Certainly the American Civil War was too vast an event to be the responsibility of any one man, but it can be argued that Calhoun contributed as much to its coming as did abolitionist crusader William Lloyd Garrison and Pres. Abraham Lincoln. The man himself was an enigma. A staunch nationalist during the first half of his public life, one who told the son of Alexander Hamilton in 1823 that his father’s attempt to create a strong federal government “as developed by the measures of Washington’s administration is the only true policy for this country,” in the latter part of his career Calhoun became an unwavering champion of states’ rights. Yet he said shortly before his death, “If I am judged by my acts, I trust I shall be found as firm a friend of the Union as any man in it.…If I shall have any place in the memory of posterity it will be in consequence of my deep attachment to it.”

After Calhoun’s death, his protégé, James H. Hammond, said that

pre-eminent as he was intellectually above all the men of this age as I believe, he was so wanting in judgment in the managing of men, was so unyielding and unpersuasive, that he never could consolidate sufficient power to accomplish anything great, of himself and [in] due season…and the jealousy of him—his towering genius and uncompromising temper, has had much effect in preventing the South from uniting to resist [evil].

Calhoun’s two books on government, published posthumously, and his many cogent speeches in Congress have gained him a reputation as one of the country’s foremost original political theorists. He has been credited with preceding Karl Marx in advancing an economic interpretation of history, yet most of his basic ideas, particularly that of nullification, were acquired from James Madison, who was 30 years his senior. Although Calhoun is remembered as the defender of minorities, he had no use for any minority—certainly not laborers or abolitionists—except the Southern one. His solution to the problem of the preservation of the Union was to give the South everything it demanded. He was truly devoted both to the Union and to the South, and death took him before he had to choose between them. But with rare insight, in 1850 he told a friend that the Union was doomed to dissolution: “I fix its probable occurrence within twelve years or three Presidential terms.”

In his thinking Calhoun worked backward, as if from the answer at the end of a mathematics primer. With his objective in mind, he chose a seemingly innocuous premise and then proceeded with hard logic to the desired conclusion. The historian William P. Trent said in the 1890s that he “started with the conclusion he wanted and reasoned back to the premises....Calhoun led thought rather than men, and lacking imagination, he led thought badly.”

Calhoun’s life was a tragedy in both the Greek and the Shakespearean senses. The gods thirsted after him, but he helped them along. Almost his last words were “The South! The poor South!” The poet Walt Whitman heard a Union soldier say shortly after the surrender of Confederate forces at Appomattox Court House that the true monuments to Calhoun were the wasted farms and the gaunt chimneys scattered over the South.

Gerald M. Capers
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Nullification Crisis, in U.S. history, confrontation between the state of South Carolina and the federal government in 1832–33 over the former’s attempt to declare null and void within the state the federal Tariffs of 1828 and 1832. The resolution of the Nullification Crisis in favor of the federal government helped to undermine the nullification doctrine, the constitutional theory that upheld the right of states to nullify federal acts within their boundaries.

Doctrine of nullification and the “Tariff of Abominations”

The doctrine of nullification had been advocated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798–99. The union was a compact of sovereign states, Jefferson asserted, and the federal government was their agent with certain specified, delegated powers. The states retained the authority to determine when the federal government exceeded its powers, and they could declare acts to be “void and of no force” in their jurisdictions.

The so-called Tariff of Abominations of 1828 was passed at the instigation of Northern manufacturers, but it distressed many Southern planters who depended on foreign trade for their livelihoods. Agriculture in South Carolina was undergoing grave difficulties owing to soil exhaustion, and many believed that the extraordinarily high tariffs would damage the state’s economy irreparably. During 1828, protests were voiced through Southern newspapers and town meetings, and finally, on December 19, the state legislature issued South Carolina Exposition and Protest, which declared the tariff unconstitutional. Secretly drafted by Vice Pres. John C. Calhoun (whose name did not appear on it), the paper outlined the state’s grievances and furthered the nullification doctrine.

Calhoun took the position that state “interposition” could block enforcement of a federal law. The state would be obliged to obey only if the law were made an amendment to the Constitution by three-fourths of the states. The “concurrent majority”—i.e., the people of a state having veto power over federal actions—would protect minority rights from the possible tyranny of the numerical majority.

Ordinance of Nullification

When the Tariff of 1832 only slightly modified the Tariff of 1828, the South Carolina legislature decided to put Calhoun’s nullification theory to a practical test. The legislature called for a special state convention, and on November 24, 1832, the convention adopted the Ordinance of Nullification. The ordinance declared the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 “null, void, and no law, nor binding upon this State, its officers or citizens.” It also forbade appeal of any ordinance measure to the federal courts, required all state officeholders (except members of the legislature) to take an oath of support for the ordinance, and threatened secession if the federal government tried to collect tariff duties by force. In the meantime, Calhoun resigned the vice presidency to speak for his state in the Senate. In the address that he wrote to accompany the Ordinance of Nullification, he further elucidated his states’ rights theory of the Constitution, stating in part that

the Constitution of the United States is a compact between the people of the several states, constituting free, independent, and sovereign communities…the government it created was formed and appointed to execute, according to the provisions of the instrument, the powers therein granted as the joint agent of the several states…all its acts, transcending these powers, are simply and of themselves null and void, and…in case of such infractions, it is the right of the states, in their sovereign capacity, each acting for itself and its citizens, in like manner as they adopted the Constitution to judge thereof in the last resort and to adopt such measures—not inconsistent with the compact—as may be deemed fit to arrest the execution of the act within their respective limits. Such we hold to be the right of the states in reference to an unconstitutional act of the government; nor do we deem their duty to exercise it on proper occasions less certain and imperative than the right itself is clear.