South Carolina Background (1819-1828)
South Carolina had been adversely affected by the national economic decline of the 1820s. During this decade 56,000 whites and 30,000 slaves, out of a total free and slave population of 580,000 left the state for a better place. Historian Richard E. Ellis describes the situation:
| “ | Throughout the colonial and early national periods, South Carolina had sustained substantial economic growth and prosperity. This had created an extremely wealthy and extravagant low country aristocracy whose fortunes were based first on the cultivation of rice and indigo, and then on cotton. Then the state was devastated by the Panic of 1819. The depression that followed was more severe than in almost any other state of the Union. Moreover, competition from the newer cotton producing areas along the Gulf Coast, blessed with fertile lands that produced a higher crop-yield per acre, made recovery painfully slow. To make matters worse, in large areas of South Carolina slaves vastly outnumbered whites, and there existed both considerable fear of slave rebellion and a growing sensitivity to even the smallest criticism of “the peculiar institution.” | ” |
State leaders, led by states’ rights advocates like William Smith and Thomas Cooper, blamed most of the state’s economic problems on the Tariff of 1816 and national internal improvement projects, although soil erosion and competition from the new Southwest were also very significant reasons for the state’s declining fortunes. George McDuffie was a particularly effective speaker for the anti-tariff forces, and he popularized the Forty Bale theory. McDuffie argued that the 40% tariff on cotton finished goods meant that “the manufacturer actually invades your barns, and plunders you of 40 out of every 100 bales that you produce.” Mathematically incorrect, this argument still struck a nerve with his constituency. Nationalists such as Calhoun were forced by the increasing power of such leaders to retreat from their previous positions and adopt, in the words of Ellis, "an even more extreme version of the states' rights doctrine" in order to maintain political significance within South Carolina.
South Carolina’s first effort at nullification occurred in 1822. It was believed that free black sailors had assisted Denmark Vesey in his planned slave rebellion. South Carolina passed a Negro Seamen Act, which required that all black foreign seamen be imprisoned while their ships were docked in Charleston. Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, in his capacity as a circuit judge, declared this law as unconstitutional since it violated United States treaties with Great Britain. The South Carolina Senate announced that the judge’s ruling was invalid and that the Act would be enforced. The federal government did not attempt to carry out Johnson's decision.
Read more about this topic: Nullification Crisis
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