1831

by Louis P. Masur

  It was not only what McDuffie said but how he said it. His manner demanded attention. He “hesitates and stammers; he screams and bawls; he thumps and stumps like a mad man in Bedlam,” offered one observer. Charleston and Washington were abuzz after McDuffie spoke. It seemed that the state was moving decidedly toward nullification, and for Democrats who wished to challenge Jackson for the presidency, such a doctrine meant political suicide. Duff Green, who as editor of the United States Telegraph once supported Jackson but now opposed the administration, denounced the speech as “unexcusable folly and deliberate madness” and condemned nullification as a word “more odious to me than any other in our Language.” He thought its extremism “has done more than Daniel Webster & Henry Clay could do to confirm the tariff & elevate Clay.” Green warned Calhoun that if he had any hopes of challenging Jackson “you [must] seize the first occasion to separate yourself” from McDuffie’s remarks. Calhoun understood that people “cannot view the doctrine of nullification as it exists in South Carolina in any other light than as a revolutionary measure.”54

  The vice-president knew that the time had come to state his position publicly. Isolated within the administration, he denounced the president as “too ignorant, too suspicious & too weak to conduct our affairs successfully” and acknowledged that “every connection personal & political” with Jackson “is rescinded.” Jackson, for his part, goaded Calhoun to declare himself. In a letter to a South Carolina unionist group, he warned against “distinguished citizens … pursuing a course of redress through any other than constitutional means.” Privately, Calhoun affirmed, “Our State right doctrines ought to be manfully supported.” “Whether I am a nullifier, or not,” he wrote in May, “will depend on the meaning to be attached to the word. If it means a disunionist, a disorganizer or an anarchist, then so far from being in favour of nullification, I am utterly opposed to it … . But, if the term means one, who believes that the General Government originated with the people of the States … and that the Constitution is in fact a compact between the States in that character, and that, as parties to it, they have the right to interpose to arrest the violation of the compact, in cases of palpable and deliberate violations of it, then am I, to the full extent, a nullifier & always have been.”

  Driven by presidential ambition, cornered by McDuffie’s speech, and propelled by his position as South Carolina’s leading statesman, Calhoun placed in the Pendleton (South Carolina) Messenger a statement of his views on nullification. Throughout early August, newspapers reprinted the vice-president’s letter. Writing from his home at Fort Hill, Calhoun finally, inevitably, and fatally defended the doctrine of which he was part progenitor: “The Constitution of the United States is in fact a compact, to which each state is a party … and … the several States or parties, have a right to judge of its infractions, and in cases of deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of power not delegated, they have the right, in the last resort, to use the language of the Virginia resolutions ‘to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them.’ This right of interposition, thus solemnly asserted by the State of Virginia, be it called what it may, State right, veto, nullification, or by any other name, I conceive to be the fundamental principle of our system, resting on facts historically as certain, as our Revolution itself, and deductions, as simple and demonstrative, as that of any political, or moral truth whatever.”55

  Planters such as James Hammond, who supported nullification, believed that Calhoun’s essay made “everything as clear as a sunbeam,” but the light it cast fell unevenly across the nation. Try as he might to justify nullification by invoking Jefferson, by calling it different names, by presenting it not as revolutionary or anarchical but as “the only solid foundation of our system, and of our Union,” Calhoun had crossed a line, one that divided South from North and, in 1831 at least, South Carolina from the rest of the region. Georgians, unwilling to alienate a president who supported their efforts to rid the state of the Cherokee, refused to support nullification. And Virginians, though divided regionally and led by Governor Floyd—who supported nullification, despised Jackson, and carried South Carolina in the presidential election of 1832—remained “anti-tariff, anti-Bank, and anti-Nullification.” Calhoun’s paeans to union and nation could not mask the obvious truth that nullification meant disunion. “To commit the administration of this government to the hands of a nullifier,” thought a contributor to the United States Gazette, “would be to send the lamb to the wolf to be nursed.” “The doctrine in all its parts is so adverse to my convictions,” wrote John Quincy Adams, “that I can view it in no other light than as organized civil War.” Henry Clay boasted that the vice-president’s “late exposition has nullified him” from consideration as the Anti-Masonic candidate. And Jackson, quick to revel in his antagonist’s demise, recognized what Calhoun’s “nullification exposé” meant: it “has destroyed his prospects forever.”56

  JULY 4, 1831

  On July 4, 1831, the Boston Sabbath School Union held a celebration of the fifty-fifth anniversary of American independence at the Park Street Church. The choir introduced a new song that day. Untitled, it contained five verses; over time, only the first took hold:

  My country, ’tis of thee,

  Sweet land of liberty,

  Of thee I sing:

  Land where my fathers died,

  Land of the pilgrims’ pride,

  From every mountain-side

  Let freedom ring.

  Country and liberty. Land and freedom. Here were the terms of the equation, but few agreed on their order or relationship.

  15. S. Bernard, View Along the East Battery, Charleston (Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery, Mabel Brady Garven Collection)

  In Charleston, the States Rights and Free Trade Party gathered to celebrate the occasion and reaffirm their commitment to nullification. They met at the customs house, and a large procession moved through the streets toward the home of General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, where the ladies of the city presented a banner. On the one side of the satin banner was the Arms of the State. On the other, a palmetto tree with STATES RIGHTS inscribed on the trunk. Bales of cotton and barrels of rice were piled at its base. The states’-rights motto inscribed in gold encircled the image: “Millions for defence, not a cent for tribute.”

  At the Circular Church, Senator Robert Hayne delivered the day’s oration. The audience, remarked one observer, was “delighted and enchanted throughout—now deeply affected by his pathos—now roused and animated by his impassioned ardor.” Hayne denounced the tariff and the American system as a form of indirect taxation upon the South “that comes not upon us like the strong-man armed, at noon-day, but steals on the wings of the wind, and, like the ‘pestilence walking in darkness,’ infuses the fatal poison into our veins, and seals our destruction, before we are even aware of its approach.” Of the eight million dollars per year in exports from South Carolina, he estimated that the state paid three million dollars in duties to the federal government. And why was this money taken from the pockets of Southern planters? Not “because the Government wants money … but because it is deemed expedient that Northern manufactures should be made profitable at the expense of Southern industry.” The Tariff Party, Hayne argued, refused to dismantle the American system and even threatened force against South Carolina should the state exercise its right to nullification. But “ours is a government, not of force, but of opinion, and every one feels that the only secure basis of the Union, are the affections of the people, founded on a conviction of the justice of the government, and the perfect equality of its dispensations,” and the people are not “to be held in bonds of iron, or forced into harmonious action, by violence and blood-shed.” “When nullification shall be our only means of deliverance from the oppression,” observed Hayne, “who is there that would not be a nullifier?”57

  Hayne’s oration concluded
at half past three, at which time numerous toasts and additional speeches were offered: “South Carolina in ‘76 and ’31—Though divided among ourselves, we triumphed over our oppressors in ‘76, and will triumph now.” “The South Carolina Doctrines—Identified with our dearest interest, happiness, prosperity, and liberty—They must be maintained.” “May no true-hearted son of South Carolina submit to be slaves ‘while the earth bears a plant, or the sea rolls its waves.’”

  The day’s remarks hit the same chords over and over: speakers denounced the tariff as unconstitutional; they defended nullification as historically grounded; they decried Southern exploitation at the hands of Northerners; they devoted themselves to liberty over union. The States Rights and Free Trade Party also made explicit an argument against the tariff that expressed the deepest fears of the planters gathered on July 4: if the federal government had the power to impose protective tariffs, then who was to say they did not have the power to interfere directly with the institution of slavery? One nullifier proclaimed: “If the frightful evil of Disunion and Secession shall come upon me, it will not be because I desire these things, but because they will be forced upon me by the unrelenting tyranny of the Federal Government … . It is impossible for any son of the South, to look with complacency, into the Pandora’s Box of evils, which a Consolidated Government would inflict on this Southern Country. The destruction in store for the foreign commerce which feeds us—the regulation of our internal industry by a majority who have great local interests to promote and which cannot be sustained but at the expense and ruin of the South—the fires which Northern fanaticism is every where enkindling to subvert our peculiar local policy, and which has already extended to the Halls of Congress—these are calamities which, to my mind at least, are most appalling.” One slaveholder made the point even more directly: “If Congress has a right to fix such a system as that upon us, then has it a right to do any thing it pleases. Then has it a right to emancipate our slaves, and, after having destroyed the value of our property, to force us to change entirely the whole character and current of our avocations and pursuits.”58 Nullification represented more than straightforward opposition to the tariff or assertion of states’ rights; it provided a rationale for defending the Southern way of life until the bloody end.

  Southerners had reasons to be concerned. Already, Garrison’s Liberator and Walker’s Appeal had made them anxious over outside interference with slavery. Already, petitions against slavery were flooding Congress, and colonization schemes as a means of gradually ending slavery were winning support. Within two months, Nat Turner would rebel and rumors of insurrections across the South would place slaveholders on high alert. But if nullification meant resisting the power of the national government to interfere with slavery, it also meant creating an atmosphere of lawlessness that incited the slaves. For some Southerners, insurrection and nullification, in resisting legally constituted authorities, formed mirror images of one another. Calling Nat Turner’s revolt “a melancholy commentary on nullification,” one Virginian Republican condemned Southern Democrats who advocated the doctrine. Garrison too saw connections. If nullification meant separation, then, because of the threat of insurrection, it also meant destruction: “A separation from the Union, by any one or by all of the slave states, would be like cutting their hold on existence.” The real problem in the South was not economic policies. “Does the tariff, or the system of internal improvements, generate her diseases?” he asked. “No,” he answered, “the canker that is upon her vitals—the curse that is blighting her fields—the plague that is retarding the increase of her population—is slavery—and nothing but slavery.” A writer to the United States Gazette, hoping that Southerners would recognize their need for the protection of the federal government, believed, “The slave-holding states will not, after the recent outrages in Virginia, and the more alarming rumours, be quite so eager to cut loose from the states North of the Potomac; and that nullification fever may have received a check from which it will not very suddenly recover.”59

  Some South Carolinians, wanting to preserve their relationship with the federal government, refused to place nation and state in opposition to each other. On July 4, members of the Union and States Rights Party gathered at the First Presbyterian Church. These citizens, while also denouncing the tariff, opposed nullification and insisted that union and states’ rights were not incompatible objectives. “If the nullifier is right,” wrote one citizen, “then the framers of the constitution were guilty of designedly introducing the element of civil war, into an instrument, the very object of whose creation, was to avoid this evil.” For Charleston’s Unionists, “the question to be decided now is—whether or not we shall suffer DISUNION and CIVIL WAR.” It was delusory to believe in nullification as a peaceful remedy; rather, most regarded it as revolutionary. “If the hearts of some who are now exciting the people to madness, were exposed to public view,” wrote one resident of Abbeville under the pseudonym Madison, “I much fear that more love of self than country would be found there … . Let the conflict once commence; let blood once be shed, and the Union is gone; and I would as soon expect to see a planet start madly from its sphere, and roll beyond the verge of creation, as to see republican and free institutions springing from the ashes of our present system.”60

  In his oration on the Fourth of July, Representative William Drayton reminded the audience, “In our efforts to rescue ourselves from what we feel to be oppressive legislation, we should not transcend those means which are constitutional, among which cannot be included the interposition of a State to nullify an Act of Congress and thus, whatever the motive, necessarily involve us in a contest with the General Government.” It bemused him that supporters of nullification defended the doctrine as constitutional: “A state cannot be in the Constitution and out of it, at the same time.” And it irked Drayton that a single state would have the arrogance to dictate to its sister states: “Is it republican, is it rational, that a single State should be able to control twenty-three States?” Without question, states maintained their sovereignty, but there “are but two constitutional modes by which a State can prevent the encroachment of the General Government on the rights of the States—an amendment to the Constitution and a reference to the Judiciary.” If an amendment failed, and the courts ruled the law constitutional, then the only means of redress was resistance by force or withdrawal from the Union.

  What, Drayton wondered, would be the outcome of secession, even if accomplished peacefully? “Have we the means of retaining our independence? Does history furnish the solitary example of any nation having preserved its independence, without the physical power to secure it?” he asked. He could not bear to “contemplate the spectacle of the now free and brave—with their national banner torn—its stars shooting madly from their sphere—marching to the funeral of their own liberty by the lurid glare of the torch of discord.”

  More than likely, rather than peaceful secession, armed conflict with the federal government would ensue. “The interposition of the veto of the State could not be a peaceful remedy, unless the President should fail to perform his duty,” and Jackson, Drayton reminded the audience, was not one to back down. Nullification meant revolution and, if it was invoked, South Carolina would not escape “the direst of all calamities, intestine war. In such a struggle, victors are victorious without honor—the vanquished defeated, without sympathy. Amidst intestine feud, all the kindly feelings of the human heart would be eradicated, and for them would be substituted those burning and savage passions, which embroil the domestic fire-side—which pour rancours into the bosom of friends—which convert the excitements of honorable rivalry into deadly personal hatred. Then … might we witness the spectacle of brother armed against brother, of parent against child, and of the child against his parent.”61

  A thousand miles north, at the Fourth of July celebration in Quincy, Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams also warned of civil war. The day began early for the former president, who had a p
rocession of visitors. As the town band, infantry company, Committee of Arrangements, and citizens marched toward the meeting house, Adams felt the scorch of a blazing sun. “I never experienced atmospherical heat more intensely than from the time I left my house in the morning till my return to it after dinner,” he noted in his diary. In an oration that lasted an hour and a half, Adams defended the pre-eminence of the Union: “The Declaration of Independence was a manifesto issued to the world, by the delegates of thirteen distinct, but UNITED colonies of Great Britain, in the name and behalf of their people. It was a united declaration. Their union preceded their independence.” But “our happy but disputatious Union” has suffered at various times from the fever of heated politicians who proclaimed “the sovereign power of any one state of the confederacy to nullify any act of the whole twenty-four States.” The “hallucination of State Sovereignty” led to the creation of an impotent confederation government, a “bloodless corpse.” The Constitution saved the Union, and the powers reserved were powers “reserved to the people, and which never have been delegated either to the United or to the separate States.” But there never was such a thing as “an absolute, irresistible, despotic power, lurking somewhere under the cabalistic denomination of sovereignty.”