What Hath God Wrought (59 page)

Calhoun went on to describe a procedure by which an individual state could force a decision on matters of constitutional interpretation. The people of a state could elect a special convention to decide whether a certain federal law was constitutional. The convention would be empowered to declare an allegedly unconstitutional law null and void within the state; hence the term “nullification.” This state convention could also issue a call for a national convention to meet and clarify the issue, proposing amendments to the Constitution, if necessary. The Constitution does provide for supplementary constitutional conventions (none has ever been held), but only if two-thirds of the states, not just one, request it. Calhoun’s plan thus required multistate cooperation.

Calhoun’s entire scheme rested on the assumption that sovereignty resided in the people of the separate states and not in the national people. The logical strength of his argument resided in the fact that state conventions had originally ratified the U.S. Constitution. Calhoun believed that the same parties who had adopted the Constitution in the first place should possess the final power to interpret it. The sovereignty of these parties was indivisible and could not be shared. The federal government could perform functions of sovereignty, but only acting as an agent of the states. When the federal authority abused its trust, a state could “interpose” its sovereignty and arrest the enforcement of the offending law. What happened if, in the end, the Constitution was amended to give the federal government the power the aggrieved state had challenged? By the logic of Calhoun’s position, the state would still have the right to secede. Yet here Calhoun held back, displaying the residuum of his former nationalism and perhaps unwilling to indulge the Radicals that far. He concluded that after a definitive resolution of the constitutional question, any further resistance by the state would constitute “rebellion.”
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Nullification was Calhoun’s device to render secession unnecessary, to enable the planters to preserve their interests without it.

Taken as a whole, the
South Carolina Exposition
is an impressive argument on behalf of an unworkable proposal. (In an America where nullification prevailed, there might be scores of federal statutes whose operation was suspended in various states, while each awaited resolution in an endless succession of constitutional conventions.) Calhoun and most of the Carolina legislators hoped at the time that Jackson’s election would suffice to ensure a downward revision of the tariff, so the
Exposition
concludes with an admonition to wait and see. The vice president did not publicly reveal his authorship, sensing that it would surely offend Jackson. The South Carolina legislature was not yet ready to endorse the
Exposition
, but instead issued a brief official “Protest” against the tariff, perhaps also composed by Calhoun, which asserted the unconstitutionality of a protective tariff but described no nullification plans. Five thousand copies of the
Exposition
were printed for distribution in the hope of winning converts elsewhere in the South. If it proved popular enough, Calhoun could avow the authorship and use it to campaign for president later on a state-rights platform. Meanwhile, the
Exposition
would keep up the pressure for tariff reform. In January of 1830, its doctrine of sovereignty was defended by Hayne and attacked by Webster.

By the summer of 1831, Calhoun reluctantly concluded the time had come to go public with his views, even though doing so risked his long-term presidential hopes. He wanted to head off talk of secession, and he certainly no longer had anything more to lose by angering Jackson. On July 26, he published in a South Carolina newspaper what is called “the Fort Hill Address” (named for his plantation outside Clemson), an eloquent defense of state sovereignty and state rights. In it he rejected the federal judiciary as the arbiter of the Constitution, something he had not done in the
Exposition
. Conscious of a nationwide audience, he had less to say this time about the evils of a protective tariff. He emphasized that he was not opposed to industrialization and technological progress but welcomed them, not only for economic reasons but also “as laying the solid foundation of a highly improved condition of society, morally and politically.” Very likely this showed Calhoun’s wish to protect his standing with an American public that supported modernization, but of course his nationalist past justified the claim. If he worried that improved communication increased the likelihood that a consolidated national majority would emerge, resolved to impose its will, he did not make such a concern explicit. But clearly Calhoun no longer trusted, as James Madison had argued in
The Federalist
, that the sheer size of the United States would protect it against tyranny. Calhoun now wrote as a political theorist proposing state rights as a check on what would otherwise be the “unlimited and despotic” power of a national majority. He endorsed the concept of nullification while avoiding use of the word.
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Calhoun deserves his reputation as a brilliant political logician. His tragedy, and America’s, was that he turned his talents to immobilizing the federal government in the service of a slave economy. But he could not have done otherwise and retained his political base in his home state. As things turned out, Calhoun’s careful reasoning did less to encourage enthusiasm for state rights in South Carolina than news of Nat Turner’s Uprising a few days later. Governor Floyd of Virginia wrote the governor of South Carolina warning him of a widespread slave conspiracy led by literate blacks who found anti-slavery principles in the Bible and preached that “God was no respecter of persons; the black man was as good as the white; that all men were born free and equal.” This letter fanned flames of hysterical reaction in white South Carolina. The master of Fort Hill plantation shared in the renewed determination to assert the authority of the ruling race. One of his house slaves, named Aleck, chose these anxious times to escape; he was recaptured fifty miles away. Calhoun wrote an instruction that the man should be kept in the local jail for a week on bread and water, then given “30 lashes well laid on at the end of the time.” Such punishment, he explained, was “necessary to our proper security.” Probably it did not occur to Calhoun that this order illustrated the problem of “unlimited and despotic” power even more graphically than his arguments in the Fort Hill Address.
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In both the
Exposition
and the Fort Hill Address, Calhoun invoked the authority of Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions and Madison’s Virginia Resolutions to the effect that states could interpose their sovereignty and nullify unconstitutional federal legislation. Jefferson was dead, but Madison still lived. The “Father of the Constitution,” last surviving member of the Philadelphia convention of 1787, had long since embraced the new Republican nationalism, and when the
South Carolina Exposition
was published, Madison repudiated it, insisting that the Virginia Resolutions had meant nothing of the kind. Madison asserted that the Constitution had in fact created a system of divided sovereignty, whatever philosophers might say about sovereignty being indivisible, and that no individual state could nullify a federal law. It is hard not to conclude, however, that Calhoun was fairly entitled to cite the Jefferson and Madison of 1798 in defense of his position on the Constitution as a compact among sovereign states. Like most politicians of that era, Madison did not like to admit that he ever changed his mind.
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Calhoun never admitted that he himself had changed his views on state rights, the tariff, or any other subject. He attached an exaggerated importance to logical consistency and always claimed to be entirely governed by deduction from first principles rather than any consideration of practicality or political advantage.

A solution to the Jackson administration’s tariff quandary presented itself when John Quincy Adams returned to Washington in 1831 to take a seat in the House of Representatives from his home district in Massachusetts. The Democratic majority in the House offered him the chairmanship of the Committee on Manufactures. Ostensibly a courtesy to an ex-president, in reality this enabled the administration to delegate public responsibility for the necessary adjustments in the tariff.
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Adams characteristically relished both the task and the responsibility. Consulting with Secretary of the Treasury McLane and resisting pressure from Clay to expand the scope of protection, he drafted a measure that successfully resolved the complexities of the problem. Duties were moderately reduced on items not produced in the United States, though key domestic industries such as iron and cotton textiles retained sufficient protection. In a special gesture to conciliate plantation owners, duty on the cheap woolens in which slaves were clothed was slashed from 45 percent to 5 percent; this was Adams’s own idea. The outcome was a major legislative achievement for the New Englander, which should be remembered to balance his legislative failures as president. His bill passed with handsome majorities from both sections in the House and won in the Senate the votes of most northerners and exactly half the southerners.
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The northern business community had come to recognize that their enlightened self-interest lay in tariff rates that could endure rather than ones that inflamed southern agitation. Most southerners saw the measure as a significant amelioration of their grievance and were now content to back Jackson for reelection rather than pursue any more drastic remedy such as the one South Carolina was touting. Hailed as a “
bill of compromise
,” Adams’s Tariff of 1832 largely removed the issue from the presidential election of that year. Adams felt satisfied to have resolved a national problem in such a way as to avoid a confrontation between the sections, even though the outcome produced an electoral benefit to Jackson.
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In South Carolina, however, many refused to accept the Tariff of 1832 as the resolution that it seemed elsewhere. South Carolina politics were distinctive. It was the only state that had successfully resisted political democratization in the years since independence. By a compromise agreed in 1808, the tidewater controlled one house of the state legislature and the more populous up-country the other; large planters dominated both houses through property qualifications and local custom. The legislators in turn chose the governor and most other state officers as well as the presidential electors. South Carolina’s plantation aristocracy lived in a world of conspicuous consumption, male rivalry, and a heightened sense of personal and family honor. To these haughty patriarchs, tariffs represented an insult as well as an injury.

Within South Carolina’s peculiar polity competed three political factions: Calhoun’s own following, who included Robert Hayne; state-rights Radicals, led by William Smith and Thomas Cooper; and the Unionists, who despite their opposition to protectionism did not countenance nullification as a remedy. Although led by planter magnates like the other factions, the Unionists numbered among their followers up-country yeoman farmers and Charleston merchants.
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Earlier Calhoun had allied with the Unionists, but since 1825 he had sometimes cooperated with the Radicals, and in 1828 both Calhounites and Radicals had backed Jackson. Taking up the cause of nullification enabled Calhoun to firm up his alliance with the Radicals, whose political strength in the state was growing. In the state elections of October 1832, the Radicals and Calhounites together gained the two-thirds majority in the legislature that they needed to call for a nullification convention, finally overcoming the long resistance of the Unionists. Seizing the opportunity, they ordered a quick special election for November 12, and the voters returned a convention overwhelmingly in favor of nullification.

Why did South Carolina’s political community insist on pursuing nullification when the rest of the South felt comfortable with Jackson and thought it could live with the Tariff of 1832? Fears for slavery, while widespread in the South, alarmed whites the most in the state with the highest proportion of the population enslaved (54 percent in 1830). Ever since the Missouri Compromise, those in South Carolina called the Radicals had felt apprehensive regarding the future of slavery. In 1827, a powerfully argued pamphlet called
The Crisis
appeared in South Carolina under the pseudonym “Brutus,” linking the protective tariff and internal improvements with the slavery issue. The American Colonization Society, the author warned, constituted a stalking-horse for the general abolition of slavery. Brutus (whose real name was Robert J. Turnbull) declared that in the face of growing northern strength and ever-broadening constitutional interpretation, only consistent insistence on state sovereignty could forestall eventual emancipation by Congress.
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With such anxieties in the back of their minds, Calhoun and the Radicals with whom he now cooperated wanted to try out nullification as a means of pressuring the majority into making concessions. If they could make the procedure work in the case of the tariff, they would have the tactic to use whenever needed, and the protection of slavery would be that much more secure. Proud of his invention, Calhoun hoped that he could demonstrate nullification’s effectiveness and hush rash talk of secession. For the Radicals, the tariff provided an occasion for testing a novel weapon on behalf of a state-rights philosophy they had long held. Unlike Calhoun, they had no qualms about secession as another option to exercise.
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That South Carolina’s nullification was intended as much to defend slavery as to bring down the tariff is clear in the intertwined motives of the low-country growers of rice and long-staple cotton. Like the up-country producers of short-staple cotton, they sold their crops on the international market. Compared with the growers in the Piedmont, the great coastal planters of rice and luxury cotton suffered less from the competition of more fertile lands to the west and consequently felt less squeezed financially. But the tariff, by reducing the supply of dollars in foreign hands, limited the overseas market for their crops and encouraged their customers to look for alternative sources of supply. Rice producers suffered more from the tariff than cotton producers because the world demand for rice was more economically “elastic.”
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Furthermore, with over 50 percent of their total wealth invested in human beings, these particular large-scale capitalists felt that they had the greatest stake in the slave system of anyone in America. The swamps where their rice grew bred mosquitoes. Workers of African descent, carrying partial immunity to malaria along with traditional knowledge of rice culture from their homeland, seemed ideally suited to tend the rice crop. The aristocrats spent much of the year in Charleston, away from their plantations, leaving their holdings to slaves performing pre-assigned “tasks” (typically a half acre of rice land per worker) under the supervision of enslaved overseers called drivers.
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