Nullification Crisis - Aftermath

Aftermath

People reflected on the meaning of the nullification crisis and its outcome for the country. On May 1, 1833 Jackson wrote, "the tariff was only a pretext, and disunion and southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question."

The final resolution of the crisis and Jackson’s leadership had appeal throughout the North and South. Robert Remini, the historian and Jackson biographer, described the opposition that nullification drew from traditionally states’ rights Southern states:

The Alabama legislature, for example, pronounced the doctrine “unsound in theory and dangerous in practice.” Georgia said it was “mischievous,” “rash and revolutionary.” Mississippi lawmakers chided the South Carolinians for acting with “reckless precipitancy.”

Forest McDonald, describing the split over nullification among proponents of states rights, wrote, “The doctrine of states’ rights, as embraced by most Americans, was not concerned exclusively, or even primarily with state resistance to federal authority.” But, by the end of the nullification crisis, many southerners started to question whether the Jacksonian Democrats still represented Southern interests. The historian William J. Cooper notes that, “Numerous southerners had begun to perceive it as a spear aimed at the South rather than a shield defending the South.”

In the political vacuum created by this alienation, the southern wing of the Whig Party was formed. The party was a coalition of interests united by the common thread of opposition to Andrew Jackson and, more specifically, his “definition of federal and executive power.” The party included former National Republicans with an “urban, commercial, and nationalist outlook” as well as former nullifiers. Emphasizing that “they were more southern than the Democrats,” the party grew within the South by going “after the abolition issue with unabashed vigor and glee.” With both parties arguing who could best defend southern institutions, the nuances of the differences between free soil and abolitionism, which became an issue in the late 1840s with the Mexican War and territorial expansion, never became part of the political dialogue. This failure increased the volatility of the slavery issues.

Richard Ellis argues that the end of the crisis signified the beginning of a new era. Within the states’ rights movement, the traditional desire for simply “a weak, inactive, and frugal government” was challenged. Ellis states that “in the years leading up to the Civil War the nullifiers and their pro-slavery allies used the doctrine of states’ rights and state sovereignty in such a way as to try to expand the powers of the federal government so that it could more effectively protect the peculiar institution.” By the 1850s, states’ rights had become a call for state equality under the Constitution.

Madison reacted to this incipient tendency by writing two paragraphs of "Advice to My Country," found among his papers. It said that the Union "should be cherished and perpetuated. Let the open enemy to it be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened; and the disguised one, as the Serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into paradise." Richard Rush published this "Advice" in 1850, by which time Southern spirit was so high that it was denounced as a forgery.

The first test for the South over the slavery issue began during the final congressional session of 1835. In what became known as the Gag Rule Debates, abolitionists flooded the Congress with anti-slavery petitions to end slavery and the slave trade in Washington, D.C. The debate was reopened each session as Southerners, led by South Carolinians Henry Pinckney and John Hammond, prevented the petitions from even being officially received by Congress. Led by John Quincy Adams, the slavery debate remained on the national stage until late 1844 when Congress lifted all restrictions on processing the petitions.

Describing the legacy of the crisis, Sean Wilentz writes:

“

The battle between Jacksonian democratic nationalists, northern and southern, and nullifier sectionalists would resound through the politics of slavery and antislavery for decades to come. Jackson’s victory, ironically, would help accelerate the emergence of southern pro-slavery as a coherent and articulate political force, which would help solidify northern antislavery opinion, inside as well as outside Jackson’s party. Those developments would accelerate the emergence of two fundamentally incompatible democracies, one in the slave South, the other in the free North.

”

For South Carolina, the legacy of the crisis involved both the divisions within the state during the crisis and the apparent isolation of the state as the crisis was resolved. By 1860, when South Carolina became the first state to secede, the state was more internally united than any other southern state. Historian Charles Edward Cauthen writes:

“

Probably to a greater extent than in any other Southern state South Carolina had been prepared by her leaders over a period of thirty years for the issues of 1860. Indoctrination in the principles of state sovereignty, education in the necessity of maintaining Southern institutions, warnings of the dangers of control of the federal government by a section hostile to its interests – in a word, the education of the masses in the principles and necessity of secession under certain circumstances – had been carried on with a skill and success hardly inferior to the masterly propaganda of the abolitionists themselves. It was this education, this propaganda, by South Carolina leaders which made secession the almost spontaneous movement that it was.

”