Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859

3. Ruinous Tendencies: The Anti-Abolition Backlash

87 3 Ruinous Tendencies THE ANTI-ABOLITION BACKLASH ‘‘Who does not see that the American people are walking over a subterranean fire, the flames of which are fed by slavery?’’ These words, with their ominous ring, were written by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child as a commentary on the nullification crisis, the protracted clash between South Carolina and the federal government that lasted from 1828 until 1833. As we have seen, the ostensible cause of the crisis was Congress’s passage, in 1828, of a ‘‘tari√ of abominations’’ on European imports. In the first act of the crisis, President Andrew Jackson had condemned South Carolina’s nullification scheme and hoped that a reduction in the tari√ rate would ease tensions. But South Carolinia states’ rights men were singularly unimpressed by the tari√ reform of 1832 (although it reset the tari√ rate at its 1824 level), and in November of that year they held a Nullification Convention that enacted a veto of the hated measure and threatened secession if the U.S. government tried to enforce the nullified law. The South Carolina legislature voted to muster an army to protect the state against federal force. In December 1832 John C. Calhoun, the mastermind of nullification, resigned the vice presidency and took up the banner of state sovereignty in the U.S. Senate. Under pressure from extremists in his own state, Calhoun had made his stance of interposition public in his July 1831 ‘‘Fort Hill Address,’’ and he now developed the doctrine in a This 1831 anti-Jackson satire shows him beleaguered by infighting, as Van Buren and Calhoun compete over the ladder of ‘‘political preferment’’ while Webster and Clay look on. Webster remarks that Calhoun has ‘‘nullified the whole Concern,’’ while Clay, given to dire prophecies of disunion, mutters ‘‘Famine! War! Pestilence!’’ (Courtesy of the Library of Congress) The Anti-Abolition Backlash Δ 89 host of speeches, letters, discourses, and other polemics. Interposition, he explained, provided a constitutional check on the ‘‘unrestrained will of a majority,’’ by which he meant a numerical majority. The states, through Calhoun’s mechanism of protest, could assert themselves as a ‘‘concurrent majority’’—they could achieve consensus or compromise in consultation with each other. In other words, in Calhoun’s view, the government was not designed to confer absolute power on a ruling majority based on a simple tally of votes. Instead, the government was designed to protect all of its constitutive interests—namely, the states. By ‘‘taking the sense of the community’’ (a favorite phrase of Calhoun’s), the constitutional device of interposition would give ‘‘each interest or portion of the community’’ the right to defend itself against the others.∞ Calhoun was at great pains, in his public and private writings, to distinguish nullification from secession. Secession was a separation of one state from its partners, whereas nullification set in motion a deliberative process among the states. Nullification could be ‘‘succeeded by secession,’’ but that was a last resort; the purpose of nullification was to preserve the Union. The Union was the ‘‘means, if wisely used,’’ Calhoun again and again reminded his followers, ‘‘not only of reconciling all diversities, but also the means and the only e√ectual one, of securing to us justice, peace and security, at home and abroad.’’≤ With leading nullifiers such as Robert Barnwell Rhett, James Henry Hammond , and South Carolina governor James Hamilton Jr., rejecting such paeans to the Union in favor of militant rhetoric that promised martial resistance to federal ‘‘invasion,’’ Calhoun’s attempts to cast nullification as a patriotic doctrine rang false. President Jackson again took a defiant stance against his former partner—Jackson issued his own proclamation that nullified nullification , declaring it unconstitutional. Jackson believed that pro-nullification Southerners had been manipulated by designing leaders like Calhoun and Rhett. Addressing himself to South Carolinians, Jackson decried the ‘‘eloquent appeals to your passions, to your State pride, to your native courage, [and] to your sense of real injury’’ that ‘‘were used to prepare you for the period when the mask which concealed the hideous features of disunion should be taken o√.’’ Instead of looking with ‘‘horror’’ on the deformity of disunion, duped nullifiers now looked on it with ‘‘complacency.’’ Jackson tried to restore their sense of horror, both by invoking the ‘‘bloody conflicts’’ 90 Δ 1789–1836 that disunion would...