(Cont. from Part 1) The South Carolina radicals certainly realized that the issue could come to a head over slavery. It had already come up in the slavery controversy settled by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In 1831, the Nat Turner Rebellion had scared the Slave Power into a near frenzy. And that same year, free farmers from western Virginia forced the legislature to begin what became the last serious free debate about abolishing slavery in the states that eventually joined the Confederacy. (The debate was not "free" to slaves, of course.) The Slave Power felt increasingly on the defensive.
John C. Calhoun, Old Hickory's main opponent on the nullification issue, anonymously authored a pamphlet called The South Carolina Exposition which the defiant South Carolina legislature published. In it, Calhoun argued that the tariff controverysy was merely the occasion for demanding the right of nullification. The real issue was defending the "peculiar institution of the Southern States," i.e., slavery.
Jackson later said from his deathbed that he regretted that he hadn't hanged Calhoun for treason over the nullification incident. "My country would have sustained me in the act, and his fate would have been a warning to traitors in all time to come." (And you think political rhetoric today is harsh!) And Jackson was a Southern political leader who saw the issue of secession as being something other than a purely sectional issue. What Jackson the Southern President said in his proclamation to the people of South Carolina in December, 1832, was:
Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent [the] execution [of the laws] deceived you; they could not have been deceived themselves. They know that a forcible opposition could alone prevent the execution of the laws, and they know that such opposition must be repelled. The object is disunion. But be not deceived by names. Disunion by armed force is treason. Are you really ready to incur its guilt?
That's what patriotic American Southerners thought of secession - in 1832 and in 1861. (Cont. in Part 3)
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