Antebellum South Carolina - The Nullification Crisis

The Nullification Crisis

In 1811, British ships plundered American ships, inspiring outraged "War Hawk" representatives into declaring the War of 1812. During the war, tariffs on imported goods were raised to support America's military efforts. Afterward, as the North began to create manufacturing centers, Northern lawmakers passed higher taxes on imports to protect the new industries. Because the South had an agricultural economy, it did not benefit from the tariffs and believed they interfered with the South's trade with Great Britain and Europe based on cotton and rice.

In the 1820s, many South Carolinians began to talk of seceding from the union to operate as an independent state with trade laws tailored to its own best interests. Even South Carolina-born John C. Calhoun, who had begun as a Federalist favoring a strong centralized government, began to change his views. He believed rights of his home state were being trampled for the "good" of the North, though he also recognized the political dangers of secession. In 1828, Calhoun decided upon the primacy of "states' rights", a doctrine which he would support for the rest of his life. He believed that constitutionally, the state government of each state had more power within that state than did the federal government. Consequently, if a state deemed it necessary, it had the right to "nullify" any federal law within its boundaries.

To most South Carolinians, this sounded like a reasonable compromise. Some in the state, such as Joel J. Poinsett, novelist William Gilmore Simms, and James L. Petigru, believed that while a state had the full right to secede from the Union if it chose, it had no right, as long as it remained part of the Union, to nullify a federal law. The federal government believed the concept of nullification was as an attack on its powers. When in 1832, South Carolina's government quickly "nullified" the hated tariffs passed by the full Congress, President Andrew Jackson declared this an act of open rebellion and ordered U.S. ships to South Carolina to enforce the law.

In December 1832, Calhoun resigned as Jackson's vice president. He was the only vice president to resign until Spiro Agnew did so, 141 years later. Calhoun planned to become a senator in South Carolina to stop its run toward secession. He wanted to work on solving the problems that troubled his fellow Carolinians. Before federal forces arrived at Charleston, Calhoun and Senator Henry Clay agreed upon a compromise. They had often worked effectively together before. Clay persuaded Congress to pass the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which lowered the tariff gradually over 10 years (see copy on the page). The passage of this tariff prevented armed conflict.

The debate about the relative importance of states' rights versus federal power became a dividing line between the North and South. The political discussion was related to the differing rates of growth of the regions. Increased immigration to the North had meant a faster rate of growth in its population and gave it an advantage in representation, despite the 3/5 compromise that allowed the South to use its enslaved population in figuring Congressional representation.

The 19th century religious revival in the South had first been led by Methodist and Baptist preachers who opposed slavery. Gradually they began to adopt the Southern viewpoint. The Methodist and Baptist churches grew as their preachers accommodated slaveholding as a principle of continuity. Southern slaveholders looked to the Bible for language to control slaves. Southern slaveholders generally saw abolitionists as dangerous, self-righteous meddlers who would be better off tending to themselves than passing judgement on the choices of others. Pro-slavery apologists argued that the Northerners had no place in the debate over the morality of slavery, because they could not own slaves and would therefore not suffer the societal impacts that manumission would mean to the South.

The effect of bloody slave rebellions, such as the Vesey revolt of 1822 and John Brown's massacre at Harper's Ferry in 1859, was to reduce moderate abolitionists to silence, particularly in the South. These events inflamed fears and galvanized Southerners into an anti-abolitionist stance that effectively ended reasoned debate on the issue. South Carolinians had earlier tolerated slavery as a necessary evil. In an evolving concept, they came to proclaim slavery a positive good, a civilizing benefit to the enslaved, and a proper response to the "natural" differences between whites and blacks.

Apologists such as Thomas Harper argued that the wage-employee system of the North was more exploitive than slavery itself. So avid had this defense become that by 1856, Governor James Hopkins Adams recommended a resumption of the Foreign Slave Trade. A powerful minority of slaveholders had begun arguing that every white man should legally required to own at least one slave, which they claimed would give an interest in the issue and instill responsibility. The Charleston Mercury denounced the slave trade; a number of newly captured slaves were imported into Charleston against federal law.