Chapter 3
chapter two part two of epochs of american history division and reunion eighteen twenty nine to eighteen eighty nine by woodrow wilson this librivox recording is in the public domain Party Spirit and Policy Under Jackson, 1829-1833. Part II. 25. Tariff Legislation, 1816-1828. South Carolina, nevertheless, meant to put this novel doctrine of nullification to the test of practical experiment.
Her grievance had no immediate connection with the question of the public lands. It arose out of the tariff policy of the federal government. The question of Western settlement was part of the economic situation as a whole, but the central question of that situation was the tariff. And the latest tariff legislation had, in the opinion of Carolinians, been the worst.
Certainly the South had abundant reason to be dissatisfied with the operation of protective tariffs, and certainly the protective tariff of 1828 was a monstrosity of its kind. It was not equitable even when judged by the standard of its own purposes. It was not so much as self-consistent. It was a complex of compromises and bore upon its face evidences of the notorious fact
that it was the product of a selfish contest between several sections of the country for an economic advantage. The awkward part of the situation for the Southern members was that they had themselves been in part responsible for this very law, and in a way that it was very embarrassing to defend. They had used their influence to fill the bill with as many provisions as possible that would be obnoxious to New England and had then used their votes to prevent amendments in order that the New England members might be forced to vote with them at the last against the adoption of the measure. They had played a dangerous game for a political advantage with a view to the presidential election just at hand, and they had lost the game, for a sufficient number of the New England members voted for the bill to carry it.
All this, however, though it embarrassed the Southern argument against the measure, did not change the character of the tariff law of 1828 or alter its significance as an object lesson in such legislation. it had evidently been the result of a scramble among rival interests for a selfish advantage until eighteen sixteen the duties imposed upon imports had been primarily intended to yield a revenue to the government they were only incidentally protective The tariff of 1816 had been more directly meant to afford protection to industries which had sprung up during the period of the embargo and the war of 1812-14, when all foreign commerce was practically cut off and domestic manufactures made necessary. The moderate duties then imposed, however, had not prevented a flood of importation after the war or a rapid rise in the prices of agricultural products in consequence of repeated failures in the European crops. They had not mended the vicious currency system of the country.
They had not furnished any remedy for speculation or any specific against the results of a return of good crops in Europe. In 1819, therefore, there came a financial crash. Public opinion insisted upon a series of protective measures, and the Tariff Act of 1828 was the culmination of the series. 26 Effect of the Tariff Upon the South, 1816-1829 The particular provisions of these various tariff measures were of comparatively little consequence so far as the South was concerned.
The Act of 1816 had had little importance for her, but when subsequent tariffs increased duty after duty and more and more restrained importation, it became very evident that she was to suffer almost in direct proportion as other sections of the country gained advantage from such legislation. legislation, and assuredly she was making contributions to the wealth and commerce of the country which entitled her to consideration in the matter. The total value of the exports from the United States in 1829 was $55,700,193, and to this total the southern states contributed no less than $34,072,655 in cotton, tobacco, and rice. The contribution of the South
appears still more striking if it be compared with the total value of agricultural exports, which was little under $44 million. Three-fourths of the agricultural exports of the country, in short, came from the South and very nearly three-fifths of all the exports. The value of the exports of manufactured articles reached only about $6 million. High duties on hemp and flax, on wool, on lead, and iron meant that those who contributed most to the external commerce of the
country were to have their markets restricted for the benefit of those who contributed very little. The value of the exports of manufactured iron in 1829 was only $70,767. Of the exports of lead, only $8,417. Moreover, if there was reason for complaint, South Carolina was entitled to be spokesman for the South. The exports from South Carolina in 1829 reached the sum of $3,175,586, figures exceeded only by the figures for New York and Louisiana and by a few thousands by those for
Massachusetts. The total value of the exports of cotton in that year was $26,575,311. That of cotton-manufactured goods exported only $1,258,000. It was urged, of course, that by stimulating domestic industries, the resources of the country were being augmented and a great home market created for the products of the solid. But this home market for cotton and rice and tobacco seemed a remote and doubtful good to the southern planters
when balanced against the great and present value of their foreign market. 27. Constitutional Question of the Tariff, 1829 It was this gross inequality in the operation of the tariff, this burden thrown upon a particular section from which the other sections were exempt, that gave emphasis to the claim of the southern leaders
that such legislation was unconstitutional, even deliberately and palpably unconstitutional. The Constitution of the United States explicitly bestows upon the Federal Congress both the power to levy taxes of all kinds and the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations. The only limitation imposed is that all taxation shall be uniform throughout the United States and that its object shall be either to pay the debts or to
provide for the common defense or general welfare of the country. Plainly, it would seem to be within the right of Congress to regulate commerce by means of duties or imposts in any way that seemed to it calculated to promote the general welfare of the nation. At any rate, such an exercise of power on its part could certainly not be deemed within reason a deliberate and palpable violation of the Constitution, and yet to stop here is not to state the whole case which the
South had to urge. Incidental or even direct protection of domestic industry by means of tariffs, it might be urged, was one thing, but the adoption of a system which notoriously bore with its whole weight upon a single section of the country was quite a different thing. Such taxation was not uniform in its incidence, neither did it promote the general warfare. It might even be urged that any selection of specific interests for protection made the constitutionality of the policy doubtful by deliberately making the burdens of taxation unequal.
At any rate, it was not easy to answer such objections. A serious doubt could be cast upon protective terrorists by representing them as acts of special legislation, such as the Constitution could not have contemplated in connection with the power of laying taxes. Such legislation, unquestionably, constituted, so far as the South was concerned, a very substantial grievance indeed, and like other parties with a grievance, the Southern Party fell back upon the doctrine of state sovereignty. 28 Calhoun and Jackson, 1818-1831 The real leader of the South in its action against the tariff policy of Congress was not Senator Hain, but the Vice President, Calhoun.
Hain's speech upon Foote's resolution, though its brilliancy and force were all his own, was recognized as a manifesto of the group of Southern statesmen who stood about Calhoun. Possibly it was tentative, meant to try the temper of Congress and of the country with regard to the policy which the Southern men were meditating. Their next step was to test the feeling of Jackson.
At a great democratic banquet, given on the 13th April, 1830, the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, toasts were proposed, which smacked very strongly of state sovereignty. Southern spokesmen responded to them warmly, and then the President, who was of course the principal guest of the occasion,
was called upon to volunteer a sentiment. He did so with characteristic directness and emphasis. His toast was, Our Federal Union, it must be preserved. The South Carolina leaders had misjudged their man.
General Jackson was in favor of a strict construction of the Constitution and studied respect for the rights of the states, but he had the quick executive instinct of the soldier. He both knew and relished his duty with regard to the laws of the United States. Yes, he said to a member of Congress from South Carolina
who had called upon him and who asked him upon leaving whether he had any commands for his friends in South Carolina. Yes, I have. Please give my compliments to my friends in your state and say to them that if a single drop of blood
shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hands on engaged in such treasonable conduct upon the first tree I can reach. The issue was made up so far as the President was concerned. the nullification party knew what to expect from the executive.
Practical test of the issue was hastened by a personal breach between Jackson and Calhoun. Calhoun had supported Jackson for the presidency and been elected vice president as his friend and was regarded as his natural successor in the presidency. But his political fortunes, as it turned out, depended upon the personal favor of Jackson, whose individual popularity had created the new Democratic Party.
and the intriguing rivals of Calhoun presently set facts before the president which caused an immediate breach with Calhoun. Calhoun had been Secretary of War in Monroe's cabinet in 1818 when Jackson, in prosecution of the war against the Seminole Indians, had, after his own thorough and arbitrary manner of conducting warfare, wantonly disregarded the neutral rights of Spain upon the Florida peninsula and had besides hanged two British subjects whom he found among the Indians and suspected of inciting the tribes to hostilities against the United States.
He had acted in direct disobedience to orders from the War Department and he had embroiled the government with two neutral powers. When the matter was discussed in the Cabinet, Calhoun, as Secretary of War, had naturally proposed that Jackson should be censured for his extraordinary insubordination. But the majority of his colleagues would not brave the universal popularity of the man, or impeach his motives by such an action, and Calhoun was directed to write the insubordinate commander an official letter of thanks and congratulation.
In Jackson's mind, with its frontier standards in such matters, no man could be his friend and yet censure his conduct. The attitude of the cabinet towards his course in the Seminole War was a point of special sensitiveness with him, for he knew and resented the fact that his censure had been debated. In 1831, a betrayal of confidence on the part of another member of the Cabinet of Monroe informed Jackson of what he had not suspected that Mr. Calhoun had favored, had even proposed the censure. It was in vain that Calhoun protested that he had, nevertheless, been Jackson's personal friend throughout, even while seeking to vindicate his own official authority as head of the War
Department. Such a friend Jackson regarded as a traitor. The breach was immediate and final, and Calhoun and his friends were read out of the Jackson Party. 29. Reconstruction of the Cabinet, 1831. The quarrel came opportunely for the reconstruction of his cabinet, which Jackson now desired on other grounds also personal in their nature.
He had not found his cabinet either harmonious or docile. It was not made up of those who were really his confidential advisers. The wives of several of the secretaries had refused social recognition to Mrs. Eaton, the wife of the Secretary of War, because before her marriage with General Eden she had not enjoyed an enviable reputation, and the President had warmly taken her part. It was not long since he
had lost his own wife, whom he had loved after a tender and knightly fashion. Scandalous things had been said about her too, most unjustly, and he was in a mood to espouse the cause of any woman whose name was aspersed. The officers of whom he wished in any case to rid himself were either unable or unwilling to command the conduct of their wives towards Mrs. Eaton. It was, therefore, the more pleasant to dismiss them, Calhoun, men and all, and make up his cabinet afresh.
Van Buren and Eaton withdrew to facilitate the process, and during the spring and summer of 1831 the cabinet places were filled with men who were the real forces of the Jackson Party. Edward Livingston of New York Department of State, Lewis McLean of Delaware Treasury, Lewis Cass of Michigan War, Levy Woodbury of New Hampshire Navy, and Roger B. Taney of Maryland Attorney General. Only Berry of the Post Office was retained. The administration was now organically whole. 30 South Carolina's protests against the tariff 1828-1832,
but Calhoun and his friends were at the same time freed from entangling alliances and left at liberty to pursue their own course without party responsibility. It seemed to men of that day who were watching with suspicion and alarm the movements of the South Carolina party that Calhoun and his friends were hatching a deliberate conspiracy against the Union.
But now that the whole of the careers of the men, concern, and the entire history of the measures taken are open to scrutiny, it is impossible to justify so harsh a judgment. Men's lives offer strange paradoxes and contradictions, and it is evident now that the most urgent sentiment of Calhoun's heart was love for the Union in 1831 when he was advocating nullification, no less than in his earlier days in Congress when he was throwing his whole soul into every project that was liberal and national. But in his mind the Union meant state sovereignty,
no less than it meant national expansion and united power. His devotion was reserved for the original ideal as he conceived it for a union of free states, not a national government set over subject states. He thought to preserve the union by checking a course of events which threatened, as it seemed to him, to pervert it from its original and better plan. If he loses his early liberality of view as his years advance, if he grows stern and turns bitter in his moods,
if he draws away from questions of national politics to devote himself wholly to the promotion of sectional objects, it is the more pathetic. His career may be pronounced tragical, but it cannot justly be pronounced false. He meant to the last to save the Union, and he died as if with broken heart when it became evident even to himself that he could not save it by the means he had chosen and had deemed right. Webster had certainly been able to
prove the doctrine of nullification, the paradoxical doctrine of peaceful and legal disobedience to the law, an absurd and mischievous tenet. It was indeed a desperate and perverse remedy, but it was not dishonestly used by those who proposed it. In the summer of 1828, Calhoun prepared a careful and elaborate statement of the theory of nullification for the use of the legislature of South Carolina, which presently adopted and promulgated it as an official manifesto.
It became known as the South Carolina Exposition. It explains the whole attitude of Calhoun and his friends in the most explicit terms and in terms of evident sincerity. It declares what was only too true, that there is a permanent dissimilarity of interest between the South and the rest of the Union because the southern states are staple states, exclusively devoted to agriculture and destined always to remain so because of their soil climate habits and peculiar labor. While the other
states of the Union may diversify their industry and their resources as they please, the southern states, in other words, were in the position of a minority, whose advantage could never wholly coincide with the advantage of the majority in respect of the commercial policy of the country. Under such circumstances, the exposition argued Congress should be the more careful, the more punctilious to keep strictly within the plain letter of its constitutional powers, and if it should seem to one of the states of the minority that those powers were evidently exceeded in any case, it must be within her privilege to veto the legislation in question, and so suspend its operation so far as she herself was concerned until an amendment to the federal constitution specifically granting the power disputed should have been prepared and accepted by three-fourths of the
states. It was nevertheless pronounced by the exposition to be inexpedient to adopt such measures of suspension at once. Time ought to be allowed for further consideration and reflection in the hope that the returning sense of justice on the part of the majority, when they came to reflect on the wrongs which this and the other staple states have suffered and are suffering, may repeal the obnoxious and unconstitutional acts, and thereby prevent the necessity of
interposing the veto of the state, especially since it was hoped that the great political revolution, which was to displace the Adams administration on the following 4th of March, and bring in an eminent citizen distinguished for his services in the country and his justice and patriotism, might be followed up under his influence with a complete restoration of the pure principles of our government. When Jackson's words at the Jefferson Banquet made it plain
that the nullification movement could count upon no sympathy from him, Calhoun prepared and published in one of the newspapers of his state an address to the people of South Carolina, dated from Fort Hill, his South Carolina home, July 26, 1831, in which he re-argued the matter of the exposition. He dwelt again upon the great dissimilarity and even contrariety of interests which existed between the different parts of the country. He again interpreted the Constitution
as being meant to establish an equilibrium of powers between the state and federal governments, a delicate poise of interests very difficult to maintain, and he spoke with greater boldness than before of the remedy of nullification. Deep feelings were excited in South Carolina and throughout the South, there were many ominous signs of grave discontent. There were even unmistakable signs that nullification was actually to be tried
unless Congress should take steps to remove the tariff grievance. Almost the entire attention of Congress, therefore, was given to the tariff question during the session of 1831 to 1832. It was not difficult to make sentiment in favor of changing the tariff law of 1828. It was very generally admitted to be a tariff of abominations by reason of its method without principle, its miscellaneous protecting without regard to any consistent principle of protection.
There had been protests against it in the North as well as in the South. Accordingly, in July 1832, a new tariff measure passed by very large majorities became law. It did away with almost all the abominations of the Law of 1828. Taken as a whole, it may be said to have sought to effect substantially a return to the Tariff of 1824. It maintained the principle of protection but abandoned previous vagaries in applying it.
It was to go into effect March 3, 1833. 31. Nullification 1832. It was to the principle of protection, however, rather than to any particular applications of it that the South objected. The revision of 1832 showed that the majority in Congress were willing to see the policy of protection temperately and reasonably employed, but did not give any promise that they would ever consent to abandon it.
It rather fixed the policy upon a firmer basis by ridding it of its extravagances. Calhoun immediately took steps to prevent its going into operation. He wrote an elaborate letter to James Hamilton, the governor of South Carolina, dated Fort Hill, August 28, 1832, again setting forth his views on the right of the state to defend her reserve powers against the encroachments of the general government. Once more he stated with consummate clearness and force the historical argument for state sovereignty.
He maintained the central government was the agent of the states that the people of each state were obliged to obey the laws of the Union because their state in joining the Union had established their obligation to do so. But that, as each state had established this obligation for its citizens, it could also declare its extent so far as they were concerned, and that such a declaration would be as binding upon them as the original act of adherence to the Union. He argued that a declaration on the part of the State, defining the extent of its obligations under the Constitution which it had accepted, might be made by a convention of the people, that such a declaration would be similar to the act by which the State had entered the Union, of like solemnity and as much a part of her fundamental law, and he could find nothing in the Constitution which could warrant the Federal Government in coercing a State for any purpose or in any manner, whatever. Nullification, he insisted, was not, as some contended, the same thing as secession. Secession is a withdrawal from the Union, a dissolution of the partnership.
Nullification, on the contrary, presupposes the relation of principle and agent, and is simply a declaration made in due form that an act of the agent transcending its power is null and void. He thought to one power as logical a deduction from the premises of state sovereignty as the other.
The only majority which could, he conceived, under a federal system avail to overcome the opposition of a state to the exercise of the contested power was the majority which could amend the Constitution. That majority and not the majority of Congress could override nullification by the process of amendment, inasmuch as the Union was a confederation of interests, not a mere combination of individuals. Our system was meant to fortify the Constitution-making power against the lawmaking. In the minds of the public men of South Carolina, this letter was conclusive, not only as to what ought to be held, but also as to what ought to be done. The state legislature came together in October and formally called a convention for the following month.
The convention was immediately chosen and convened in Columbia on November 19. On November 24 it passed an ordinance of nullification which declared the Tariff Acts of 1828 and 1832 null and void and without force within the jurisdiction of South Carolina. Prohibited payment of duties under those laws within the state after the first day of the following February. forbade under penalties appeals upon the questions involved to the courts of the United States and declared that any attempt on the part of the federal government to enforce the nullified laws in South Carolina
would sever the state's connection with the Union and force her to organize a separate government. Meantime, November 6, Jackson had sent instructions to the collector of the Port of Charleston to collect the duties at all hazards, if necessary by the use of force, as much force as might be needed. When the Convention promulgated its ordinance, he issued a proclamation, December 11, couched in terms characteristically direct and vehement. It argued the manifest practical
difficulties of the doctrine of nullification, and very firmly denounced it as incompatible with the existence of the Union contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded and destructive of the great object for which it was formed. He exhorted the people of South Carolina to yield, but he offered no compromise. The laws of the United States declared the president must
be executed. I have no discretionary power on the subject. My duty is emphatically pronounced in the Constitution. Those who told you that you might peacefully prevent their execution deceived due. Their object is disunion, and disunion by armed force is treason. The state authorities, nevertheless, did not flinch even in the face of this ominous proclamation. A new legislature, in which the nullifiers had secured an overwhelming majority, met in Colombia the same month and
called Mr. Hain from the Senate to assume the governorship of the state, and one of the first acts of the new governor was to issue a proclamation of his own, denouncing the utterance of the president and calling upon the people of the state to stand firm in their opposition to its pernicious doctrines. During these transactions, Calhoun resigned the office of vice president to accept Haynes' vacated seat upon the floor of the Senate. He must be in the arena itself,
where part of the battle was to be fought. 32. The presidential election of 1832. In the meantime, there had been a new presidential election. The president had taken the sense of the country and regarded the result as a triumph both for himself and for his avowed principles of government. This election is notable for several reasons. It marks the beginning of the system of national nominating conventions. It gave Jackson a second term of office in which
he was to display his peculiar qualities more conspicuously than ever. It compacted and gave distinct character to the new Democratic Party, and it practically settled directly the fate of the Bank of the United States and indirectly the question of nullification. Jackson was easily re-elected, for he had established a great popularity, and the opposition was divided. A new party came into the field and marked its advent by originating the National Nominating
Convention. This was the Anti-Masonic Party in 1826 when William Morgan, who had ventured to make public the secrets of the Masonic Order, was abducted and, it was alleged, murdered. The event created great excitement and led singularly enough to the formation of a political party whose first tenet was the duty of excluding Freemasons from public office. This party spread so rapidly that within four years it assumed something like the proportions of a national organization. By September 1831, it was able to muster a national nominating convention in which more than half the states were represented.
This convention put in nomination William Wirt of Virginia, formerly Attorney General. The National Republicans following suit met in a similar convention in December of the same year and by unanimous vote nominated Henry Clay of Kentucky, already once before Jackson's rival for the presidency. A National Assembly of Young Men also met in Washington in May 1832 at the suggestion of members of the Clay Party to endorse the national Republican nominations
and to add another point to subsequent practice by adopting a set of formal resolutions defining its position on the issues of the campaign, the first platform ever adopted by a national convention. These resolutions denounced Jackson for most of the acts of his administration, declared that the Supreme Court of the United States,
rather than the president or the leading public man in South Carolina, was the proper tribunal for deciding, in the last resort, all questions arising under the Constitution and laws of the United States, and favored the policy of protection. The Democrats, in their turn, also held a convention in May 1832, without hesitation, re-nominated Jackson for the presidency, and with considerably less spontaneity, Martin Van Buren for the vice
presidency. Mr. Van Buren was Jackson's choice for the office, and it was Jackson's preference that forced him upon the party, many of whose members would have been glad to have someone else. Calhoun had fallen out from the line of succession since his breach with the president. His position at the time, with reference to nullification, practically severed his connection with parties altogether.
The result of the election was decisive. The electoral votes of all the southern states even, except those of South Carolina, and five out of the eight votes of Maryland, were cast for Jackson, whose total was 219. Only 49 votes were cast for Clay.
South Carolina threw away her 11 votes on John Floyd of Virginia, and Vermont alone was carried by the anti-Masons. Upon Jackson, with his somewhat Napoleonic instincts, the election acted like the tonic of a favorable plebiscite.
He was incapable of entertaining any purpose to overthrow the Constitution or even to act in contravention of his provisions, but he did claim the right to read, and interpret that instrument for himself without the assistance either of the courts or of the leaders of politics.
And he took his second election to mean that the people gave him carte blanche to act as their representative on that theory. The chief issue of the election had been the question of the recharter of the Bank of the United States, a question which we shall presently discuss. The tariff question had entered only in a subordinate degree, for Jackson was not fully committed with regard to it,
and the nullification troubles had not come to a head until too late to affect the vote materially. It was Jackson's immense popularity, the divisions among his opponents, his successes and their lack of unity that determined the result, but Jackson made no close analysis of the result. He was heartened by the consciousness that he had been such a president
as the people liked and were ready to support. It was probably this feeling that contributed to give its clear ring of determination to the proclamation which he issued against the nullifiers in December. In January, he asked Congress for special powers to enforce the revenue laws. He wished to be authorized to alter revenue districts
as he thought best to change the locality of custom houses when necessary and to use the land and naval forces of the government to prevent unlawful interference with the powers of collectors. There was evident need that such powers should be conferred upon the executive for the legislature of south carolina after electing hayne governor had passed acts practically resuming some of the powers expressly bethel from the states by the federal constitution and had taken steps to put the state in a condition of military preparation against the time of federal action in february
A bill to enforce the tariff laws was therefore introduced into Congress in response to the President's request and became known as the Force Bill. 33. Compromise and Reconciliation, 1832-1833 While the employment of force was proposed, however, conciliation also was attempted at the suggestion of the administration itself. The Secretary of the Treasury had recommended in his annual report that the duties be lowered to the revenue standard, and on December 27, Mr. Verblank, Chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means, had reported to the House a bill meant to effect a return to the tariff of 1816. The protectionists of the House, however, subjected the measure to a raking fire of debate and amendment, which very soon disfigured it beyond recognition, and which delayed final action upon it until within two weeks of the end of the session.
The Senate did not wait for the action of the House. On February 12, Mr. Clay introduced a compromise measure in the Senate intended at once to save the principle of protection and to stave off civil difficulties. taking the tariff of 1832 as a basis it provided that all duties which under the provisions of that tariff exceeded 20% should be reduced by one-tenth of that excess on the 1st of January 1834 and of each alternate year till 1840 and that then on the 1st of January 1842 one half of the remaining excess should be taken off and on the 1st of July 1842 the other half so that after the first day of July 1842 1842, there should be a uniform duty of 20 percent on all articles. South Carolina had eerily given notice that such a horizontal rate was the least concession that would satisfy her. To Mr. Clay's measure, after a little hesitation, all parties assented. On February 26, the House
dropped its own bill and took up the Senate measure, which it speedily passed. Passing the Senate also, the bill became law on March 2, 1833, the day before the tariff law of 1832 was to have gone into effect. The Forrest Bill became law one day earlier on the 1st of March. What had been happening in South Carolina in the meantime, the nullification ordinance was to have gone into effect on the 1st of February. It had unquestionably been intended, however, to force not war but
concession and it would have been in the highest degree unwise and maladroit to attempt to put it forcibly into operation while Congress was actually debating concession. Virginia, moreover, when she saw preparations amaking for actual conflict between South Carolina and the federal authorities, had undertaken the part of mediator. Her legislature passed resolutions which reiterated the principles of the celebrated resolutions of 1798, while expressing the opinion that those
principles sanctioned neither the action of South Carolina nor the proclamation of the President, and which begged South Carolina at least to suspend her ordinance until after the close of the session of Congress, but the Convention which had passed the ordinance had dispersed and no power existed which, under the theory of nullification, was authorized to repeal it. Under such circumstances, since nothing regular could be done, something very irregular was
resolved upon, which no conceivable theory of constitutional law could justify, but which prudence and practical wisdom nevertheless demanded. Governor Hain replied to the overtures of Virginia that the ordinance would be suspended by common consent, and a private meeting of leading public men was held in Charleston late in January, which declared the ordinance suspended until Congress should adjourn. The federal officers collected the duties after
the first day of February as before. On March 11, the nullification convention reassembled at the call of the governor and, reciting the concessions of Congress, repealed the ordinance nullifying the tariff laws. At the same time, however, it passed another ordinance nullifying the force bill which there was then no longer any reason for putting into operation. The outcome of the matter could not be wholly satisfactory to either party. South Carolina had obtained the concessions
which she had demanded, but the force bill was still unrepealed, and stood as a flat denial of the whole principle for which the nullifiers had contended. The federal authorities had collected the revenue at the ports of South Carolina and enforced the law which she had attempted to nullify, but then they had immediately withdrawn that law and acceded to the state's demands. Nullification had succeeded in its immediate practical object by getting rid of
the laws at which it had been aimed, but it had failed in the much greater matter of establishing itself as an acknowledged principle. What is most striking in the whole affair for the student of institutions is that it gave to the practical politics of an English people a theoretical caste, such as the politics of no English community had ever worn before. Practical considerations, hitherto conclusive in all matters of English development, were now for the first time
compelled to contest their right with the refined theories of government had a cunning net of logical inference from a written document thrown about them by a master of logic and were bidden to extricate themselves without breaking the net chapter two part two
