Slavery and four years of war

by Joseph Warren Keifer

XIII NULLIFICATION—1832-3 (1835)

A debate arose in the United States Senate over a resolution of Senator Foote of Connecticut proposing to limit the sale of the public lands, which took a wide range. Hayne of South Carolina elaborately set forth the doctrine of nullification, claiming it inhered in each State under the Constitution. He boldly announced that the Union formed was only a league or a compact. This called forth from Webster his celebrated "Reply to Hayne," of January 26, 1830, in which he assailed and apparently overthrew the then new doctrine of nullification. He denounced its exercise as incompatible with a loyal adherence to the Constitution, and showed historically that the government formed under it was not a mere "compact" or "league" between sovereign or independent States terminable at will. He then asserted that any attempt of any State to act on the theory of nullification would inevitably entail civil war or a dissolution of the Union.

The first real attempt, however, at nullification, or the first attempt of a State to declare laws of Congress nugatory and of no binding force when not approved by the State, was made in South Carolina in 1832, under the leadership of John C. Calhoun, then Vice-President of the United States, and hitherto a statesman of so much just renown, and esteemed so moderate and patriotic in his views on all national questions as to have been looked upon, with the special approval of the North, as eminently qualified for the Presidency. He hopefully aspired to it until he quarrelled with President Jackson; he had been in favor of a protective tariff.

Cotton was, as we have seen, the principal article of export, and the slaveholding cotton planters conceived the idea that to secure a market for it there must be no duties on imports, and that home manufactures of needed articles for consumption would restrict the foreign demand for the raw material. Besides, the South with its slave labor could not indulge in manufacturing. A tariff on imports meant protection to home industries and to free white labor, both inimical to slavery. Some leading Southern statesmen, adherents of slavery, had vehemently opposed the ratification of the Constitution of 1787, on the ground that as it empowered Congress to levy import duties, it would encourage and build up home industries, with free labor; and they prophesied that with them slavery would eventually become unprofitable and therefore unpopular, hence would die. This idea never left the Southern mind, so, when the Confederacy of 1861 was formed, its Constitution (framed at Montgomery, Alabama) prohibited such duties for the express reason that no branch of industry was to be promoted in the new slave government, using this language:

"Nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry."(45)

This was then supposed to be the highest bulwark of slavery. Its votaries understood its strength and weakness. Independent, well- paid free labor and industries (46) would ennoble the men of toil, bring wealth and power, build up populous towns and cities, and consequently overwhelm, politically and otherwise, the institution of slavery, or draw into successful social competition with plantation life wealthy inhabitants who knew not slavery and its demoralizing influences.

Already, in 1832, the effects of protection on the prosperity of our country were manifest, especially since the Tariff Act of 1828, which levied a duty equivalent to 45 per cent. ad valorem. The Act of 1832 made a small reduction in the duties, but because it was claimed it did not distribute them equally, nullification was determined on as the remedy.

It was agreed by the strict constructionists of that day that a State Legislature could not declare a law of the United States void, but to do this the people must speak through a convention. Such a convention met in South Carolina, in November, 1832, and passed a Nullification Ordinance, declaring the tariff acts "null and void," not binding on the State, and that under them no duties should be paid in the State after February 1, 1833.

Immediately thereafter medals were struck, inscribed "John C. Calhoun, first President of the Southern Confederacy." Nullification, thus proclaimed, was the legitimate forerunner of secession.

President Jackson, with his heroic love of the Union, regarded the movement as only treason; he called it that in his proclamations; he prepared to collect the duties in Charleston or to confiscate the cargoes; he warned the nullifiers by the presence of General Scott there that he would be promptly used to coerce the State into loyalty; and he seemed eager to find an excuse for arresting, condemning for treason, and hanging Calhoun, who then went to Washington as a Senator, resigning the Vice-Presidency.(47)

Jackson tersely said:

"To say that any State may, at pleasure, secede from the Union, is to say that the United States are not a nation."

The situation was too imminent for Calhoun's nerves. To confront an indignant nation, led by a fearless, never doubting President, was a different thing then from what it was in 1860-61 with Buchanan as President, surrounded as he was by traitors in his Cabinet. Calhoun and his State backed down, and import duties continued to be collected in South Carolina, although a gradual reduction of them was made an excuse for Calhoun and his friends in Congress, in 1833, to vote for a protective tariff act, so recently before by them declared unconstitutional.(48)

On a "Force Bill" and a new tariff act being passed (March 15, 1833) the Nullification Ordinance was repealed in South Carolina. The next Ordinance of Secession of this State (1860) was based on the principles of the first one and the doctrines of Calhoun, slavery being the direct, as it had been the indirect, cause of their first enunciation. We must not anticipate here.

In the debate, in 1833, between Webster and Calhoun, the former, as in his great reply to Hayne,(49) expounded the Constitution as a "Charter of Union for all the States."

"The Constitution does not provide for events that must be preceded by its own destruction.

"That the Constitution is not a league, confederacy, or compact between the people of the several States in their sovereign capacity, but a government proper, founded on the adoption of the people, and creating direct relations between itself and individuals. That no State authority has power to dissolve these relations. That as to certain purposes the people of the United States are one people."

Nullification, attempted first on account of a protective tariff to foster home and young industries and for needed revenue to carry on the Federal government, was in two years, by its author, Calhoun, transferred, for a new cause on which to attempt to justify it— from the tariff to domestic slavery. Calhoun soon discovered and admitted that the South could not be united against the North and for disunion on opposition to a protective tariff. He therefore promptly sought an opportunity to bring forward in Congress the slavery question, and to attack the "agitators" and opponents of slavery extension in the North, and to threaten disunion if the institution of slavery was not permitted to dictate the political policy of the Republic.

The exact method of reviving in Congress the whole subject of slavery so soon after nullification had been so signally suppressed by Jackson is worth briefly stating.

President Jackson, in his Annual Message, December, 1835, called attention to attempts to use the mails to circulate matter calculated to excite slaves to insurrection, but he did not recommend any legislation to prevent it. Mr. Calhoun moved in the Senate that so much of the message relating to mail transportation of incendiary publications be referred to a select committee of five.

He was made chairman of this committee, and, on his request, three others from the South, with but one from the North, were put on the committee, and he promptly made an elaborate and carefully- prepared report, going into the whole doctrine of states-rights and nullification.

In it he said:

"That the States which form our Federal Union are sovereign and independent communities, bound together by a constitutional compact, and are possessed of all the powers belonging to distinct and separate States, etc.

"The Compact itself expressly provides that all powers not delegated are reserved to the States and the people. . . . On returning to the Constitution, it will be seen that, while the power of defending the country against external danger is found among the enumerated, the instrument is wholly silent as to the power of defending the internal peace and security of the States: and of course reserves to the States this important power, etc.

"It belongs to slave-holding States, whose institutions are in danger, and not to Congress, as is supposed by the message, to determine what papers are incendiary and intended to excite insurrection among the slaves, etc.

"It has already been stated that the States which comprise our Federal Union are sovereign and independent communities, united by a constitutional compact. Among its members the laws of nations are in full force and obligation, except as altered or modified by the compact, etc.

"Within their limits, the rights of the slave-holding States are as full to demand of the States within whose limits and jurisdiction their peace is assailed, to adopt the measures necessary to prevent the same, and, if refused or neglected, to resort to means to protect themselves, as if they were separate and independent communities."

Here, perhaps, was the clearest statement yet made, not only of the independence of States from Federal interference and of their right, on their own whim, to break the "compact," but of the right of the slaveholding States to dictate to the other States legislation on the subject of slavery.

It was at once a declaration of independence for the Southern States, and a declaration of their right to hold all the Northern States so far subject to them as to be obliged, on demand, to pass and enforce any prescribed law in the interest of slavery. The South was to be the sole judge of what law on this subject was requisite for slavery's purposes.

No duty was demanded on this question of the Federal Government; and Southern States, according to Calhoun, owed it none where slavery was concerned.

Calhoun and his committee could discover no power in the Southern
States to enforce their demands save to act as separate and
independent communities—that is, by setting up for themselves.
This led logically to disunion, the result intended.

There was much in this report setting forth and professing to believe that it was the purpose of the North to emancipate the slaves, and through the agencies of organized anti-slavery societies bring about slave insurrections. The fanaticism of the North was descanted on, and the character of slavery and its wisdom as a social institution upheld.

He further said:

"He who regards slavery in those States simply under the relation of master and slave, as important as that relation is, viewed merely as a question of property to the slave-holding section of the Union, has a very imperfect conception of the institution, and the impossibility of abolishing it without disasters unexampled in the history of the world. To understand its nature and importance fully, it must be borne in mind that slavery, as it exists in the Southern States, involves not only the relation of master and slave, but also the social and political relation of the two races, of nearly equal numbers, from different quarters of the globe, and the most opposite of all others in every particular that distinguishes one race of men from another."

The whole report was replete with accusations against the North, and full of warning as to what the South would do should its demands not be complied with. The bill brought in by the committee was more remarkable than the report itself, and wholly inconsistent with its doctrine.

The bill provided high penalties for any postmaster who should knowingly receive and put into the mail any publication or picture touching the subject of slavery, to go into any State or Territory in which its circulation was forbidden by state law.

The report concluded:

"Should such be your decision, by refusing to pass this bill, I shall say to the people of the South, look to yourselves.

"But I must tell the Senate, be your decision what it may, the South will never abandon the principles of this bill. . . . We have a remedy in our own hands."

Clay, Webster, Benton, and others ably and effectually combated both the report and the bill, and the latter failed (25 to 19) in the Senate.

Besides denying the doctrine of the report, they showed the evil was not in mailing, but in taking from the mails and circulating by their own citizens the supposed objectionable publications.

Benton, himself a slaveholder, then and in subsequent years assailed and pronounced the doctrine of this report as the "birth of disunion." He has also shown that Calhoun delighted over the agitation of slavery more than he deprecated it; that he profoundly hoped that on the slavery question the South would be united and a Slave-Confederacy formed.(50)

In support of this Mr. Benton quotes from a letter of Mr. Calhoun to a gentleman in Alabama (1847) in which he says:

"I am much gratified with the tone and views of your letter, and concur entirely in the opinion you express, that instead of shunning, we ought to court the issue with the North on the slavery question. I would even go one step further and add that it is our duty to force the issue on the North. We are now stronger relatively than we shall be hereafter, politically and morally. Unless we bring on the issue, delay to us will be dangerous indeed. . . . Something of the kind was indispensable to the South. On the contrary, if we should not meet it as we ought, I fear, greatly fear, our doom will be fixed."(51)

Comment is unnecessary, but the letter, almost exultantly, mentions as fortunate that the Wilmot Proviso was offered, as it gave an opportunity to unite the South.

It proceeds:

"With this impression, I would regard any compromise or adjustment of the proviso, or even its defeat, without meeting the danger in its whole length and breadth, as very unfortunate for us.

"This brings up the question, how can it be so met, without resorting to the dissolution of the Union.

"There is and can be but one remedy short of disunion, and that is to retaliate on our part by refusing to fulfill the stipulations in their (other States) favor, or such as we may select, as the most efficient."

The letter, still proceeding to discuss modes of dissolution or retaliation against Northern States, declares a convention of Southern States indispensable, and their co-operation absolutely essential to success, and says:

"Let that be called, and let it adopt measures to bring about the co-operation, and I would underwrite for the rest. The non- slaveholding States would be compelled to observe the stipulations of the Constitution in our favor, or abandon their trade with us, or to take measures to coerce us, which would throw on them the responsibility of dissolving the Union. Their unbounded avarice would in the end control them."(52)

It is certain that President Jackson's heroic proclamation of December, 1832, aborted the project of nullification under the South Carolina Ordinance, and certain it is, also, that the disappointed leaders of it turned from a protective tariff as a ground for it, to what they regarded as a better excuse, to wit: A slavery agitation, generated out of false alarms in the slave States.

After the tariff compromise of 1833, in which Calhoun sullenly acquiesced, he returned home and immediately announced that the South would never unite against the North on the tariff question, —"That the sugar interest of Louisiana would keep her out,—and consequently the basis of Southern union must be shifted to the slave question," which was then accordingly done.(53)

Jackson, discussing nullification, is reported to have said:

"It was the tariff this time; next time it will be the negro."

This new and dangerous departure was not overlooked. The report and bill of 1835 relating to the use of the mails was only a chapter in execution of the new plan.

The observing friends of the Union did not overlook or misunderstand the movement. They at once took alarm. Mr. Clay, in May, 1833, wrote a letter to Mr. Madison expressing his apprehensions of the new danger, which brought from him a prompt response.

Mr. Madison in his letter said:

"It is painful to see the unceasing efforts to alarm the South by imputations against the North of unconstitutional designs on the subject of the slaves. You are right. I have no doubt that no such intermeddling disposition exists in the body of our Northern brethren. Their good faith is sufficiently guaranteed by the interest they have as merchants, ship-owners, and as manufacturers, in preserving a union with the slave-holding states. On the other hand, what madness in the South to look for greater safety in disunion."(54)

What Clay and Madison saw in 1833 as the real starting-point for ultimate secession proved true to history. From that time dates the machinations which led, through the steps that successively followed, to actual dissolution of the Union in 1860-61; then to coercion—War; then to the eradication of slavery. It was Southern madness that hastened the destruction of American slavery. "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."

The excuse for even this much significance given to "nullification" is, that in less than thirty years, under a new name—"state-rights" —it worked secession—disunion, and lit up the whole country with the flames and frenzy of internal war that did not die down for four years more; and then only when slavery was consumed.

The great abolition movement commenced in earnest, January 1, 1831. Wm. Lloyd Garrison published, at Boston, the Liberator, with the motto—"Our countrymen are all mankind." Benjamin Lundy, and perhaps others, had preceded Garrison, but not until after the Webster-Hayne debate did the abolition movement spread. Thenceforth it took deeper root in the human conscience, and it had advocates of determined spirit throughout the North, led on fearlessly, not alone by Garrison, but by Rev. Dr. Channing, Rev. James Freeman Clarke, and, later, by Rev. Samuel May (Syracuse, N. Y.), Gerritt Smith, the poet Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, Horace Mann, Charles Sumner, Joshua R. Giddings, Owen Lovejoy, and others, who spoke from pulpit, rostrum, and some in the halls of legislation; others in the courts and through the press. The enforcement of the fugitive-slave law was often violent, and always added new fuel to the fierce and constantly growing opposition to slavery.

The Anti-Slavery party was not one wholly built on abstract sentiment of philanthropists, but it involved physical resistance: Violence to violence.

The American Anti-Slavery Society was founded at a National Anti-
Slavery Convention held in Philadelphia, in December, 1831.

Hard upon the establishment of the Liberator came the Nat Turner insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia (August, 1831). This gave to the South a fresh ground to complain of the North. Turner's insurrection was held to be the legitimate fruit of abolition agitation. Turner was an African of natural capacity, who quoted the Bible fluently, prayed vehemently, and preached to his fellow slaves.

He told them, as did Joan of Arc, of "Voices" and "Visions," and of his communion with the Holy Spirit. An eclipse of the sun was the signal to strike their enemies and for freedom. The massacre lasted forty-eight hours, and sixty-one whites, women and children not spared, were victims. On the other hand, negroes were shot, tortured, hanged, and burned at the stake on whom the slightest suspicion of complicity fell.

The Nat Turner negro slave insurrection is the only one known to slavery in the United States. Others may possibly have been contemplated. The John Brown raid was not a negro insurrection. Even in the midst of the war (1861-65), believed by most slaves to be a war for their freedom, insurrections were unknown.(55)

The African race, the most wronged through the centuries, has been the most docile and the least revengeful of the races of the world.

(45) Confederate Con., Art. 1, Sec. 8, par. 1.

(46) The South in the days of slavery had, practically, no manufactories.

(47) Benton, Thirty Years' View, vol. i., p. 343.

(48) Rhodes, Hist. U. S., vol. i., pp. 49-50.

(49) January 26, 1830.

(50) For this report and history see Benton's Thirty Years' View, vol. i, pp. 580, etc.

(51) Thirty Years' View, vol. ii., chap. clxxxix.; Historical, etc. Examination, Dred Scott Case (Benton), p. 139.

(52) Historical, etc., Examination, Dred Scott Case (Benton), p. 141-4.

(53) Ibid., p. 181.

(54) Historical, etc., Ex., Dred Scott Case, pp. 181-2.

(55) There were some small insurrections and some threatened ones in the colonies as early as 1660, the guilty negroes or Indians being then punished by crucifixion, burning, and by starvation; other insurrections took place in the Carolinas and Georgia in 1734, and the Cato insurrection occurred at Stono, S. C., in 1740. There was a wide spread "Negro Plot" in New York in 1712. These attempts alarmed the colonies and caused some of them to take steps to abolish slavery.—Sup. of African Slave-Trade U. S., pp. 6, 10, 22, 206.