December 10, 1832 – President Andrew Jackson Repudiates the Doctrine of Nullification Issued by South Carolina

On this day in history, President Andrew Jackson responded to the action of the South Carolina legislature, which had declared a federal tariff law on imports “null, void, and no law, nor binding” upon South Carolina. As Samarth Desai writes in his study of the effect of the nullification crisis on Lincoln and the secession crisis (“”Jackson Redivivus” in Lincoln’s First Inaugural”, The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 43(1):3:

The state’s objections to the tariffs were grounded in political economy, specifically in the disproportionate burden the tariffs exacted on the Southern economy due to its position in the North-South-Europe trade triangle. . . . [But] South Carolina also had a second, subtler yet deeper, reason for fearing the tariffs. To the leading South Carolinian politicians and planters, the tariff controversy was about not just economics, but also political theory, state sovereignty, and ultimately slavery. Why, they asked, should they tolerate an inequitable tariff imposed by an external legislature? . . . State sovereignty, South Carolinians believed, was all that was standing between the federal government and their beloved peculiar institution. If Congress could meddle with their trade today, what would stop it from meddling with slavery tomorrow? As historians have come to recognize, it was this fear of a future federal attack on slavery that inspired South Carolina to resist the tariffs.”

President Jackson issued a lengthy Proclamation assertively decrying the ordinance passed by South Carolina and declaring:

I consider the power to annul a law of the United States assumed by the one state, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed. [emphasis in original.]”

He went on to point out that in coming together, the states formed “a government not a league,” and by taking this step, the constituent states “expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute, jointly with the other States, a single nation…” From this single nation they did not retain the right to secede. They did, by contrast, agree to transfer their allegiance to the government of the United States, to the Constitution, and to the laws made in conformity with it. And the laws of the United States, President Jackson assured his readers, must be executed.

[Well, unless Jackson himself disagreed with the law, as he did with the 1832 Supreme Court decision to protect the Cherokees in Worcester v. Georgia, but that’s another story….]

President Andrew Jackson

South Carolina still resisted, however, and even threatened Civil War. President Jackson then called on Congress for a Force Bill (4 Stat. 632, 1833), stipulating that the president could, if he deemed it necessary, deploy the U.S. Army to force South Carolina to comply with the law. Surrounding southern state legislatures also indicated they did not agree with the actions taken by South Carolina, and it finally capitulated – at least, until twenty-eight years later.

As Desai points out, “Jackson himself, in a private letter later that year, doubted that South Carolina’s rebellious tendencies would abate and predicted that the next battle would be fought over slavery. ‘The tariff was only the pretext, and disunion and southern confederacy the real object,’ he wrote. ‘The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question.’ Like Calhoun, Jackson speculated presciently that the Nullification Crisis would be, to borrow from William Freehling, the ‘prelude to civil war.’”