The Nullification Crisis

The Nullification Crisis lasted from roughly 1832 - 1833. Before I talk about it directly, I'll start with some exposition (to set things up for you.)

(Yes, my use of the word "exposition" was intentional.)

After the War of 1812, British goods started flooding the American market. To protect and encourage American industry, the Tariff of 1816 was enacted. This made British goods more expensive so that people would buy American-made products instead. This tariff was great for the North especially, since it was well on its way to becoming the industrial hub of the nation. For the South the tariff wasn't too great; they were mostly agricultural and helping industry didn't help them too much, and since they bought many goods from Europe, they were afraid of angering the British (since they might make their own tariffs against Southern cotton) and it just made the things they liked to buy more expensive. Eventually much of the South decided to just go with the tariff for national interest; America needed it and it would probably be repealed in a few years, right?

Andrew Jackson, as pictured during his service in the War of 1812.

They were wrong. The tariff wasn't repealed. Southern cotton went to Britain, which gave America lots of money. With all this new money, industrialization could just get stronger in the North since it could be widely financed. The South didn't industrialize, while the North did. As industry and the North grew, people tried to get more protective tariffs to make it grow even more. The whole thing was a bit self-perpetuating.

There was another tariff in 1824 which basically raised the 1816 tariff rates. This was the first time that many Southerners (who had supported the 1816 tariff) actually began to out right oppose raising the tariff rate. Many believed that this new tariff was not in national interest, but sectional interest, favoring the North and hurting the South. States that were part of the original Southern colonies were also going through some tougher times, so the tariff wasn't exactly appreciated. Among the opposition to the tariff was then Vice President John C. Calhoun from South Carolina, who had previously supported the 1816 tariff in order to raise revenue for the country. Like many other Southerners, he believed that this tariff was an unfair burden on the South and was purely for the North's benefit. There was also some opposition in New England against it among traders. (This tariff was pretty sectional, so you can't really blame the opposition for getting annoyed with it.)

 This picture of Errol Flynn is unrelated to anything I have to say in this post.

In 1828 the tariff was raised again, by the then President J. Q. Adams. Many were angry enough about it to give it the name "the Tariff of Abominations." In the election of that year, Andrew Jackson won the presidency, and Calhoun ran for Vice President under him and (again) won the office. He had been assured that Jackson would not support the tariff, but when he did (thanks on part to his Northern party members), Calhoun became displeased. Over the course of Jackson's presidency, conflicts over various policies and such only made relations between the two of them worse, and the Tariff of Abominations and what ensued because of it pretty much became the final straw.

Frustrated, Calhoun went back to his plantation in South Carolina and wrote a pamphlet entitled "Exposition and Protest." In it, he endorsed and argued for the idea of nullification, which says that a state may nullify (choose to ignore) any federal law that it finds to be unconstitutional. (He also said that if a state should decide to nullify, then a vote could be held among the states and if 3/4 ruled that the law was not unconstitutional, the nullifying state would have to follow suit with the law.) Accordingly, because the Tariff of Abominations was so one sided, South Carolina had every right to nullify the tariff should it choose to.Calhoun also went further to suggest that states could secede from the Union if the federal government proved not to be acting in its best interests and only harming it.

A map showing if all the secessionist movements in our history had succeeded.

Here's an excerpt from the pamphlet. It sums up his thoughts on the 1828 tariff in brief:

"...the whole system of legislation imposing duties on imports, not for revenue, but the protection of one branch of industry at the expense of others, is unconstitutional, unequal, and oppressive, and calculated to corrupt the public virtue and destroy the liberty of the country...so partial are the effects of the system, that its burdens are exclusively on one side and its benefits on the other."

 John C. Calhoun: yes, he wore a cape..

Calhoun wrote this anonymously so as not to get himself into too much trouble just yet, since he had his eye on succeeding Jackson as president or getting the office some time or other, (which never happened and was never going to happen anyways once 1828 came along) but many people suspected that he had written it anyway. In case you were wondering, Exposition and Protest did not have an effect on the proceedings regarding the tariff, but it did irk Jackson. Although he liked small government and state's rights, he believed in the Union, and thought nullification and secession were treasonous things to do to it.  

By 1832, nullification had become a topic of national debate. To calm the situation down, a revised tariff was created, but South Carolina was still not happy with the tariff rate it had set; it was still too high. Later in that same year, South Carolina (Calhoun's home state) decided that it'd had enough, and passed the Ordinance of Nullification to effectively nullify the 1828 and 1832 tariffs. The Nullification Crisis had officially begun! *drum roll*

Look what I found...

Jackson was highly displeased with S.C., and he was a guy that you probably didn't want to annoy. In 1833 he issued the Force Bill which would allow the tariff money to be collected from South Carolina by any means necessary. He also sent in the military and warships into Charleston harbor just in case the message wasn't clear enough. The little state smirked, and nullified that bill too.

Meanwhile, some South Carolinians (among others) began to make some extreme rallies and movements in support of nullification that were a little radical and could possibly create a volatile situation. Calhoun was a bit unnerved by this, and with his anger against Andrew Jackson contributing to the decision, decided to resign as Vice President and go spearhead the nullification movement. He joined the Senate (where he would remain 'til the end of his days, almost literally), and formed the short lived Nullifier Party. (It merged with the Democratic Party in 1839.) 

On the same day that the Force Bill passed in 1833, Senator Henry Clay and Calhoun, now a senator himself, together authored the Compromise Tariff for a gradual reduction in tariff rates. South Carolina found this acceptable, and repealed the Ordinance of Nullification. Andrew Jackson also dropped the Force Bill, since South Carolina now intended to comply with federal law.

Amusingly, South Carolina kept the now-repealed Force Bill nullified, a fact which Jackson decided to ignore.

The Conflict of Slavery

After having been traded for food and supplies, the first slaves arrived in 1619 in Virginia Colony. The Congressional government (when it finally came into being) would not regulate slavery until 1787 with the Northwest Ordinance. Before then, slave policy had been regulated by individual colonies, like Georgia and Virginia. The Northwest Ordinance created the Northwest Territories in the Ohio River Valley + the Great Lakes area. It also banned slavery there, becoming the first act of the US government against slavery. (However, indentured servitude was still legal, and some people illegally kept their slaves anyways.)

Slaves working in Virginia Colony

In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase was acquired by president Thomas Jefferson. This addition more than doubled the size of the United States, and people eagerly began moving westward. People migrated mostly along horizontal lines; this meant that people from the South would move into western regions still in the southern part of the country, and people from the North moved into regions in the northern part of the country. By 1819, all the Northern states (thus far) had abolished slavery, but not so in the South. Thus as Southerners moved westward in search of new land, they carried slavery with them.

Butter yellow color is Louisiana Purchase, peachy-tan is the color of the USA before that. 

Darker hot chocolate brown belongs to other countries, like Spain and UK.

The Southern economy was highly agricultural, while the North's was working its way to becoming the industrial powerhouse of the nation. With the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney and its introduction into the market in the late 1790's,  cotton production because easier and cheaper. Since the crop was so profitable, the South started devoting more land to cotton, and brought over more slaves from Africa to pick it. As time went on, the South built a society structured on the plantation system that was highly dependent on agriculture, and the existence of slavery. The North becomes industrialized, and slavery is thrown out the window. Abolitionism grew out of the North, and would begin to pose a threat to the Southern system as time went on.

Slave traders loading slaves into harsh and cruel ships

In 1807, Congress abolishes US involvement in the international slave trade. Around this time, and even before and after it, states with large slave populations (like South Carolina) would make increasingly harsh and restrictive rules against slaves and black people. They felt threatened by the closing of the international slave trade for the US, and by slave rebellions in the US, as well as a successful one in Haiti where the slaves rose up and killed the French, and essentially kicked them out and formed their own country.


In 1819, Missouri was to become a state. Since there was an equal number of slave states and free states, people from both sides each wanted Missouri to have a slavery policy that would fit their ideas, so that they could have more power in Congress. The South was a minority in the House of Representatives, so they wanted to protect their power in the Senate. They also wanted to protect their way of life, and felt that since slaves were their legal property, Congress couldn't and shouldn't make laws against that. Northerners and abolitionists disagreed and wanted Missouri to be a free state.  Maine was also in line to become a state during this time.

The Missouri issue caused much controversy and friction between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise was made to remedy it. Key in this compromise was the representative from Kentucky in the HoR (and later the Senate), Henry Clay. In this compromise, Missouri would be a slave state and Maine would be a free state. It also forbade any slavery anywhere in the USA above the 36th parallel, except at Missouri of course.

 Picture unrelated.

Over the next twenty years, the South increased its reliance on agricultural, cotton, and slave labor. As abolitionism and anti-expansion of slavery feelings grew in the North, they felt increasingly on edge and more anxious to protect slavery, which they called the "peculiar institution." From 1836 - 1844, supporters of slavery had various gag rules put into action in Congress. These rules prevented/hindered the discussion of slavery in Congress. This was done partly out of a fear that slavery would be threatened and weakened, and partly also because people thought that Congress wouldn't get anything done if they got into an endless argument about slavery. Tensions were mounting, and there was a lot of friction between Northern and Southern interests. The two major political parties, the generally pro-industrialization Whigs and the generally pro-agriculture Democrats, started splitting among sectional lines and becoming less and less national in support as time went on.

In 1846, the country becomes involved in the Mexican-American War.(You can read about that on the preceding blog post.) Since it was possible that we'd get a lot of territory from winning, (which we did) slavery would most certainly have to be dealt with. The Wilmot Proviso was introduced the year the war started, and it proposed that slavery be banned in any new territory we got from Mexico all together. During this time, a new party called the Liberty Party came to being, and proposed to abolish slavery from the USA completely, though where it already existed, it would be done away with over time and its proponents would be restricted in their political activities. Since this was a pretty radical stance, the Free-Soil Party came about, which would just ban slavery in all the territories. In 1848 the war ended, and we got a bunch of land from Mexico. The Democrat Lewis Cass (who was running for President that year) proposed that popular sovereignty be used in determining whether or not new states would be slave or free. This idea basically would let the people of a state vote on whether or not they wanted it to allow slavery or not.

In 1850, an agreement was finally reached over what to do with the land gained from the war in the Mexican Cession. This was the Compromise of 1850. It drove tensions between North and South way up high, and people were predicting civil war, and "trying their damnedest" to stop it from happening. The South wanted territory open to slavery. Senator John C. Calhoun, a Southerner and slave owner, argued that Congress had no rights over people's property in the territories. Slaves were property, so they could be taken wherever their owners wished. Abolitionists strongly objected to this, as they always had. The North wanted to suppress slavery, and the South felt threatened and hemmed in by industrial interests from the North. New states could tip the balance of power in the government, so each side wanted more on their own side.

Texas became a slave state, and California became free. The Utah and New Mexico Territories both became open to popular sovereignty. A stronger fugitive slave law was also called for in the 1850 compromise, and it would be enforced. The North was ticked off that they would have to comply, and the South felt that the whole deal wasn't really fair and that this was their only concession. This compromise also repealed the Missouri Compromise, since it opened up land to potentially get slavery that would have been guaranteed slavery-free since it was above the 36th parallel.

In 1854 with the Kansas-Nebraska Act in which the states were opened to popular sovereignty (so that they could become states so a railroad could go through them), pro and anti-slavery forces clashed and created much violence and bloodshed, as well as political turmoil and pressure. It was pretty much a proxy war between anti-slavery North and pro-slavery South. In 1857 the Dred Scott Decision, by the Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, repealed the Missouri Compromise decision (again) from 1820 and said that all territory was legally open to slavery. This case made many people in the North extremely angry, and tensions rose higher and higher. The Whig Party actually died because sectional tension tore it apart, and the Republican Party rose up, (they originally formed to protest the Kansas-Nebraska Act.) The Democratic Party was also weakened, but did not suffer the fate of the Whigs. In 1859, abolitionist John Brown, who had fought against pro-slavery people in Kansas earlier, took over an arsenal and tried to lead a raid on Virginia that was supposed to end with a mass-freeing of the slaves in the whole South. It failed, but the South became extremely disturbed...more so than it was already.

In 1860, Republican Abraham Lincoln becomes president, and the South is sure its fate is sealed, so they secede from the Union and form the Confederacy. The Civil War begins shortly after, and goes until 1865.

During the Civil War, African-Americans were used by the Union army (to a small extent, but they were distinguished!) but not by the Confederate Army. Early on, General Benjamin Butler ordered that all slaves be confiscated and not returned to their masters; they were now "contraband of war." He had the now former-slaves help work on fortifications for his troops. Later, the Congress would issue orders instructing that the whole Union army to do what Butler was doing, Fugitive Slave Law be damned. President Lincoln in 1863 then enacted the two part Emancipation Proclamation, which said that slaves in rebelling states were now free, voila! This got him lots of PR points, especially among already free African-Americans and former slaves.

When the Civil War ended in 1865, and the 13th Amendment went through Congress to outlaw slavery and involuntary servitude forever.This is the end of slavery in the USA, hoorah! What happens to the African-Americans, the South, and everyone else after 1865 will be covered in another blog post.

Thanks for reading! ^^