Nullification, Secession, Webster's Argument, and the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions / Considered in Reference to the Constitution and Historically

by Caleb William Loring

CHAPTER VI.

CALHOUN, JACKSON, AND NATIONAL GOVERNMENT.

In 1811, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a young man not of the age of thirty years, took his seat as a member of the national House of Representatives, and at once became a leader in public affairs. He was one of the Committee on Foreign Relations. On the 12th of December he said what was the road the nation should tread “to make it great and to produce in this country not the form but the real spirit of union.”[91] In March, 1815, he voted for a high tariff and said: “He believed the policy of the country required protection to our manufacturing establishments.”[92] He also reported the bill to incorporate a United States Bank, and supported it in a speech on its constitutionality.[93] Webster, on the contrary, opposed the tariff bills, not however on the ground of their unconstitutionality. In December, 1816, Calhoun moved “that a committee be appointed to inquire into the expediency of setting apart a permanent fund for internal improvement”; on December 23d, he reported a bill setting aside the bonus paid by the United States Bank, $1,500,000 and future dividends from bank stock, “as a fund for constructing roads and canals.”[94] In his speech supporting it he said: “that the extent of our republic exposes us to the greatest of all calamities, next to the loss of liberty, and even to that in its consequences, disunion.” “Probably not more than twenty-five or thirty members, in the total number of one hundred and seventy, regarded the constitutional difficulty as fatal to the bill.”[95] Madison, however, consistent and persistent in his strict construction of the Constitution, vetoed it.

In 1819 and 1820 came the admission of Missouri and the struggle over the extension or restriction of slavery. The Southern statesmen feared that the South was losing its relative importance in the Union. Even those of Virginia, who had formerly been opposed to slavery, now took the opposite view, and the Legislature of that State passed resolutions for the admission of Missouri with slavery. The increase in the production of cotton had made the raising of slaves profitable. The controversy was settled by the bill called the Missouri Compromise, admitting Missouri with slavery, and excluding slavery from all the rest of the country west of that State and north of 36° 30′, the southern boundary of Missouri. This was the first important controversy dividing the States geographically. It was the division that Mason, Madison, and others foresaw in the convention that made the Constitution; not a combination of the great States against the small, but geographical, between the South and the North, the planting and commercial States, and, underlying this and more potent, the institution of slavery repugnant to the North and existing only in the South.

It was this difference of interest between the two sections that brought Calhoun to a change of opinion on the great industrial, commercial, and moral questions that had arisen. His convictions followed what he wished to believe: not an unusual temperament. From a protectionist he became the zealous advocate of extreme free trade, from a nationalist to the belief that the Union was nothing but a league any State could break at its will, from holding slavery to be a moral evil to the support of it as a divine institution. In 1837, after the nullification controversy, when he introduced resolutions in the Senate as to slavery, he said:

“This question has produced one happy effect, at least it has compelled us of the South to look into the nature and character of this great institution (slavery), and to correct many false impressions that even we had entertained in relation to it. Many in the South once believed that it was a moral and political evil. That folly and delusion are gone. We see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world. It is impossible with us that the conflict take place between labor and capital.”

He went so far as to say a mysterious Providence had brought together two races from different portions of the globe and placed them together in equal numbers in the southern portion of the Union. To which Clay forcibly replied, “to call a generation of slave-hunting pirates (who brought the negroes to this country) a mysterious Providence, was an insult to the Supreme Being.”[96]

Calhoun and many of the leaders and politicians of the cotton-raising States saw that they were losing their relative importance in population and wealth; they believed that, with free trade bringing to them everything they consumed at a lower price, their products and profits would be increased. South Carolina with Calhoun as the master spirit was the leader in this matter; the existing protective tariff bearing hardly on the plantation States was in their opinion the great hindrance to their prosperity. It was not difficult for them to come to the conclusion it was a tyrannical and palpable violation of the Constitution. Seeing that they could not bring the majority in Congress to their belief, the South Carolinian politicians revived and developed the doctrine of the Kentucky resolutions of the sovereignty of each State, and of its right as a sovereign to judge of the constitutionality of an act of the United States. A convention of the people of the State was called, and under the claimed right of sovereignty the convention, on the 24th of November, 1832, passed an ordinance in which it was declared the tariff laws of the United States were null and void, and that no duties imposed by the United States should be collected after the first of February, A. D. 1833. The convention further declared that they would resist any acts of the United States to collect its duties or to coerce the State into paying them, and that such acts of the United States would absolve the people of the State from any political connection with the people of the other States, and that the State would organize as a sovereign independent government.

Thus South Carolina, more than forty years after the adoption of the Constitution, was the first State that assumed to act as a distinct sovereign power. To such a degree did the confidence of the State in its own prowess and a spirit of rash defiance of the United States exist, that upon Governor Haynes’ return to Charleston from the State Capital, the horses were taken from his carriage and the citizens dragged him in triumph through the streets.

Few leaders have had more warm admirers than Calhoun. Oliver Dyer in his Great Senators, tells us he was tall and gaunt, his complexion dark and Indian-like. Eyes large, black, piercing, scintillant; his iron-gray hair hung down in thick masses. He was remarkable for the exceeding courtesy of his demeanor and for the sweetness and bell-like resonance of his voice. His private life, what could not be said of most of his contemporaries, was unimpeachable.