398

CALHOUN ON NULLIFICATION.

not the slightest obligation. North Carolina and Rhode Island, Calhoun claimed, stood for a time in the relation of a foreign State to the general government.1 As a State thus remained a sovereign body in the Union it possessed authority to pronounce an unconstitutional act of the General Government null and void.

Calhoun did not claim that a State has the right to abrogate an act of the government; such an act, he believed, being void of itself, for he conceived that the Constitution annulled an unconstitutional act. A State had the right to declare the extent of its obligations, from which, if true, it followed that the allegiance of the citizen was due primarily to his State. Webster, while recognizing the contractual relations created by the Constitution, also recognized it as the great organic act of the Nation; Calhoun viewed it as a treaty which the sovereign States had entered into, from which it followed, that the general government was only the agent of the States, and he insisted that this interpretation agreed with the original intention of the makers of the Constitution, who in none of its provisions had empowered it in any way to control a State. Indeed, they had refused to clothe the Supreme Court with this high power. They had made the government a confederation. Party folly had carried through the alien and sedition laws, but public opinion, referring to the election of Jefferson, quickly saved the government from the consequences of its error. For unconstitutional acts of any kind nullification was the rightful remedy. The Confederation could not coerce a State nor infringe the rights of any without violating the Constitution. Even if nullification resulted in secession, a State would still remain in its original relation as

1 For the discussion of the status of North Carolina and Rhode Island as understood at this time by these States, see pp. 169-187.

THE SOUTH CAROLINA ADDRESS.

399

a foreign power to the others. Secession, he said, would never place a State beyond the pale of these federal relations, for they were the relations existing between independent powers. Nullification and secession were two different processes, the one was an act affecting the several parties to the government, the other affected the government itself. Thus, secession would dissolve the Union while nullification would confine the government generally within the limits of its powers; whence the conclusion that it was the true constitutional remedy for unlawful acts of the government.

Stripped of subtle distinctions, Calhoun's ideas were expressed in the form of an address to the people of the United States and sent forth nearly thirty years later by the South Carolina convention.1 The tariff laws, and particularly the supplementary acts of May twenty-ninth and July fourteenth, 1832, were declared null and void, and going the full length of the theory of State sovereignty, South Carolina issued this address, not through its legislature, but through a convention specially called for the purpose, and conceived to be sovereign in its powers.2 The nullification act of South Carolina led Jackson to issue that famous proclamation, in which he denied the great issue involved, and which remains the best known of his State papers. Nothing in his career up to this time,

1 Journal of the Convention of the People of South Carolina, assembled at Columbia on the 19th of November, 1832, and again March 11, 1833; Reports and Ordinances, Columbia, 1833.

2 For the doctrine of sovereignty in the convention, see the report of the Chief of the Department of Justice and Police, on the Powers of the Convention (I. W. Hayne to Governor Pickings) in Appendix of the Fourth Session of the Convention of the People of South Carolina, held in 1860, 1861 and 1862; Columbia, South Carolina, 1862, pp. 649, 667; also Sproule vs. Fredericks, (1892) 62 Mississippi, 898.

400

JACKSON'S PROCLAMATION.

had led anyone to suppose that he would take the stand he now took in his treatment of nullification. Extreme men of his own party confidently anticipated that he would either support the South Carolina doctrine, or by a neutral course at least avoid antagonism in such a way as practically to admit its truth. He did neither. "I consider the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State," said he in the proclamation, "incompatible with the existence of the Union contracted expressly by the law of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed."1

On the sixteenth of January, he followed the proclamation by a message on nullification, in which the South Carolina ordinance was analyzed, its character and probable effects exhaustively considered, and the relations between the States and the United States clearly set forth. The State of South Carolina had now forced the general government to decide whether it would allow any State to obstruct the execution of federal laws within its own limits, or to withdraw from the Union. The President pronounced both purposes revolutionary, and denied the right of the people of a State to secede from the Union without the consent of the other States. The Constitution, he said, in all cases in which it might be alleged that the general government had transcended its powers prescribed the mode of redress. Secession was the ultima ratio which presupposes that all other means of redress. had failed. Admitting that the federal government was essentially a social compact, he carried the effect of its organization further than Calhoun, that it bound the several States and their citizens. Moreover it was fully 1 December 10, 1832; Richardson, II, 640.

JACKSON'S PROCLAMATION.

401

empowered in the nature of the government to protect itself. The Constitution provided various means of redressing a so-called unlawful act; to none of which had South Carolina appealed, but in effect had defied them all. Its defiance consisted in threatening to separate from the Union, if the federal government made any attempt to enforce its revenue laws within the States, and for the purpose of executing its defiance, the legislature had hastily passed several laws making it a penal offense for any citizen of the State to assist the United States in any way in collecting the revenue.

To the attack on the federal revenue acts, Jackson replied that no revenue had been raised beyond the necessary wants of the country, that the revenue had been imposed without discrimination against any State, and the laws particularly complained of had been made "with the express assent of a part of the representatives of South Carolina." While obstructing the execution of these laws South Carolina still claimed to be a component part of the Union and continued to participate in the national councils, nor had it refused to share in the public benefits of the general government. The duty of the government, therefore, Jackson thought, seemed plain; to recognize the State as a part of the Union and subject to its authority; to indicate the just power of the Constitution; to preserve the integrity of the Union and to execute the laws. by all constitutional means. All these obligations in so far as the executive was a branch of the government, the President had sworn faithfully to perform, and the Constitution which empowered him to act also conferred on Congress ample authority to carry its powers into effect. There was, therefore, no lack of authority in the general government to defend itself and to execute its laws. The President then reviewed the various revenue acts since

402

RANK OF THE PROCLAMATION.

the organization of the government, proving their consistency, and as he believed, their constitutionality, and also reviewed the acts which empowered the government to use force if necessary in executing its laws. He left no man in doubt whether he would spare any effort to discharge the duty which in this conjuncture devolved upon him. Nor did he doubt the co-operation of Congress. His duty and theirs were plain: the Constitution and the laws, concluded he, are supreme and the Union indissoluble.

The proclamation was a less technical and more popular paper, and its presentation of the principles of American government ranked it with the Declaration of Independence. It may be called the first proclamation of its kind in our history; a popular exposition of the national character of the general government. An utterance of this kind was hardly to be expected from a President of the Jeffersonian school. But had Jefferson himself stood in Jackson's shoes, there is little doubt that he would have spoken in like manner. Jackson met fairly and controverted thoroughly every point which Calhoun had made in his famous letter to Governor Hamilton on nullification. The Constitution of the United States, wrote Jackson, forms a government not a league, and whether it be formed by a compact between the State or in any other manner, its character is the same. To say that any State might at pleasure secede from the Union was to say that the United States are not a Nation, a word seldom written in this sense before 1863. "The States severally have not retained their entire sovereignty," continued Jackson, "for in becoming members of a Nation, not members of a league, they surrender many of their essential parts of

1 See note on Lincoln's utilization of the Proclamation, p. 396, ante.