the uniform sense of Congress in passing laws under it, against the practice of forty years, never stayed nor suspended, against the opinion of every tribunal in the country … but it is also against the entire conviction of a vast majority of the people themselves, that these new and what we think dangerous opinions, are now brought forward as the true doctrines of the constitution.”52

  As a matter of political economy, compared to constitutional authority, protective tariffs were equally unimpeachable. The tariff “constitutes the American System. It invites the application of American capital to stimulate American industry. It imposes a restriction, in the form of an impost duty, on certain products of foreign labour, but so far as relates to American capital, or American labour, it simply offers security an inducement to the one, and gives energy and vigour to the other.” Within a nation, free trade provides great advantages. But between foreign nations “there is no free trade—there never was—there never can be.” Noting that the cry of oppression came predominantly from the South, the address argued that it was not the tariff but the acquisition of fertile lands that had depreciated Southern property values. Furthermore, the Southern “aversion to manufactures has engendered, of late, bitter local prejudices in parts of those states in which they do not flourish.” Simply put, defenders of the tariff believed that Southern economic problems would have been alleviated had the region manufactured goods instead of specious arguments against the tariff.

  Neither the Free Trade nor the Domestic Industry Convention ever referred to nullification, but the word hovered over the nation like dark clouds on a summer’s day. Even as plans went forth for these conventions, which were intended to provide a forum for reasoned discussion and public remonstrance and an
opportunity for minority opinions to be voiced, some South Carolinians took strides toward disunion. On May 19, at a public dinner, Representative George McDuffie delivered a blistering speech, “a red hot thunder and lightning speech of six hours length,” that denounced the tariff and defended nullification. McDuffie, who had once espoused a doctrine of American nationalist growth and carried a bullet near his spine from a duel over the issue a decade earlier, now proclaimed that nullification “flows from a higher source” than the Constitution. He denounced as “unequal,” “oppressive,” “unjust,” and “iniquitous” a system of taxation that reduced the South to “colonial vassalage.” He feared not for personal liberty but for property rights, which the revenue power of the federal government assailed by imposing tariffs that were “ruinous to our interests, in order to build up the prosperity of other States at our expense.” The prosperity of the North and the decay of the South, McDuffie thundered, resulted from a federal tax on cotton that was equal to “one third of our incomes,” and this very tax was “transferred as a bounty to Northern labour and … Northern industry.” Denouncing the government as “an upstart, mercenary aristocracy of absentee landlords” who imposed a “heartless and irresponsible tyranny,” McDuffie demanded the interposition of some power to relieve Southerners from their oppression.

  That power, offered McDuffie, was nullification: “The people of South Carolina are subject to the laws of Congress, provided they be authorized by the Constitution; but with no propriety of language can it be said that the State, the sovereign State of South Carolina is subject to Congress, or to any human power.” McDuffie mocked those who cried, “The Union, the Union, the Union is in danger.” The “phantom of disunion, civil war, and fraternal bloodshed” was conjured up by tyrants seeking to maintain power. “The idea of bloodshed and civil war, in a contest of this kind,” thought McDuffie, “is utterly ridiculous. How would the war commence? Who would begin it, and what would be the occasion or the pretext of using arms? I confess I am utterly at a loss to imagine.” And if the Union were in danger, whose fault was it, that of the oppressor or the oppressed? “The Union, such as the majority have made it,” concluded McDuffie, “is a foul monster, which those who worship, after seeing its deformity, are those worthy of their chains.” Likening South Carolina’s position to that of the colonies as a “glorious example before us,” McDuffie inquired, “Shall we be terrified by mere phantoms of blood, when our ancestors, for less cause, encountered the dreadful reality? Great God! Are we the descendants of those ancestors; are we freemen; are we men?”53