by Jon Meacham
The views were intensely nationalistic. Nullification was, Jackson said, “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.” Had a single-state veto been an option “at an earlier day, the Union would have been dissolved in its infancy,” Jackson said. The War of 1812—Jackson’s true trial by fire, and the theater from which he rose to power—might have been lost: “The war into [which] we were forced [in order to] support the dignity of the nation and the rights of our citizens might have ended in defeat and disgrace, instead of victory and honor, if the states who supposed it a ruinous and unconstitutional measure had thought they possessed the right of nullifying the act by which it was declared and denying supplies for its prosecution.” The Constitution, he said, “forms a government, not a league.… It is a government in which all the people are represented.”
The system was not perfect, and therefore there were “two appeals from an unconstitutional act passed by Congress—one to the judiciary, the other to the people and the States” through constitutional amendment. Jackson argued that “We the People” had formed the Union that produced the Constitution, as opposed to the Southern theory that the Constitution was a compact between the states in which the individual states were paramount. To Jackson, the people were paramount, and the American system of government was, he believed, equal to the task of reconciling the competing interests of modern life as well as any human institution could.
Addressing the people of South Carolina, Jackson was alternately stern and soft, painting a portrait of a rising nation whose progress to glory could only be interrupted by the attempts of a single interest to seize power from the whole:
Contemplate the condition of that country of which you still form an important part. Consider its government, uniting in one bond of common interest and general protection so many different states, giving to all their inhabitants the proud title of American citizen, protecting their commerce, securing their literature and their arts, facilitating their intercommunication, defending their frontiers, and making their name respected in the remotest parts of the earth. Consider the extent of its territory, its increasing and happy population, its advance in arts which render life agreeable, and the sciences which elevate the mind! See education spreading the lights of religion, morality, and general information into every cottage in this wide extent of our Territories and States. Behold it as the asylum where the wretched and the oppressed find a refuge and support. Look on this picture of happiness and honor and say, We too are citizens of America.
The cost of failing to see the virtues of the Union that had brought America so far would be enormous, and Jackson did not hesitate to conjure the terrors that awaited anyone who thought they could break away, thus putting the entire experiment in liberty at risk:
Carolina is one of these proud states; her arms have defended, her best blood has cemented, this happy Union.… For what do you throw away these inestimable blessings? For what would you exchange your share in the advantages and honor of the Union? For the dream of a separate independence—a dream interrupted by bloody conflicts with your neighbors and a vile dependence on a foreign power. If your leaders could succeed in establishing a separation, what would be your situation? Are you united at home? Are you free from the apprehension of civil discord, with all its fearful consequences? Do our neighboring republics, every day suffering some new revolution or contending with some new insurrection, do they excite your envy?
The answers to these questions were so self-evident to Jackson that he did not care to let his audience even begin to reply. He continued:
But the dictates of a high duty oblige me solemnly to announce that you cannot succeed. The laws of the United States must be executed. I have no discretionary power on the subject; my duty is emphatically pronounced in the Constitution.… Disunion by armed force is treason. Are you really ready to incur its guilt? … On your unhappy state will inevitably fall all the evils of the conflict you force upon the government of your country. It cannot accede to the mad project of disunion, of which you would be the first victims. Its First Magistrate cannot, if he would, avoid the performance of his duty.… Declare that you will never take the field unless the star-spangled banner of your country shall float over you; that you will not be stigmatized when dead, and dishonored and scorned while you live, as the authors of the first attack on the Constitution of your country. Its destroyers you cannot be.
Among the radicals in South Carolina, the publication of the proclamation prompted fury. To James Henry Hammond, Jackson’s words were “destined to bring about another reign of terror.” To the Unionists, Poinsett said, the proclamation was considered “wise, determined and firm.” James A. Hamilton, a son of Alexander Hamilton, told Jackson: “I pray God to preserve your life … that you may preserve this Union.” According to Joseph Story, John Marshall became one of Jackson’s “warmest supporters” after the proclamation. Henry Clay, on the other hand, could not get over the contrast between this and the annual message: “One short week produced the message and the Proclamation—the former ultra, on the side of State rights—the latter ultra, on the side of Consolidation.” To another friend, he complained: “Who can have confidence in any man that would put forth two such contradictory papers?”
Still unable to see the calculation behind Jackson’s confrontational style, Clay was unwilling to acknowledge what in hindsight appears clear enough: that the two messages, while different in tone—understandably, since they were written to serve different purposes in the same cause—were ideologically and philosophically compatible. The cumulative effect of the two documents was, first, to define the ideal shape and scope of the federal government, and second, to defend the existence of that government as the best means yet devised to reconcile contending forces in a peaceable and enduring way. The annual message was about the brushstrokes and colors Jackson would like to use in the art of American politics and governance. The proclamation explained the size and importance of the canvas.
DID JACKSON HAVE firm states’ rights ideas? He did. They included a belief in a generally limited federal government, a debt-free nation, and a country in which the people, acting through the states more fully and frequently than through Washington, made a larger number of important decisions about public affairs. Experience had taught him, however, that there was virtue in the Union and in custom, even if he himself flouted custom when it suited him. “King Andrew the First,” as his foes styled him, was the most powerful president in the forty-year history of the office, but his power was marshaled not for personal gain—he was always in financial straits—but, as Jackson saw it, for what he believed was in the best interests of the ordinary, the unconnected, the uneducated. He could be brutal in his application of power, but he was not a brute. He could be unwavering, but he was not closed-minded. He was, rather, the great politician of his time, if success in politics is measured by the affirmation of a majority of the people in real time and by the shadow one casts after leaving the stage.
Read even now, the proclamation he issued on the tenth day of December, only half a century after the Revolution, captures both what was remarkable about the nation then and which of her virtues—liberty, union, imagination, loyalty, perseverance—sustained her through decades and centuries of tumult. Henry Clay may have found Jackson inconsistent, but most of the people of the time did not. Thomas Hart Benton remarked that the “mass of the people think the Union is attacked, and that the Proclamation is to save it, and that brief view is decisive with them.”
It moved even those inclined to find fault with Jackson. Philip Hone, a former mayor of New York who kept a detailed diary of the period, generally thought Jackson a rube. But the proclamation surprised him. “The whole subject is discussed in a spirit of conciliation, but with firmness and decision.… The language of the P
resident is that of a father addressing his wayward children, but determined to punish with the utmost severity the first open act of insubordination,” Hone wrote. “As a composition it is splendid, and will take its place in the archives of our country, and will dwell in the memory of our citizens alongside of the farewell address of the ‘Father of his Country.’ ” He added: “I think Jackson’s election may save the Union.”
ROBERT HAYNE, WHO had succeeded Hamilton as governor of South Carolina in December 1832, giving up his seat in the Senate to Calhoun, told his aide-de-camp that “measures have been taken to procure an ample supply of arms of every description” for the volunteer corps and that the cavalry should be told that “I am in hopes in a very short time to forward a supply of sabers and pistols.”
Poinsett was pessimistic. “These men are reckless and desperate and I have little hope of a peaceful termination of this conflict,” he told Jackson on Monday, December 17. Jackson thought his ally was reading things right. “If I can judge from the signs of the times, nullification and secession, or, in the language of truth, disunion, is gaining strength,” Jackson wrote to Secretary of War Cass on the same day. “We must be prepared to act with promptness and crush the monster in its cradle before it matures to manhood. We must be prepared for the crisis.” He then requested a report on how many muskets were on hand, as well as how much ammunition and artillery. He and Hayne were asking the same questions as they readied for the fight; a week after Jackson’s note to Cass, Hayne ordered the preparation of a confidential report detailing “what supplies exist of field pieces, muskets, rifles, lead, and generally everything which it is important for me to know.” A Unionist told Jackson that his supporters comforted themselves with the cry: “What have we to fear, we are right and God and Old Hickory are with us.”
South Carolina was roiling. “I am lingering here to witness the ‘outbreak’ on the subject of the tariff,” Washington Irving told his brother. The Reverend Samuel Cram Jackson took in a meeting at which Hayne and McDuffie spoke. There were more than two thousand people there, and “the vast building resounded, almost incessantly, with the thunders of applause.” The Reverend Jackson “could easily see how nullification had spread. The multitude believe and applaud all that their leaders say, and are blindly led on to their destruction.”
“I hope these southern Nullifiers will not break down the beautiful edifice their fathers have erected to freedom,” Rebecca Gratz, a Philadelphian who was rumored to be the model for the heroine in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, wrote her sister-in-law on Tuesday, December 18, 1832. “Oh how I tremble lest American blood should be spilt by American hands.”
As the year came to a close, Calhoun resigned the vice presidency—his brief letter to Edward Livingston was dated Friday, December 28, 1832—but he would not be moving far from the presiding officer’s chair in the chamber. The state legislature at Columbia had elected him senator and now he could fight Jackson openly from the floor rather than secretly and sporadically from the shadows—for as long, in any event, as South Carolina remained in the Union.
On December 30, Calhoun was in Raleigh and spent an entire Sunday, William Gaston said, “lecturing on nullification at the Hotel.” With “zeal and animation,” Calhoun made his case to a room crowded with people, many of them standing to hear him. The gist of his argument, Gaston reported, was that “our government had remained unreformed [for] upwards of forty years. No human institution could fail to require amendment after that length of time”—glossing over the existing amending process that had given the nation the Bill of Rights. For Calhoun, the wisdom of South Carolina’s course was so obvious that anyone could see it. “The doctrine of nullification was perfectly understood in South Carolina, from the judge who presided on the bench to the humblest tenant of a log cabin in the piney woods,” Calhoun told his listeners in Raleigh, and that “when it was more studied and better understood it could not fail to triumph.”
JACKSON FEARED CALHOUN might be right, that the theory of nullification, cloaked in the garb of republican virtue, could give other unhappy Southern states the occasion and the means to cast their lot with South Carolina rather than with Washington. Nullification was, as Calhoun and others had shown, an intellectually respectable enough proposition that Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi took a long look at the doctrine. From Richmond to Raleigh to Atlanta to Montgomery to Jackson, Southern governors and lawmakers, both federal and state, hated the tariff and longed to see it reformed or killed (preferably the latter). But was nullification, with its attendant risk of civil war, worth it? Even if only a few Southerners thought so—and they did—Jackson had to worry.
He knew that elements in each of these states, some quite strong, inclined to follow South Carolina’s lead. In Alabama, the influential congressman Dixon Hall Lewis—a nearly five-hundred-pound giant of a man who chaired the House Indian Affairs Committee—thought Calhoun was on to something. In Mississippi, Senator George Poindexter and John A. Quitman, the chancellor of the state courts, attempted to translate states’ rights opinion into sentiment for nullification. Implacably anti-Jackson, Poindexter said that “the very existence and vital interests of the Southern states depend” on restricting presidential authority. With the settlement of its Cherokee cases in favor of the white majority, Georgia stood by Jackson. In North Carolina, officials professed simultaneous anger at the tariff and opposition to nullification—but worried that Jackson might go too far in putting down South Carolina. The use of force by federal troops could turn North Carolina’s sympathies from Washington to Columbia and Charleston.
Virginia was perhaps the greatest threat. It was a divided state. On the Unionist side, figures like the aged James Madison insisted that nullification was neither constitutional nor within the spirit of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. The more radical side was led by the state’s governor, John Floyd, who was an intimate of Calhoun’s, and he, like Calhoun, had no use for Jackson. In December, Floyd alluded to the abolitionist maneuvering in the North, warning the legislature that it was all “for the purpose no doubt of inciting our slave population to rebellion and acts of violence.” But it was not until Jackson’s Nullification Proclamation, with its intense language of nationalism, that Virginia began to waver in its support of the Union. The vision of Jackson sweeping into the South with the might of the army was too much for many Virginians, who fell back on the old critique of Jackson and his character: “He pursues enemies with a cruel vengeance, which knows no bounds, and is restrained by no generosity,” wrote one. Floyd’s confidence grew. Perhaps he and Calhoun could win after all. If Jackson “uses force,” Floyd said, “I will oppose him with a military force. I nor my country will be enslaved without a struggle.”
At home in Richmond, as John Marshall watched Floyd call on the state’s lawmakers to weigh nullification, the chief justice’s post-proclamation euphoria quickly dissipated. “I look with anxious solicitude to the proceedings of our legislature, and with much more fear than hope,” Marshall told William Gaston. “Might I judge from the very little I know of its character, I should say that a considerable portion is in favor of a separate confederacy, and that this portion contains the boldest and most active of its members. Consequently it strengthens daily.”
Floyd was inclined to throw in his lot with Calhoun, and there was an argument that the Union’s demise could be good for Virginia, which would become the greatest power in a new Southern order. In considering their own decisions about nullification, Virginia’s neighbors worried that they might be trading the tyranny of the North for the tyranny of Virginia. “Separated from the East and united in a Southern Confederacy, would not Virginia govern with supreme control?” a correspondent asked John Branch of North Carolina. “Have you not already felt the force of her domination, when her sons were in power? And how could you protect yourself against her overwhelming population and resources? There are matters which it would seem the worthy nullifiers have not stud
ied as they deserve. The time is approaching when it will be necessary for South Carolina to look at this side of the question—and to decide which is likely to use power most tyrannically, the General Government or the mighty and proud Dominion [of Virginia] by which she is located and before which she must tremble and crouch in the event of a contest between them.”
Marshall, no alarmist, took the prospect of disunion seriously. “Insane as South Carolina unquestionably is, I do not think her so absolutely mad as to have made her declaration of war against the United States had she not counted on uniting the south—beginning with Virginia,” Marshall told Gaston. Marshall knew Floyd and Calhoun were close, and he worried that the alliance might have far-reaching consequences. The whole business depressed Marshall, who expected civil war. “Were an open declaration in favor of a southern league to be made by the governments and supported by the people, I believe the terms of separation might be amicably adjusted,” he told Gaston—a remarkable admission, coming from one of the architects of American nationalism. “But the course we seem inclined to take”—meaning Jackson’s refusal to give in—“encourages South Carolina to persevere and the consequence of her perseverance must be civil war. In the mean time, our people will be inextricably entangled in the labyrinth of their State right theories, and the feeble attachment they still retain for the Union will be daily weakened. ‘We have fallen on evil times.’ ” Still, the chief justice hoped he was wrong. “Old men are timid,” he said, referring to himself. “Pray Heaven that my fears may proceed from the timidity of age rather than from rational calculation founded on the actual state of things.”