| Southern disappointment. |
This was a stunning blow to the hopes of the Southerners. The extinction of the debt and the existence of an unemployed surplus were the conditions to which they had looked forward as necessitating in all conservative minds the reduction of the duties. But here was a plan, suggested by a Southern President, for relieving the Treasury of any amount of surplus for an indefinite period, without the reduction of a single penny of duty upon a single article. Thus encouraged the protectionists in both Houses of Congress refused, during the session of 1830-31, to consider any propositions looking toward a reduction of duties.
It is hardly a cause of wonder that the South Carolinians began to despair of obtaining through Congress any relief from what they regarded as dire oppression, and that some of them were reviewing the Constitution, and the political principles upon which it was founded, with the purpose of finding other means with which to meet the great emergency. It was in this part of the work that Mr. Calhoun took the lead.
| "The South Carolina Exposition." Calhoun's doctrine of "States' rights." |
As far back as 1828, just after the enactment of the tariff measure which was giving so much offence, Mr. Calhoun had started out in this direction in the paper which he furnished the South Carolina legislature, which served as the basis of the first pronunciamento from that body upon the subject, the so-called South Carolina Exposition. This document by Mr. Calhoun was comparatively temperate in its language and not very clear in its political doctrines and its constitutional interpretation. The great debate between Hayne and Webster on the floor of the Senate, over which body Mr. Calhoun, as Vice-President, presided, in regard to the fundamental principles of the Union, taught Mr. Calhoun several very important points in the evolution of his doctrine of "States' rights." Especially was he warned against the great error, made by Mr. Hayne, of representing the United States Government as one of the parties to the "constitutional pact" and the "States" as the other. Mr. Webster so completely demolished this theory that Mr. Calhoun was preserved from introducing this fallacy or any of its corollaries into his reasoning, if he had ever been inclined to do so. In his "Address on the Relations of the States and Federal Government," and in his "Address to the People of South Carolina," both published in the summer of 1831, he shows that he had maturely reflected upon all that had been said and written upon the fundamental question of the relation of the "States" to the Union and to the general Government. He had given up his hope both in the Congress and in the President. With him the question of the tariff had now, therefore, been removed from the domain of governmental policy into that of constitutional powers and political principle. This was the point of view which he took in the documents just mentioned.
He began, as innovators generally do, with the assertion that his interpretation of the Constitution was no new invention of his own, but was the ancient principle of the Constitution. That principle was, he contended, that the Constitution was made by the "States," as sovereign bodies, and that through it the "States" created only a governmental agent for their general affairs. The term or phrase United States was only the name of the general governmental agent of the "States." Sovereignty was in the "States" only. Consequently, when the United States assumed powers not conferred by the "States" in the Constitution, the "States," by virtue of the sovereign attribute, might and should interpose, interpose individually, not collectively as they, of course, might do constitutionally through the regular form of procedure for amending the Constitution.
| Nullification in theory. |
Calhoun, like every other real statesman of his day, held that there is a domain of liberty secured not only to the minority, but to the individual, by the Constitution, upon which the majority shall not encroach. The practical question was how to prevent the majority, in possession of the powers and machinery of the Government, from doing so. The answer to this question developed by precedent, and formulated clearly by Webster at that very moment, was that it could be done only by invoking the aid of the judicial power of the United States. But Calhoun said in reply to this, that the United States courts were a part of the Government, substantially under the control of Congress and the President, through the power of Congress to constitute judgeships at pleasure, and of the President and the Senate to fill them, and that they were interested, therefore, in the usurpations of power by the Government. He further held that these courts could not decide political questions, although these questions might incidentally involve the most sacred rights of individuals, and that, anyhow, they were as much subject to the "States," acting in their sovereign capacities, as any other part of the Government. He could see no way for preserving the rights of the minority and of individuals, in last resort, against governmental usurpation, save through the power of "each of the parties to the compact" to prevent the execution within the territory subject to its jurisdiction of such governmental measures as it might deem usurpations.