| The meaning of Nullification as understood by the Nullifiers. |
As we have seen, Calhoun and the members of the nullifying convention held it to be the latter. They argued that the reserved powers of the Commonwealths are recognized by the Constitution; that every conceivable power is reserved to the Commonwealths, except such as are vested by the Constitution in the general Government exclusively, or are denied by the Constitution to the Commonwealths; that the power to pronounce an act of the general Government null and void had been neither so vested nor so denied; that this was, therefore, a reserved power of the Commonwealths, and was, like all other reserved powers, a constitutional power; that South Carolina proposed to use this power through judicial means only, which means were legally and constitutionally at her disposal through the principle of the governmental system of the United States that general criminal jurisdiction belongs exclusively to the Commonwealths; and that the employment of military power by the Commonwealth, indicated in the Ordinance and the legislative acts for its enforcement, was to be resorted to only in self-defence, only to repel the possible attack of the military power of the general Government upon South Carolina.
It is entirely evident that the South Carolina statesmen and lawyers thought they had so fashioned the laws of the Commonwealth as to force the general Government to the first violation of legal order in attempting to execute the nullified Acts of Congress—that is, they thought they had made it impossible for the general Government to execute these Acts by regular legal methods; and that they had done so without themselves violating any rule or principle of American jurisprudence. They repeated the assertion, again and again, that they did not rest their case on moral, or on revolutionary, principles, but on strict constitutional right; and it is impossible to prove that they were insincere.
The great question now was, what attitude the general Government would take toward the attempt of a Commonwealth to defeat the supremacy of its laws. Naturally the Executive Department must act first, since nullification was directed against the execution of existing laws.
| Jackson's view of Nullification. |
In his message of December 4th (1832), President Jackson referred briefly to the events of the preceding month in South Carolina, but did not seem to have fully appreciated their purport. He said he hoped the United States courts would be able to cope successfully with the difficulties in South Carolina, and that, if they were not, he thought that the existing laws gave the President sufficient power to suppress any attempts which might be immediately made against the supremacy of the Government.
| The Tariff in the Annual Message of 1832. |
He devoted a much larger portion of the message to a consideration of the tariff, and declared that the time had arrived for the United States to enter upon the realization of the policy of a tariff for revenue only, and of the ultimate limitation of protection to those articles of domestic manufacture indispensable to the country in time of war.