Moreover, the price of slaves was increased by the demands of the new cotton-fields of Alabama, Mississippi, and the rest of the southwest, so that the Carolina planter had to apply a larger capital to his operations, while, at the same time, the cheap and unexhausted soil of these new states tended still further to hamper the older cotton areas in their competition, and the means of transportation from the western cotton-fields were better than from those of South Carolina. By devoting almost exclusive attention to her great staple, South Carolina had made herself dependent on the grain and live-stock of the west and the manufactures of the north or of England; and, when the one crop from which she derived her means of purchasing declined in value, the state was plunged in unrelieved distress. Nevertheless, the planters of the old south saw clearly but two of the causes of their distress: the tariff, which seemed to them to steal the profits of their crops; and internal improvements, by which the proceeds of their indirect taxes were expended in the west and north. Their indignation was also fanned to a fiercer flame by apprehensions over the attitude of the north towards slavery.
In the summer of 1828, Calhoun addressed himself to the statement of these grievances and to the formulation of a remedy. After consultation with leading men in his home at Fort Hill, he was ready to shape a document which, nominally a report of a legislative committee (since it was not expedient for the vice-president to appear in the matter), put in its first systematic form the doctrine of nullification. This so-called Exposition, [Footnote: Calhoun, Works, VI., 1-59.] beginning with the unconstitutionality and injustice of protection, developed the argument that the tax on imports, amounting to about twenty-three million dollars, fell, in effect, solely on the south, because the northern sections recompensed themselves by the increased profits afforded to their productions by protection; while the south, seeking in the markets of the world customers for its staples, and obliged to purchase manufactures and supplies in return, was forced to pay tribute on this exchange for the benefit of the north. "To the growers of cotton, rice, and tobacco, it is the same whether the Government takes one-third of what they raise, for the liberty of sending the other two-thirds abroad, or one-third of the iron, salt, sugar, coffee, cloth and other articles they may need in exchange for the liberty of bringing them home."
Estimating the annual average export of domestic produce at fifty- three million dollars, the Exposition attributed to the planting section at least thirty-seven million dollars—over two-thirds of the total exports; the voting power of this section in the House of Representatives was but seventy-six, while the rest of the Union had one hundred and thirty-seven members. Thus, one-third of the political Union exported more than two-thirds of the domestic products. Assuming imports to equal exports, and the tariff of 1828 to average forty-five per cent., the south would pay sixteen million six hundred and fifty thousand dollars as its share of contributions to the national treasury. Calhoun then presented the ominous suggestion that, if the staple section had a separate custom-house, it would have for its own use a revenue of sixteen million six hundred and fifty thousand dollars from foreign trade alone, not counting the imports from the north, which would bring in millions more.
"We are mere consumers," he declared, "the serfs of the system—out of whose labor is raised, not only the money paid into the Treasury, but the funds out of which are drawn the rich rewards of the manufacturer and his associates in interest."
Taking for granted that the price at which the south could afford to cultivate cotton was determined by the price at which it received its supplies, he argued that, if the crop could be produced at ten cents a pound, the removal of the duty would enable the planter to produce it at five and one-half cents, and thus to drive out competition and to add three or four hundred thousand bales annually to the production, with a corresponding increase of profit. The complaints of the south were not yet exhausted, for the Exposition went on to point out that, in the commercial warfare with Europe which protection might be expected to engender, the south would be deprived of its market and might be forced to change its industrial life and compete with the northern states in manufactures. The advantages of the north would probably insure it an easy victory; but if not, then an attack might be expected on the labor system of the south, in behalf of the white workmen of the north.
What, then, was the remedy? Calhoun found this, although in fragmentary form, ready to his hand. The reserved rights of the sovereign states had long been the theoretical basis of southern resistance. In the argumentation of such writers as Taylor, Turnbull, and Judge Roane, not to mention Madison and Jefferson in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, there was material for the system; but as yet no one had stated with entire clearness the two features which Calhoun made prominent in his Exposition. First, he made use of reasoning in sharp contrast to that of the statesmen of the days of the American Revolution, by rejecting the doctrine of the division of sovereignty between the states and the general government. [Footnote: McLaughlin, in Am. Hist. Rev., V., 482, 484.] Clearly differentiating government from sovereignty, he limited the application of the division to the powers of government, and attributed the sovereignty solely to the people of the several states. This conception of the unity of sovereignty was combined with the designation of the Constitution as articles of compact between sovereign states, each entitled to determine whether or not the general government had usurped powers not granted by the Constitution, and each entitled peacefully to prevent the operation of the disputed law within its own limits, pending a decision by the same power that could amend the Constitution—namely, three-fourths of the states.
These doctrines were brought out with definiteness and with the deliberate intention of creating from them a practical governmental machinery to be peacefully applied for the preservation of the rights of the states. In effect, therefore, Calhoun, the logician of nationalism in the legislation that followed the War of 1812, became the real architect of the system of nullification as a plan of action rather than a protest. As it left his hands, the system was essentially a new creation. In the Exposition, the doctrine was sketched only in its larger lines, for it was in later documents that he refined and elaborated it. It was intended as a substitute for revolution and disunion—but it proved to be the basis on which was afterwards developed the theory of peaceable secession. Calhoun did not publicly avow his authorship or his adhesion to nullification until three years later.
The rallying of the party of the Union in South Carolina against this doctrine, the refusal of Georgia, Virginia, and other southern states to accept it as the true exposition of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, the repudiation of it by the planting states of the southwest, all belong to the next volume of this series.
Yet the Exposition marks the culmination of the process of transformation with which this volume has dealt. Beginning with nationalism, the period ends with sectionalism. Beginning with unity of party and with the almost complete ascendancy of republicanism of the type of Monroe, it ends with sharply distinguished rival parties, as yet unnamed, but fully organized, and tending to differ fundamentally on the question of national powers. From the days when South-Carolinians led in legislation for tariff and internal improvements, when Virginians promoted the Colonization Society, and Georgians advocated the policy of mitigating the evils of slavery by scattering the slaves, we have reached the period when a united south protests against "the American system," and the lower south asserts that slavery must not be touched—not even discussed.
In various southern states the minority counties of the coast, raising staples by slave labor, had protected their property interests against the free majority of farmers in the interior counties by so apportioning the legislature as to prevent action by the majority. Now the same conditions existed for the nation. The free majority embraced a great zone of states in the north and west; the south, a minority section, was now seeking protection against the majority of the Union by the device of state sovereignty; and Calhoun made himself the political philosopher of the rights of this minority section, applying to the nation the experience of South Carolina. [Footnote: Calhoun. Works, I., 400-405.]