| Motives and general results. |
It is not easy to see what principles or what party finally triumphed in this contest, or to comprehend all the motives of the chief actors in it. It has been said, or hinted, that Mr. Calhoun, chagrined and disappointed at not gaining the presidency in 1832, was induced to take the course which he followed in reference to nullification by the hope of breaking up the Union and winning, thus, the presidency of a Southern confederacy; that President Jackson was largely influenced, in the decided attitude which he assumed, by the desire to take revenge on Mr. Calhoun and South Carolina for Mr. Calhoun's attempt to court-martial him more than a dozen years before, and for South Carolina's slight upon him in the election of 1832; and that Mr. Clay was moved far more by his jealousy of President Jackson, and his fear of trusting him with extraordinary powers, than by any dread of the destruction of the Union.
There is probably some truth in certain, if not in all, of these speculations, but such things are not the matters of chief value in the search for the line of development of the constitutional history of this country. They do indeed help us to appreciate the motives for the particular form of adjustment put upon that development at any stage of its course; but our chief concern must be with the advance or retrogression in principle of that development, our question must be whether the Union and the Constitution were strengthened or weakened by the events of 1832 and 1833, whether the political nationality of the country was cemented or suffered disintegration, and whether strength was gathered, or the seeds of weakness were sown, in the results attained.
From the point of view of the present, a point so much more national than any reached before 1860, the settlement of 1833 is usually regarded as a great misfortune, as a fateful error, which led the country finally into civil war. It is now usually said that the national cause lost everything in principle, and that nullification was virtually acknowledged by the Act of Congress in repealing the nullified laws, at the same moment that it enacted the measure for upholding the supremacy of the laws of the United States.
From a purely historical view of the development of the constitutional law of the country, this proposition does not seem to be true, at least not without great modification. From such a point of view it seems more correct to say, that the doctrine formulated by Mr. Calhoun and his colleagues in South Carolina was only the exact logical statement of the principles advanced by Mr. Jefferson in 1798, principles through the advocacy of which Mr. Jefferson and the Republicans turned the Federalists out of power and captured the Government; that under the pressure of foreign war and through its results, the Republican practice in administering the Government had been driven into lines almost, if not quite, contradictory to the Republican doctrine; that in the gradual relapse, after 1815, into the humdrum of peace and business, the conditions were being revived for the reassertion of the principles of 1800; and that, under such conditions and in such a period, the doctrines advanced by President Jackson, doctrines of a far more completely national system of sovereignty, government, and liberty than were ever expressed by any preceding President, certainly mark a great advance in the development of the national theory of the Constitution.
The South Carolinians said that John Quincy Adams invented these doctrines, and that Jackson first essayed their application. Even Clay declared that they were an advance upon his own views. And some of Jackson's friends undertook, it was said with authority from Jackson himself, to explain them away, so startled were they by their strong nationalism.
But the spoken word cannot be recalled. It had gone forth, and the nation had approved it. The politicians might split hairs in its interpretation, but the people had heard from the highest authority which they recognized that the United States was a sovereign nation, and that the attempt of any combination of persons, whether calling themselves a "State" or not, to resist by violence the execution of the laws of the United States, or to withdraw themselves from their operation, was rebellion, which the President was empowered and required by the Constitution to suppress with the whole physical power of the nation.
And besides the Proclamation there was the "Force Bill," which rested upon the same theory of the political system of the country as the Proclamation. The Congress as well as the President was now inculcating the national doctrine. Calhoun and his friends knew what an influence this would exert. He said that he and they would never rest content until this measure was expunged from among the Acts of Congress.
It is true that the passage of the new Tariff Act appeared to take the virtue out of the Proclamation and the "Force Bill;" but it is not at all probable that the nullifiers would have retreated from their ground so promptly, to say the least, except for the determined words of the President and the Congress, and the popular approval with which they were received; and it is almost certain that, when it came to the great crisis, twenty-eight years later, the people would not have understood and supported the great principle that the general Government has the right of self-preservation, in the exercise of all its powers, throughout the whole territory of the Union, against everything and everybody but the sovereign nation itself, except for the great education in national principles which they received from the Proclamation, and through the enactment of the law which gave the sanction of Congress to the enforcement of its principles.