Nullification Crisis: Calhoun, Jackson's Hanging Threat and the Force Bill

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After the Panic of 1819, South Carolina's planter economy slid amid soil exhaustion and Gulf Coast competition, and tens of thousands of white residents left in the 1820s. Planters blamed federal tariffs that raised the price of manufactured imports and risked British retaliation against cotton. The Tariff of 1828, which Southerners called the Tariff of Abominations, came from a Martin Van Buren scheme to help Andrew Jackson that backfired when the bill passed. Fear after the 1822 Denmark Vesey conspiracy fed the Negro Seamen Act, which jailed free Black foreign sailors in Charleston. Vice President John C. Calhoun secretly wrote the Exposition and Protest, arguing that a state convention could declare a federal law void within its borders.

James Madison rejected Calhoun's reading of the 1798 Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, and Daniel Webster answered Robert Hayne that the Constitution began with we the people. At an April 13, 1830 Jefferson dinner, Jackson toasted the federal union and Calhoun replied with liberty. In November 1832 a South Carolina convention passed the Ordinance of Nullification, and Governor Hayne readied 2,000 mounted minutemen and 25,000 volunteers. Jackson sent warships to Charleston, called nullification treason, and won the Force Bill. Henry Clay and Calhoun produced the Compromise Tariff of 1833, South Carolina repealed its ordinance and then nullified the Force Bill, and Jackson predicted slavery would be the next pretext for disunion.

• South Carolina's population actually shrank during the 1820s.
• Van Buren loaded the 1828 bill with duties on hemp, flax and iron expecting New England to vote it down.
• South Carolina agents spent $100,000 on weapons bought in the North.
• The regular U.S. Army numbered roughly 6,000 soldiers, far fewer than the state's planned volunteers.
• State law let merchants sue federal customs officers personally for double the value of seized goods.