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. 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."

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.

THE ISSUE DEFINED.

403

sovereignty." If South Carolina was sincerely anxious to remedy any supposed grievance, plainly its duty was to proceed in one of the methods pointed out by the Constitution: either to amend the supreme law through the initiative of Congress, or through a convention called by two-thirds of the States.

But the power of Jackson's proclamation, it must be admitted, lay not so much in its argument and in its reply to Calhoun and his disciples, as in its appeal to the American people, and especially to the citizens of South Carolina to sustain the Constitution and the laws of the government. It clearly defined the issue: Union or disunion. "Be not deceived by names," concluded his appeal to the people of that State, "disunion by armed force is treason. Are you really ready to encourage guilt? If you are, on the heads of the instigators of the act be the dreadful consequences; on their heads be the dishonor, but on yours may fall the punishment. On your unhappy State will inevitably fall all the evils of the conflict you force upon the government of your country. It cannot accede to the mad project of disunion of which you would be the first victims." Before a generation had passed away these words had proved a prophecy.1

The response of the Nation to the President's proclamation was immediate and overwhelming. Public meetings were held all over the Union and the State legislatures, with few exceptions, passed resolutions commending the President's course and condemning South

1 A remarkable fulfillment of this prophecy is recorded in the Appendix of the Journal of the Convention of South Carolina, held in 1860, 1861 and 1862, together with the Ordinances, Reports, Resolutions, etc. Published by order of the Convention, Columbia, South Carolina: R. W. Gibbes, printer to the Convention, 1862, pp. 459-801.