Showing posts with label andrew jackson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label andrew jackson. Show all posts
Thursday, April 6, 2006
Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 - April 6: Contradictions of Jacksonian democracy
Sean Wilentz in Andrew Jackson (2005) gives a good summary of the contradictions of Jacksonian democracy that would eventually split the Jacksonian movement and the Democratic Party:
As Jackson noted in his farewell address, sectional divisions over slavery and democracy directly threatened his very conception of democracy. For Jackson, the confrontations were artificial, whipped up by ambitious demagogues in order to distract the electorate from the truly important division between the privileged few and the humble many. But slavery and its expansion were not artificial issues; they were redefining how Americans thought about the few and many; and these clashing views cut to the heart of how Americans thought about democracy. ...
Two decades would pass before the clash between the northern democracy [i.e., the Democratic Party] and the southern democracy shattered Jackson's Democratic Party in all but its name. Yet in the most profound irony of all, the widening of democratic politics that (as Herman Melville would later write in Moby-Dick) "didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles" and "thunder him higher than a throne" would also render that conflict irrepressible. By expanding popular politics and enshrining the popular will, Jackson and his followers exposed the political system to precisely the kinds of agitation they (and their Whig Party adversaries) hoped to keep forever out of national debates. Using all of the electioneering techniques pioneered by the Jackson Democrats, new movements, factions, and parties would arise and amass popular support over issues connected to slavery - and would elect candidates to national office dedicated solely to addressing whether slavery threatened or embodied democratic values.
Jackson lived long enough to feel these early tremors of the crisis of American democracy over slavery, and he would try to still them with all the strength he could muster. He would never fully comprehend how his own democratic achievements had brought them about, and lead his countrymen, North and South, to begin questioning whether democracy could endure in a nation half slave and half free, a house divided against itself. (my emphasis)
Wilentz in his Jackson biography does anexceptionallygood job of describing how Jackson and his movement not only made consciously and deliberate choices. But they also set processes and conflicts in motion whose implications they didn't comprehend and whose further results they could only dimly predict.
These passages from Wilentz are also reminders that in understanding the Civil War and the conflicts over slavery that led up to it, it's important for us to keep in mind that what may look to us like an inevitable process did not appear so to its participants. Even for the strict Calvinists like John Brown, who believed that God at least had pre-ordained the entire course of human history down to the last detail. God may have known the future. But Andrew Jackson, John Calhoun and John Brown did not.
And on the issue of slavery, we are inclined today to view the issue as one of good and right (emancipation) versus evil and cruelty (slavery). And indeed it was. Nor is that an anachronistic view, reading current values and assumptions into the past. There were many Americans and certainly many people in the rest of the world in the time of Andrew Jackson who viewed slavery as a sinful evil.
But the actual participants in the events of those years in the United States didn't have the luxury of making entirely clear-cut choices in the practical issues that slavery presented. Jefferson, the staunch opponent of slavery, feared the implications of the Missouri Compromise because it was made under a series of assumptions very different that how he had always conceived states rights as a defense of democratic and personal liberties against a potentially tyrannical federal government.
Jackson never faced a direct choice of freedom versus slavery. But when he found himself in a position in the nullification crisis where he had to defend democracy against a slaveowners revolt, he came down hard on the side of democracy. His action didn't free a single slave. But would a genuine opponet of slavery like Thomas Jefferson have been willing to take such a clear stand in asserting federal power against a state's claim to the right of nullification?
The quotes are also a reminder of how important to the future course of events Jackson's stand against secession in the nullification crisis was. Jackson certainly didn't intend to set off a three-decades-long process of escalating tensions over slavery. On the contrary, he aimed at calming such tensions down.
But the content of his actions went far beyond their intent. By establishing the notion of Union and democracy as inseparable, he set the stage for the position that the defenders of democracy and American unity would eventually take when matters reached the point that either democracy or slavery would have to die out.
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
Wednesday, April 5, 2006
Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 - April 5: Westward expansion (2)
It would be silly to claim that Jackson was unaware or indifferent to the fact that the Mexican War had a great deal to do with slavery and with increasing the strength of the Slave Power. It was part of the contradictory nature of Jackson as a political leader and of the broad movement of Jacksonian Democracy. Sean Wilentz writes in Andrew Jackson (2005):
The most powerful contradictions generated by Jackson's presidency and legacy had to do with slavery, democracy, and American expansionism.
Jackson left office as President in 1837. So he had long been out of office when the Mexican War began in 1846, and Jackson himself passed away in 1845. That conflict is also called la Guerra Mexicano-estadounidense, la Guerra de Estados Unidos a México and the Mexican-American War. Yes, trolls and nativist zealots, Spanish-speakers don't use the English name for the war exclusively!
Speaking of the developments around the Texas Revolution of 1835-6, Wilentz writes:
The difficulties that surrounded these developments, especially in Texas, also reinforced the stresses that were afflicting the country and the Democracy by the mid-1830s. The results deepened the tragic dimensions of Jackson's presidency, especially in his second term. To Jackson, westward expansion was chiefly a nationalist and democratic enterprise: filling in Thomas Jefferson's empire of freedom, pushing back any possibility of Old World meddling in America's affairs, widening the opportunities for ordinary, virtuous, hardworking Americans to prosper much as he himself, a westward migrant of humble origins, had prospered. Jackson's vision of invigorated expansion was closely tied to his attacks on monied privilege over banking and the currency: opening lands, he wrote, to "actual settlers" and checking western speculation would curb the rise of a class of nonresident landlords and land jobbers, among "the greatest obstacles to the advancement of a new country and the prosperity of an old one." His was a vision of western settlement as a patriotic and egalitarian fulfillment, free of strife, bloodshed, and the artificial hierarchies that Jackson believed had no place in a democratic republic. (my emphasis)
Before his death, Jackson did give his opinions and advice on the tensions that led up to la Guerra Mexicano-estadounidense. In the debate over whether to annex Texas, which had applied for statehood, Jackson expressed particular concern about the hostile designs of Britain against the US, the schemes of his arch-enemy the secessionist John Calhoun and his old enemy John Quincy Adams. Robert Remini writes in Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy 1833-1845 (1984):
But all these [various partisan political] questions, important as they were, paled by comparison to the Texas problem. Jackson could not rest easy until he knew that it had been satisfactorily resolved. Once Congress reconvened in December, the General charged after its members with demands that they pass a joint resolution for immediate annexation and thereby execute the will of the people as mandated by Polk's election. At the same time he kept his nephew, Andrew J. Donelson, informed of all developments, instructing him on what he thought should be brought to the attention of the Texas officials. "This you will have to bring to their view," he wrote in one letter concerning the "secret designs" of Britain to reduce Texas to a colony. "Remember, the word reannex," he added, "this hold forth," namely the right of the United States to Texas under the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. As for the Florida Treaty of 1819 which renounced Texas, that was a "nullity, not having the approbation of France and the citizens of Louisia," no matter what "that old scamp, J. Q. Adams" says about it.
Early in the congressional session a joint resolution was introduced for immediate annexation. This resolution required only a simple majority in both houses. The friends of Calhoun and the Tyler administration insisted on a resolution that vindicated the rejected treaty with all its connotations about slavery. They also demanded a provision requiring that the United States absorb the Texan debt. Again, many voiced doubts as to whether Calhoun and his allies really wanted the resolution to pass, arguing that they actually preferred the dissolution of the Union. The House took up the resolutionfirst, and, after a lively debate, passed it on January 25, 1845. Obviously many congressmen believed with Jackson that the people had expressed their view on the subject and wanted Texas admitted to the Union posthaste. (my emphasis)
Given Jackson's position in the nullification crisis, his successful battle against the Bank of United States and its wealthy backers and his general commitment to expanding democracy, I'm willing to believe that democratic and national-security concerns were the primary elements of the issue for Jackson. Although he did tend to personalize political disputes, so the fact that he saw dark designs of Calhoun and Adams in the matter also affected his position.
Still, it's important to remember that, although Jackson sucessfully defended democracy and the Union against the South Carolina secessionists, Jackson's notion of democracy was for white men only. He did not see the expansion of slavery as such as being an undesirable thing. To the extent that Jackson and the Jacksonians understood democracy as involving freedom for whites and slavery for blacks, it becomes hard to clearly distinguish to what extent support for western expansion in their eyes was also - or even primarily - support for the expansion of slavery.
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
The most powerful contradictions generated by Jackson's presidency and legacy had to do with slavery, democracy, and American expansionism.
Jackson left office as President in 1837. So he had long been out of office when the Mexican War began in 1846, and Jackson himself passed away in 1845. That conflict is also called la Guerra Mexicano-estadounidense, la Guerra de Estados Unidos a México and the Mexican-American War. Yes, trolls and nativist zealots, Spanish-speakers don't use the English name for the war exclusively!
Speaking of the developments around the Texas Revolution of 1835-6, Wilentz writes:
The difficulties that surrounded these developments, especially in Texas, also reinforced the stresses that were afflicting the country and the Democracy by the mid-1830s. The results deepened the tragic dimensions of Jackson's presidency, especially in his second term. To Jackson, westward expansion was chiefly a nationalist and democratic enterprise: filling in Thomas Jefferson's empire of freedom, pushing back any possibility of Old World meddling in America's affairs, widening the opportunities for ordinary, virtuous, hardworking Americans to prosper much as he himself, a westward migrant of humble origins, had prospered. Jackson's vision of invigorated expansion was closely tied to his attacks on monied privilege over banking and the currency: opening lands, he wrote, to "actual settlers" and checking western speculation would curb the rise of a class of nonresident landlords and land jobbers, among "the greatest obstacles to the advancement of a new country and the prosperity of an old one." His was a vision of western settlement as a patriotic and egalitarian fulfillment, free of strife, bloodshed, and the artificial hierarchies that Jackson believed had no place in a democratic republic. (my emphasis)
Before his death, Jackson did give his opinions and advice on the tensions that led up to la Guerra Mexicano-estadounidense. In the debate over whether to annex Texas, which had applied for statehood, Jackson expressed particular concern about the hostile designs of Britain against the US, the schemes of his arch-enemy the secessionist John Calhoun and his old enemy John Quincy Adams. Robert Remini writes in Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy 1833-1845 (1984):
But all these [various partisan political] questions, important as they were, paled by comparison to the Texas problem. Jackson could not rest easy until he knew that it had been satisfactorily resolved. Once Congress reconvened in December, the General charged after its members with demands that they pass a joint resolution for immediate annexation and thereby execute the will of the people as mandated by Polk's election. At the same time he kept his nephew, Andrew J. Donelson, informed of all developments, instructing him on what he thought should be brought to the attention of the Texas officials. "This you will have to bring to their view," he wrote in one letter concerning the "secret designs" of Britain to reduce Texas to a colony. "Remember, the word reannex," he added, "this hold forth," namely the right of the United States to Texas under the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. As for the Florida Treaty of 1819 which renounced Texas, that was a "nullity, not having the approbation of France and the citizens of Louisia," no matter what "that old scamp, J. Q. Adams" says about it.
Early in the congressional session a joint resolution was introduced for immediate annexation. This resolution required only a simple majority in both houses. The friends of Calhoun and the Tyler administration insisted on a resolution that vindicated the rejected treaty with all its connotations about slavery. They also demanded a provision requiring that the United States absorb the Texan debt. Again, many voiced doubts as to whether Calhoun and his allies really wanted the resolution to pass, arguing that they actually preferred the dissolution of the Union. The House took up the resolutionfirst, and, after a lively debate, passed it on January 25, 1845. Obviously many congressmen believed with Jackson that the people had expressed their view on the subject and wanted Texas admitted to the Union posthaste. (my emphasis)
Given Jackson's position in the nullification crisis, his successful battle against the Bank of United States and its wealthy backers and his general commitment to expanding democracy, I'm willing to believe that democratic and national-security concerns were the primary elements of the issue for Jackson. Although he did tend to personalize political disputes, so the fact that he saw dark designs of Calhoun and Adams in the matter also affected his position.
Still, it's important to remember that, although Jackson sucessfully defended democracy and the Union against the South Carolina secessionists, Jackson's notion of democracy was for white men only. He did not see the expansion of slavery as such as being an undesirable thing. To the extent that Jackson and the Jacksonians understood democracy as involving freedom for whites and slavery for blacks, it becomes hard to clearly distinguish to what extent support for western expansion in their eyes was also - or even primarily - support for the expansion of slavery.
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
Monday, April 3, 2006
Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 - April 3: When Old Hickory saved the Union (2)
This post continues the discussion of the Nullification Controversy that I began in the previous post.
The best thing about Sean Wilentz' biography of Old Hickory, Andrew Jackson (2005), is that he understands the essential democratic thrust behind the Jacksonian movement, with all it contradictions. And he gives a good glimpse in a relatively short biography of the contradictions within the Jacksonian movement. After the 1833 compromise over the tariff was reached and the secessionists forced to back down from Jackson, his power boosted by Congressional support of the Force Bill, Wilentz writes:
"I have had a laborious task here," Jackson wrote to one of his cousins in the spring, "but nullification is dead; and its actors and exciters will only be remembered by the people to be execrated for their wicked designs." The president, having vindicated his own honor as well as the Union's, overestimated his victory. In the South, even staunch Jacksonians admitted that, although nullification was impermissible, Jackson had overreacted and defended ideas that endangered state rights. "You can rest assured," one anti-nullification, normally pro-Jackson Mississippian told a friend, "S[outh] C[arolina] has our sympathies." Many northern Jacksonians, although far more supportive of the president, still found his words and actions disquieting - at odds with Jeffersonian orthodoxy[on states rights] and unnecessarily antagonistic. Martin Van Buren [Jackson's successor as President], for one - concerned as ever about keeping the Jacksonian coalition intact and now anticipating his own eventual run for the presidency - could not get the New York legislature to unite in support of Jackson's nullification proclamation, and he personally opposed the Force Bill. Other anti-nullifiers saw the outcome as ominous in the long run. "Nullification has done its work," the South Carolina Unionist James Petigru wrote. "It has prepared the minds of men for a separation of the states - and when the question is moved again it will be distinctly union or disunion."
Unlike James Buchanan in 1860-61, Jackson didn't screw around with the secessionists. During the 1832 Presidential campaign, ominous rumors about disunionist sentiment kept coming out of South Carolina. In late October, he issued this order to his secretary of war:
The Secretary of War will forthwith cause secrete and confidential orders to be Issued to the officers commanding the Forts in the harbour of Charleston So Carolina to be vigilant to prevent a surprise in the night or by day, against any attempt to seize and occupy the Fts. by any Set of people under whatever pretext the Forts may be approached. Warn them that the attempt will be made, and the officers commanding will be responsible for the defence of the Forts and garrisons, against all intrigue or assault, and they are to defend them to the last extremity - permitting no armed force to approach either by night or day. The attempt will be made to surprise the Forts and garrisons by the [South Carolins] militia, and must be guarded against with vestal vigilence and any attempt by force repelled with prompt and examplary punishment. [Yes, Old Hickory was a poor speller.]
Two of Jackson's formal statements during the Nullification crisis are important in stating the essential issues and meaning of the crisis and its outcome, which was a victory for democracy and the Union. One is his annual message of 1932, which followed the South Carolina convention's adoption of the Ordinance of Nullification and their formal threat to secede. The other is his Proclamation to the People of South Carolina of 12/10/1832.
In his annual message, he appealed for "moderation and good sense". In the Proclamation, he stated his conception of the Union and democracy, the concept which was ultimately to win out in practice in the Civil War. He flatly rejected the right of the states to nullification and secession:
The ordinance is founded, not on the indefeasible right of resisting acts which are plainly unconstitutional, and too oppressive to be endured, but on the strange position that any one State may not only declare an act of Congress void, but prohibit its execution- that they may do this consistently with the Constitution-that the true construction of that instrument permits a State to retain its place in the Union, and yet be bound by no other of its laws than those it may choose to consider as constitutional. It is true they add, that to justify this abrogation of a law, it must be palpably contrary tothe Constitution, but it is evident, that to give the right of resisting laws of that description, coupled with the uncontrolled right to decide what laws deserve that character, is to give the power of resisting all laws. For, as by the theory, there is no appeal, the reasons alleged by the State, good or bad, must prevail. If it should be said that public opinion is a sufficient check against the abuse of this power, it may be asked why it is not deemed a sufficient guard against the passage of an unconstitutional act by Congress. There is, however, a restraint in this last case, which makes the assumed power of a State more indefensible, and which does not exist in the other. There are two appeals from an unconstitutional act passed by Congress-one to the judiciary, the other to the people and the States. There is no appeal from the State decision in theory; and the practical illustration shows that the courts are closed against an application to review it, both judges and jurors being sworn to decide in its favor. But reasoning on this subject is superfluous, when our social compact in express terms declares, that the laws of the United States, its Constitution, and treaties made under it, are the supreme law of the land; and for greater caution adds, "that the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." And it may be asserted, without fear of refutation, that no federative government could exist without a similar provision. Look, for a moment, to the consequence. If South Carolina considers the revenue laws unconstitutional, and has a right to prevent their execution in the port of Charleston, there would be a clear constitutional objection to their collection in every other port, and no revenue could be collected anywhere; for all imposts must be equal. It is no answer to repeat that an unconstitutional law is no law, so long as the question of its legality is to be decided by the State itself, for every law operating injuriously upon any local interest will be perhaps thought, and certainly represented, as unconstitutional, and, as has been shown, there is no appeal. ...
I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter 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. ...
So obvious are the reasons which forbid this secession, that it is necessary only to allude to them. The Union was formed for the benefit of all. It was produced by mutual sacrifice of interest and opinions. Can those sacrifices be recalled? Can the States, who magnanimously surrendered their title to the territories of the West, recall the grant? Will the inhabitants of the inland States agree to pay the duties that may be imposed without their assent by those on the Atlantic or the Gulf, for their own benefit? Shall there be a free port in one State, and enormous duties in another? No one believes that any right exists in a single State to involve all the others in these and countless other evils, contrary to engagements solemnly made. Everyone must see that the other States, in self-defense, must oppose it at all hazards.
In the closing paragraphs, President Jackson laid out the Union position in the confrontation, connecting the preservation of the national Union directly with the American Revolution and the freedoms it aimed at guaranteeing:
There is yet time to show that the descendants of the Pinckneys, the Sumpters, the Rutledges, and of the thousand other names which adorn the pages of your Revolutionary history, will not abandon that Union to support which so many of them fought and bled and died. I adjure you, as you honor their memory - as you love the cause of freedom, to which they dedicated their lives - as you prize the peace of your country, the lives of its best citizens, and your own fair fame, to retrace your steps. Snatch from the archives of your State the disorganizing edict of its convention-hid its members to re-assemble and promulgate the decided expressions of your will to remain in the path which alone can conduct you to safety, prosperity, and honor - tell them that compared to disunion, all other evils are light, because that brings with it an accumulation of all-declare that you will never take the field unless the star-spangled banner of your country shall float over you - that you will not be stigmatized when dead, and dishonored and scorned while you live, as the authors of the first attack on the Constitution of your country! - its destroyers you cannot be. You may disturb its peace - you may interrupt the course of its prosperity - youmaycloud its reputation for stability - but its tranquillity will be restored, its prosperity will return, and the stain upon its national character will be transferred and remain an eternal blot on the memory of those who caused the disorder.
Fellow-citizens of the United States! the threat of unhallowed disunion - the names of those, once respected, by whom it is uttered [he meant John Calhoun in particular] - the array of military force to support it - denote the approach of a crisis in our affairs on which the continuance of our unexampled prosperity, our political existence, and perhaps that of all free governments, may depend. The conjuncture demanded a free, a full, and explicit enunciation, not only of my intentions, but of my principles of action, and as the claim was asserted of a right by a State to annul the laws of the Union, and even to secede from it at pleasure, a frank exposition of my opinions in relation to the origin and form of our government, and the construction I give to the instrument by which it was created, seemed to be proper. Having the fullest confidence in the justness of the legal and constitutional opinion of my duties which has been expressed, I rely with equal confidence on your undivided support in my determination to execute the laws - to preserve the Union by all constitutional means - to arrest, if possible, by moderate but firm measures, the necessity of a recourse to force; and, if it be the will of Heaven that the recurrence of its primeval curse on man for the shedding of a brother's blood should fall upon our land, that it be not called down by any offensive act on the part of the United States. (my emphasis)
Wilentz discusses the idea advocated by some historians that Jackson's conciliatory annual address, which called for moderation and also offered to compromise on the tariff again, was in direct contradiction to the assertive message in the Proclamation. But, Wilentz writes:
The fundamental misperception behind these erroneous interpretations is that the two documents actually conflicted. The common view is that Jackson, by taking a "low tariff' position in the message, was loudly endorsing southern state rights, whereas by blasting nullification, he was endorsing a nationalist - indeed, "ultranationalist" - reading of the Constitution. But Jackson saw the issues of the tariff and nullification as completely separate. According to Jackson's strict reading of the Constitution, the tariff, subject to approval by the Congress, was always negotiable. Depending on which side could muster majorities in the House and Senate, tariff rates might rise one year and fall in another, in line with the normal pull and tug of a representative democracy. Nullification, however, was not negotiable; rather, it was an assault on the very foundations of the Union and democratic government. In the nullification proclamation, Jackson dissected the difference. ...
Above all, Jackson's nullification proclamation, far from a defense of "consolidation" or "ultranationalism," arose from Jackson's belief in democracy and in the principle, as he had expressed it in his first annual message, "that the majority is to govern." Strict construction of federal power was imperative lest a minority (like the owners, directors, and supporters of the Second Bank of the United States] bend the government toward advancing the minority's interests. But no state - let alone "a bare majority of voters in any one state" - could be allowed to repudiate laws based on explicitly delegated powers and duly enacted by Congress and the president. (my emphasis in bold)
It's always a pleasure to see when a writer gets Andrew Jackson right.
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
Sunday, April 2, 2006
Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 - April 2: When Old Hickory saved the Union (1)
Actually, he saved it at least three times, I would say. But the one I want to talk about here is his successful face-off with John C. Calhoun and the South Carolina secessionists.
I've written about this subject here before in Andrew Jackson, States Rights and the South 10/24/03. Here I want to draw on Sean Wilentz' Andrew Jackson (2005), one of the American Presidents series edited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
The fight over the Tariff of 1828 became a testing ground for Calhoun and similar advocates of secessionist treason in defense of slavery. As James MacGregor Burns wrote in The Vineyard of Liberty (1981):
For rice and cotton growers, the 1820s were a time of rapid economic change, price and demand instability, credit squeezes, and depression, all tending toward a rising sense of social and economic insecurity, which in turn fostered a powerful parochialism and sectionalism. The Tariff of 1828 excited the worst southern fears; it was to them literally a tariff of abominations, to be despised and shunned. In a decade of peace they could no longer accept the tariff as a defense measure. Federal policy on internal improvements and other questions also continued to antagonize South Carolinians. But behind all the old issues always loomed the specter of northern interference with slavery. An alleged slave conspiracy, led by Denmark Vesey of Charleston, along with rumors of other planned slave revolts, aroused dread over threats from inside; the stepped-up efforts of the American Colonization Society [an anti-slavery group] in the North aroused fears over threats from outside. (my emphasis)
The South Carolina legislature passed the South Carolina Exposition and Protest in 1929, a document written by John C. Calhoun that defended the doctrine of nullifcation, the right of a state to declare a federal law void within that state. Calhoun at that time was Jackson's Vice President and tried to keep his authorship of the document secret.
The confrontation between South Carolina and the federal government under Jackson brought the contradiction between a national Union founded on democratic principles and the reality of slavery into sharper contrast, as would the subsequent confrontations. Jackson was a slaveowner himself and, unlike slaveowner Thomas Jefferson, supported the institution of slavery. But, as Wilentz explains, Jackson was also a staunch Unionist, a democratic nationalist:
Political leaders, including Jackson, strongly suspected Calhoun's authorship of the Exposition, which they interpreted as an effort to consolidate southern support for a later run for the presidency. But Jackson also took the idea of nullification seriously - and as a piece of rank heresy. According to his strict reading of the Constitution, Jackson held that Congress had full and direct authority over the enacting tariffs, including dictating tariff rates. To deny the rights of the majority in Congress to govern as it saw fit was, in this instance, an absurd breach of the Framers' explicit intentions. Worse, talk of nullification, let alone secession, endangered the Union. In Jackson's mind, it was an outrageous affront to the glorious embodiment of the American Revolution. "There is nothing I shudder at more than the idea of the separation of the Union," he had written to a South Carolina leader before the 1828 election. "It is the durability of the confederation upon which the general government is built, that must prolong our liberty. ...[T]he moment it separates, it is gone." (my emphasis)
The confrontation unfolded over years. In 1832, Jackson supported a revision of the "tariff of abominations", without yielding on the critical principle of federal authority. That was the year Jackson won re-election for a second term as President, with Martin Van Buren as his Vice Presidential running mate this time. Calhoun returned to the Senate the following year.
There was also a legislative election in South Carolina. As Wilentz writes, Southern fears over slave revolts and doubts about the survival of slavery had been mounting even before Jackson's Presidency began. He writes:
Events during the early years of Jackson's presidency further convinced slaveholders that their property and their way of life were besieged. Anxiety mounted in 1829 and 1830, when officials in Charleston and other southern seaports intercepted copies of an incendiary pamphlet - written by a Boston-based free black, David Walker, and smuggled south - bidding the slaves to overthrow their masters. A few months later Walker suddenly died, in what looked to some like suspicious circumstances. A short time after that, a white Bostonian, William Lloyd Garrison, established a new radical newspaper, The Liberator, dedicated to bringing about slavery's immediate demise. Just as ominously, antislavery advocates in the Virginia legislature forced a debate over a gradual emancipation plan early in 1832. Although the proposal failed, that the Virginians even discussed abandoning slavery shocked slaveholders in the Deep South, and especially in South Carolina. [Virginia, one disgusted South Carolinian remarked, had become "infested" with "Yankee influence.") Threatened from without and within, slavery's defenders began to see any effort by the federal government to enact policies they deemed unfavorable to the South as part of a larger antislavery design. This included the protective tariff, which one state rights' party convention in South Carolina declared was intended to hasten "the abolition of slavery throughout the southern states." (my emphasis)
It's worth noting that the 1932 Virginia debate over abolishing slavery was the last time such a proposal was so widely discussed in the South. After that time, antislavery talk was increasingly suppressed in the slave states, a definite abridgment of the rights of free speech and the press for white Southerners. This also made the contradiction between a democratic national republic and slavery in the Southern states increasingly unavoidable.
The newly-elected South Carolina legislature pushed the confrontation further by calling a special convention, which in November, 1832 adopted an Ordinance of Nullification. The Ordinance declared the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null and void in South Carolina and declared that the federal courts had no authority to intervene. The Ordinance also explicitly threatened secession if the Jackson adminitration tried to collect the tariff in South Carolina.
Jackson answered the challenge in December with a "Proclamation to the People of South Carolina" asserting federal authority. He followed it up by getting Congress toadopt the Force Bill in March, explicitly giving him the authority to use force against South Carolina if they attempt to block federal collection of taxes.
Seeing that Old Hickory was dead serious about strangling the secessionist baby in its cradle (as Churchill was later to suggest doing to Soviet Bolshevism), the South Carolina convention backed down and rescinded the Ordinance of Nullification.
Even though the immediate object of the struggle was the "tariff of abominations", it was clear then as it should be now that in this confrontation, the Union and the democratic republic won, slavery and secession lost. The outcome of most of the other slave state/free state confrontations - the Missouri question, the Mexican War, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision - represented surrenders to the Slave Power. Andrew Jackson's stomping the secession cockroach in South Carolina was a victory for democracy and the Union.
I've written about this subject here before in Andrew Jackson, States Rights and the South 10/24/03. Here I want to draw on Sean Wilentz' Andrew Jackson (2005), one of the American Presidents series edited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
The fight over the Tariff of 1828 became a testing ground for Calhoun and similar advocates of secessionist treason in defense of slavery. As James MacGregor Burns wrote in The Vineyard of Liberty (1981):
For rice and cotton growers, the 1820s were a time of rapid economic change, price and demand instability, credit squeezes, and depression, all tending toward a rising sense of social and economic insecurity, which in turn fostered a powerful parochialism and sectionalism. The Tariff of 1828 excited the worst southern fears; it was to them literally a tariff of abominations, to be despised and shunned. In a decade of peace they could no longer accept the tariff as a defense measure. Federal policy on internal improvements and other questions also continued to antagonize South Carolinians. But behind all the old issues always loomed the specter of northern interference with slavery. An alleged slave conspiracy, led by Denmark Vesey of Charleston, along with rumors of other planned slave revolts, aroused dread over threats from inside; the stepped-up efforts of the American Colonization Society [an anti-slavery group] in the North aroused fears over threats from outside. (my emphasis)
The South Carolina legislature passed the South Carolina Exposition and Protest in 1929, a document written by John C. Calhoun that defended the doctrine of nullifcation, the right of a state to declare a federal law void within that state. Calhoun at that time was Jackson's Vice President and tried to keep his authorship of the document secret.
The confrontation between South Carolina and the federal government under Jackson brought the contradiction between a national Union founded on democratic principles and the reality of slavery into sharper contrast, as would the subsequent confrontations. Jackson was a slaveowner himself and, unlike slaveowner Thomas Jefferson, supported the institution of slavery. But, as Wilentz explains, Jackson was also a staunch Unionist, a democratic nationalist:
Political leaders, including Jackson, strongly suspected Calhoun's authorship of the Exposition, which they interpreted as an effort to consolidate southern support for a later run for the presidency. But Jackson also took the idea of nullification seriously - and as a piece of rank heresy. According to his strict reading of the Constitution, Jackson held that Congress had full and direct authority over the enacting tariffs, including dictating tariff rates. To deny the rights of the majority in Congress to govern as it saw fit was, in this instance, an absurd breach of the Framers' explicit intentions. Worse, talk of nullification, let alone secession, endangered the Union. In Jackson's mind, it was an outrageous affront to the glorious embodiment of the American Revolution. "There is nothing I shudder at more than the idea of the separation of the Union," he had written to a South Carolina leader before the 1828 election. "It is the durability of the confederation upon which the general government is built, that must prolong our liberty. ...[T]he moment it separates, it is gone." (my emphasis)
The confrontation unfolded over years. In 1832, Jackson supported a revision of the "tariff of abominations", without yielding on the critical principle of federal authority. That was the year Jackson won re-election for a second term as President, with Martin Van Buren as his Vice Presidential running mate this time. Calhoun returned to the Senate the following year.
There was also a legislative election in South Carolina. As Wilentz writes, Southern fears over slave revolts and doubts about the survival of slavery had been mounting even before Jackson's Presidency began. He writes:
Events during the early years of Jackson's presidency further convinced slaveholders that their property and their way of life were besieged. Anxiety mounted in 1829 and 1830, when officials in Charleston and other southern seaports intercepted copies of an incendiary pamphlet - written by a Boston-based free black, David Walker, and smuggled south - bidding the slaves to overthrow their masters. A few months later Walker suddenly died, in what looked to some like suspicious circumstances. A short time after that, a white Bostonian, William Lloyd Garrison, established a new radical newspaper, The Liberator, dedicated to bringing about slavery's immediate demise. Just as ominously, antislavery advocates in the Virginia legislature forced a debate over a gradual emancipation plan early in 1832. Although the proposal failed, that the Virginians even discussed abandoning slavery shocked slaveholders in the Deep South, and especially in South Carolina. [Virginia, one disgusted South Carolinian remarked, had become "infested" with "Yankee influence.") Threatened from without and within, slavery's defenders began to see any effort by the federal government to enact policies they deemed unfavorable to the South as part of a larger antislavery design. This included the protective tariff, which one state rights' party convention in South Carolina declared was intended to hasten "the abolition of slavery throughout the southern states." (my emphasis)
It's worth noting that the 1932 Virginia debate over abolishing slavery was the last time such a proposal was so widely discussed in the South. After that time, antislavery talk was increasingly suppressed in the slave states, a definite abridgment of the rights of free speech and the press for white Southerners. This also made the contradiction between a democratic national republic and slavery in the Southern states increasingly unavoidable.
The newly-elected South Carolina legislature pushed the confrontation further by calling a special convention, which in November, 1832 adopted an Ordinance of Nullification. The Ordinance declared the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null and void in South Carolina and declared that the federal courts had no authority to intervene. The Ordinance also explicitly threatened secession if the Jackson adminitration tried to collect the tariff in South Carolina.
Jackson answered the challenge in December with a "Proclamation to the People of South Carolina" asserting federal authority. He followed it up by getting Congress toadopt the Force Bill in March, explicitly giving him the authority to use force against South Carolina if they attempt to block federal collection of taxes.
Seeing that Old Hickory was dead serious about strangling the secessionist baby in its cradle (as Churchill was later to suggest doing to Soviet Bolshevism), the South Carolina convention backed down and rescinded the Ordinance of Nullification.
Even though the immediate object of the struggle was the "tariff of abominations", it was clear then as it should be now that in this confrontation, the Union and the democratic republic won, slavery and secession lost. The outcome of most of the other slave state/free state confrontations - the Missouri question, the Mexican War, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision - represented surrenders to the Slave Power. Andrew Jackson's stomping the secession cockroach in South Carolina was a victory for democracy and the Union.
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