A

NULLIFICATION

THOMAS JEFFERSON first suggested the doctrine of nullification in the second Kentucky Resolutions (1799), where he asserted that the sovereign states are the only proper judges of whether the federal government has violated the Constitution and "that a nullification … [by] those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts…isthe rightful remedy." (See VIRGINIA AND KENTUCKY RESOLUTIONS.) In the 1820s, South Carolinians Robert J. Turnbull and Whitemarsh Seabrook laid the doctrinal foundations of an expanded nullification argument by denouncing the expansion of federal authority. In Consolidation (1824), THOMAS COOPER argued that the states remained independent sovereigns, having given only limited and express powers to Congress.

JOHN C. CALHOUN systematized and refined the Carolinians' constitutional arguments. He maintained that the people of the separate states never relinquished their SOVEREIGNTY, and that sovereignty was indivisible. In ratifying the Constitution, the states created a government of limited, specified, and delegated authority. Calhoun used the legal doctrine of agency to explain the federal relationship: "The States … formed the compact, acting as sovereign and independent communities. The General Government is but [their] creature … a government emanating from a compact between sovereigns … of the character of a joint commission… having, beyond its proper sphere, no more power than if it did not exist." ("Address on the Relation of the States and the Federal Government," 1831.) When the federal government (the agent) exceeded its authority, the states (the principals), in the exercise of their sovereign power, could "interpose" their authority by nullifying the federal statute or action, which would be void in the nullifying states. If three-fourths of the other states adopted a constitutional amendment empowering the federal government to perform the nullified act, the state then had the choice of acquiescing or of withdrawing from the compact (the federal Constitution) by SECESSION. But Calhoun emphasized that nullification was a peaceable alternative, not a preliminary step, to secession.

Calhoun's theory found application in a dispute, ostensibly over protective tariffs, that produced the Nullification Crisis of 1832. For a decade, Carolinians had declared that their objections to specific federal programs such as INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS or the national bank were merely specific parts of a larger objection to federal intrusion into the states' internal autonomy. The antitariff struggle was, in James Henry Hammond's metaphor, a "battle at the outposts" to prevent an assault on the real "citadel," slavery. When the Tariff of 1832 failed to meet Carolinian demands for an abrogation of the 1828 Tariff of Abominations, a South Carolina convention adopted an ordinance nullifying it and prohibiting its enforcement in the state.

President ANDREW JACKSON reacted forcefully. In his "Proclamation to the People of South Carolina" (1832), he denounced the theory of secession, insisting that the federal government was a true government to which the states had surrendered a part of their sovereignty. (See JACKSON ' SPROCLAMATION.) "Disunion by armed force is treason," he warned. Congress enacted the FORCE ACT (1833), which provided for alternative means of collecting the tariff in South Carolina and enhanced the president's power to use militia and regular forces to suppress resistance to federal authority. Congress also began a downward revision of the tariff. With the crisis over the tariff assuaged, the South Carolina legislature denounced Jackson's "Proclamation" and a subsequent convention made the empty gesture of nullifying the Force Act.

In 1837, Calhoun offered six congressional resolutions that would have opened all federal TERRITORIES to slavery. Congress adopted four of these, including one declaring that the federal government was only a "common agent" of the states and possessed only "delegated" powers. But antislavery agitation in the North increased, and many Northerners endorsed the WILMOT PROVISO (1846), which would have excluded slavery from the territories acquired as a result of the Mexican War. To meet this threat, other southern radicals, including Robert Barnwell Rhett, Edmund Ruffin, and William Lowndes Yancey, turned to secession, which subsumed nullification.

Though the Union victory in the CIVIL WAR left the doctrines of state sovereignty, INTERPOSITION, nullification, and secession all defunct, southern political leaders briefly and ineffectually exhumed interposition theories during efforts in the late 1950s to thwart desegregation in southern universities and schools.