We have seen that the first Federal Congress met at New York in March, 1789. It organized April 6th. None knew better than its members that the war of the Americana Revolution chiefly grew out of the efforts of Great Britain to cripple and destroy our Colonial industries to the benefit of the British trader, and that the Independence conquered, was an Industrial as well as Political Independence; and none knew better than they, that the failure of the subsequent political Confederation of States was due mainly to its failure to encourage and protect the budding domestic manufactures of those States. Hence they hastened, under the leadership of James Madison, to pass "An Act laying a duty on goods, wares and merchandize imported into the United States," with a preamble, declaring it to be "necessary" for the "discharge of the debt of the United States and the encouragement and protection of manufactures." It was approved by President Washington July 4, 1789—a date not without its significance—and levied imports both specific and ad valorem. It was not only our first Tariff Act, but, next to that prescribing the oath used in organizing the Government, the first Act of the first Federal Congress; and was passed in pursuance of the declaration of President Washington in his first Message, that "The safety and interest of the People" required it. Under the inspiration of Alexander Hamilton the Tariff of 1790 was enacted at the second session of the same Congress, confirming the previous Act and increasing some of the protective duties thereby imposed.
An analysis of the vote in the House of Representatives on this Tariff Bill discloses the fact that of the 39 votes for it, 21 were from Southern States, 13 from the Middle States, and 5 from New England States; while of the 13 votes against it, 9 were from New England States, 3 from Southern States, and 1 from Middle States. In other words, while the Southern States were for the Bill in the proportion of 21 to 3, and the Middle States by 13 to 1, New England was against it by 9 to 5; or again, while 10 of the 13 votes against it were from the New England and Middle States, 21 (or more than half) of the 39 votes for it were from Southern States.
It will thus be seen—singularly enough in view of subsequent events—that we not only mainly owe our first steps in Protective Tariff legislation to the almost solid Southern vote, but that it was thus secured for us despite the opposition of New England. Nor did our indebtedness to Southern statesmen and Southern votes for the institution of the now fully established American System of Protection cease here, as we shall presently see.
That Jefferson, as well as Washington and Madison, agreed with the views of Alexander Hamilton on Protection to our domestic manufactures as against those of foreign Nations, is evident in his Annual Message of December 14, 1806, wherein—discussing an anticipated surplus of Federal revenue above the expenditures, and enumerating the purposes of education and internal improvement to which he thinks the "whole surplus of impost" should during times of peace be applied; by which application of such surplus he prognosticates that "new channels of communication will be opened between the States; the lines of separation will disappear; their interests will be identified, and their Union cemented by new and indissoluble ties"—he says: "Shall we suppress the impost and give that advantage to foreign over domestic manufactures. On a few articles of more general and necessary use, the suppression in due season, will doubtless be right; but the great mass of the articles on which impost is paid is foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them." But his embargo and other retaliatory measures, put in force in 1807 and 1808, and the War of 1812-15 with Great Britain, which closely followed, furnished Protection in another manner, by shutting the door to foreign imports and throwing our people upon their own resources, and contributed greatly to the encouragement and increase of our home manufactures—especially those of wool, cotton, and hemp.
At the close of that War the traders of Great Britain determined, even at a temporary loss to themselves, to glut our market with their goods and thus break down forever, as they hoped, our infant manufactures. Their purpose and object were boldly announced in the House of Commons by Mr. Brougham, when he said: "Is it worth while to incur a loss upon the first importation, in order by the glut to stifle in the cradle those rising manufactures in the United States which the War had forced into existence contrary to the natural course of things." Against this threatened ruin, our manufacturers all over the United States—the sugar planters of Louisiana among them—clamored for Protection, and Congress at once responded with the Tariff Act of 1816.
This law greatly extended and increased specific duties on, and diminished the application of the ad valorem principle to, foreign imports; and it has been well described as "the practical foundation of the American policy of encouragement of home manufactures—the practical establishment of the great industrial system upon which rests our present National wealth, and the power and the prosperity and happiness of our whole people." While Henry Clay of Kentucky, William Loundes of South Carolina, and Henry St. George Tucker of Virginia supported the Bill most effectively, no man labored harder and did more effective service in securing its passage than John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. The contention on their part was not for a mere "incidental protection" —much less a "Tariff for revenue only"—but for "Protection" in its broadest sense, and especially the protection of their cotton manufactures. Indeed Calhoun's defense of Protection, from the assaults of those from New England and elsewhere who assailed it on the narrow ground that it was inimical to commerce and navigation, was a notable one. He declared that:
"It (the encouragement of manufactures) produced a system strictly American, as much so as agriculture, in which it had the decided advantage of commerce and navigation. The country will from this derive much advantage. Again it is calculated to bind together more closely our wide-spread Republic. It will greatly increase our mutual dependence and intercourse, and will, as a necessary consequence, excite an increased attention to internal improvements—a subject every way so intimately connected with the ultimate attainment of national strength and the perfection of our political institutions."
He regarded the fact that it would make the parts adhere more closely; that it would form a new and most powerful cement far outweighing any political objections that might be urged against the system. In his opinion "the liberty and the union of the country were inseparably united; that as the destruction of the latter would most certainly involve the former, so its maintenance will with equal certainty preserve it;" and he closed with an impressive warning to the Nation of a "new and terrible danger" which threatened it, to wit: "disunion." Nobly as he stood up then—during the last term of his service in the House of Representatives—for the great principles of, the American System of Protection to manufactures, for the perpetuity of the Union, and for the increase of "National strength," it seems like the very irony of fate that a few years later should find him battling against Protection as "unconstitutional," upholding Nullification as a "reserved right" of his State, and championing at the risk of his neck that very "danger" to the "liberties" and life of his Country against which his prophetic words had already given solemn warning.
Strange was it also, in view of the subsequent attitudes of the South and New England, that this essentially Protective Tariff Act of 1816 should have been vigorously protested and voted against by New England, while it was ably advocated and voted for by the South—the 25 votes of the latter which secured its passage being more than sufficient to have secured its defeat had they been so inclined.
The Tariff Acts of 1824 and 1828 followed the great American principle of Protection laid down and supported by the South in the Act of 1816, while widening, increasing, and strengthening it. Under their operation—especially under that of 1828, with its high duties on wool, hemp, iron, lead, and other staples—great prosperity smiled upon the land, and particularly upon the Free States.
In the cotton-growing belt of the South, however, where the prosperity was relatively less, owing to the blight of Slavery, the very contrast bred discontent; and, instead of attributing it to the real cause, the advocates of Free Trade within that region insisted that the Protective Tariff was responsible for the condition of things existing there.
A few restless and discontented spirits in the South had indeed agitated the subject of Free Trade as against Protected manufactures as early as 1797, and, hand in hand with it, the doctrine of States Rights. And Jefferson himself, although, as we have already seen, attached to the American System of Protection and believing in its Constitutionality, unwittingly played into the hands of these Free Traders by drawing up the famous Kentucky Resolutions of '98 touching States Rights, which were closely followed by the Virginia Resolutions of 1799 in the same vein by Madison, also an out-and-out Protectionist. It was mainly in condemnation of the Alien and Sedition Laws, then so unpopular everywhere, that these resolutions were professedly fulminated, but they gave to the agitating Free Traders a States-Rights-Secession-weapon of which they quickly availed themselves.
Their drift may be gathered from the first of the Kentucky Resolutions of '98, which was in these words: "Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government, but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes—delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and as an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party; that the Government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress."
The Resolutions, after enumerating the Alien and Sedition and certain other laws as in point, conclude by calling upon the other States to join Kentucky in her opposition to such Federal usurpations of power as thus embodied, and express confidence: "That they will concur with this Commonwealth in considering the said Acts as so palpably against the Constitution as to amount to an undisguised declaration that that compact is not meant to be the measure of the powers of the General Government, but that it will proceed in the exercise over these States, of all powers whatsoever; that they will view this as seizing the rights of the States, and consolidating them in the hands of the General Government, with the power assumed to bind the States (not merely as to the cases made federal (casus foederis) but) in all cases whatsoever, by laws made, not with their consent, but by others against their consent; that this would be to surrender the form of government we have chosen, and live under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority; and that the co-States, returning to their natural rights in cases not made federal, will concur in declaring these Acts void and of no force, and will each take measures of its own in providing that neither these Acts, nor any others of the General Government, not plainly and intentionally authorized by the Constitution, shall be exercised within their respective territories."
The doctrine of States Rights as formulated in these Resolutions, including the assumed right of a State to nullify laws of the General Government, naturally led up, as we shall see, not only to threats of disunion, but ultimately to a dreadful sectional War waged in the effort to secure it. That Jefferson, when he penned them, foresaw the terrible results to flow from these specious and pernicious doctrines, is not to be supposed for an instant; but that his conscience troubled him may be fairly inferred from the fact that he withheld from the World for twenty years afterward the knowledge that he was their author. It is probable that in this case, as in others, he was a victim of that casuistry which teaches that "the end justifies the means;" that he hoped and believed that the assertion of these baleful doctrines would act solely as a check upon any tendency to further centralization of power in the General Government and insure that strict construction of the Constitution.
Though afterward violated by himself at the same time that he for the moment threw aside his scruples touching African slavery, when he added to our domain the great French Slave Colony of Louisiana—was none the less the great aim of his commanding intellect; and that he fortuitously believed in the "saving common sense" of his race and country as capable of correcting an existing evil when it shall have developed into ill effects.
[Mr. Jefferson takes this very ground, in almost the same words, in his letter, 1803, to Wilson C. Nichols in the Louisiana Colony purchase case, when, after proving by his own strict construction of the Constitution that there was no power in that instrument to make such purchase, and confessing the importance in that very case of setting "an example against broad construction," he concludes: "If, however, our friends shall think differently, certainly I shall acquiesce with satisfaction; confiding that the good sense of the country will correct the evil of construction when it shall produce ill ejects."]
Be that as it may, however, the fact remains that the seeds thus sown by the hands of Jefferson on the "sacred soil" of Virginia and Kentucky, were dragon's teeth, destined in after years to spring up as legions of armed men battling for the subversion of that Constitution and the destruction of that Union which he so reverenced, and which he was so largely instrumental in founding—and which even came back in his own life to plague him and Madison during his embargo, and Madison's war of 1812-15, in the utterances and attitude of some of the New England Federalists.
The few Free Traders of the South—the Giles's and John Taylor's and men of that ilk—made up for their paucity in numbers by their unscrupulous ingenuity and active zeal. They put forth the idea that the American Protective Policy was a policy of fostering combinations by Federal laws, the effect of which was to transfer a considerable portion of the profits of slave labor from the Slave States to other parts of the Union where it was massed in the hands of a few individuals, and thus created a moneyed interest which avariciously influenced the General Government to the detriment of the entire community of people, who, made restive by the exactions of this power working through the Federal Government, were as a consequence driven to consider a possible dissolution of the Union, and make "estimates of resources and means of defense." As a means also of inflaming both the poor whites and Southern slave-holders by arousing the apprehensions of the latter concerning the "peculiar institution" of Slavery, they craftily declared that "If the maxim advanced by the advocates of the protecting duty system will justify Congress in assuming, or rather in empowering a few capitalists to assume, the direction of manufacturing labor, it also invests that body with a power of legislating for the direction of every other species of labor and assigning all occupations whatsoever to the care of the intelligence of mercenary combinations"—and hence untold misery to labor.
They charged as a further means of firing the Southern heart, that this moneyed power, born of Protection, "works upon the passion of the States it has been able to delude by computations of their physical strength and their naval superiority; and by boasting of an ability to use the weakening circumstance of negro slavery to coerce the defrauded and discontented States into submission." And they declared as fundamental truths upon which they rested that "The Federal is not a National Government; it is a league between nations. By this league, a limited power only over persons and property was given to the representatives of the united nations. This power cannot be further extended, under the pretext of national good, because the league does not create a national government."
It was the passage of the Tariff of 1824 that gave these crafty Free Traders their first great success in spreading their doctrine of Free Trade by coupling it with questions of slave labor, States Rights, and nullification, as laid down in the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. These arguments created great excitement throughout the South—especially in South Carolina and Georgia—which was still further increased by the passage of the Tariff of 1828, since declared by eminent authority to have been "the highest and most protective ever adopted in this country."
[Mr. Greeley, in his "History of the American Conflict," 1864.]
Prior to the passage of this Tariff Act, excited assemblages met in some of the Southern States, and protested against it as an outrage upon their rights—arraying the South in seditious and treasonable attitude against not only the North but the Union, with threats of Secession. At one of these meetings in South Carolina, in 1827, one of their leaders—[Dr. Thomas Cooper, President of South Carolina College.]—declared that "a drilled and managed majority" in the House of Representatives had determined "at all hazards to support the claims of the Northern manufacturers, and to offer up the planting interest on the altar of monopoly." He denounced the American system of Protection exemplified in that Tariff measure as "a system by which the earnings of the South are to be transferred to the North—by which the many are to be sacrificed to the few—under which powers are usurped that were never conceded—by which inequality of rights, inequality of burthens, inequality of protection, unequal laws, and unequal taxes are to be enacted and rendered permanent—that the planter and the farmer under this system are to be considered as inferior beings to the spinner, the bleacher, and the dyer—that we of the South hold our plantations under this system, as the serfs and operatives of the North, subject to the orders and laboring for the benefit of the master-minds of Massachusetts, the lords of the spinning jenny and peers of the power-loom, who have a right to tax our earnings for their emolument, and to burthen our poverty and to swell their riches;" and after characterizing Protection as "a system of fraud, robbery and usurpation," he continued "I have said that we shall ere long be compelled to calculate the value of our Union; and to enquire of what use to us is this most unequal alliance, by which the South has always been the loser and the North always the gainer. Is it worth our while to continue this union of States, where the North demands to be our masters and we are required to be their tributaries? who with the most insulting mockery call the yoke they put upon our necks the 'American system!' The question, however, is fast approaching the alternative of submission or separation."
Only a few days after this inflammatory speech at Columbus, S. C., inciting South Carolinians to resist the pending Protective Tariff even to the lengths of Secession, during a grand banquet at Richmond, Va., William B. Giles—another Free Trade leader—proposed, and those present drank a toast to the "Tariff Schemer" in which was embodied a declaration that "The Southerners will not long pay tribute." Despite these turbulent and treasonable mutterings, however, the "Jacksonian Congress" passed the Act—a majority of members from the Cotton and New England States voting against, while the vote of the Middle and Western Free States was almost solidly for, it.
At a meeting held soon after the enactment of the Tariff of 1828, at Walterborough Court House, S. C., an address was adopted and issued which, after reciting the steps that had been taken by South Carolina during the previous year to oppose it, by memorials and otherwise, and stating that, despite their "remonstrances and implorations," a Tariff Bill had passed, not indeed, such as they apprehended, but "ten-fold worse in all its oppressive features," proceeded thus:
"From the rapid step of usurpation, whether we now act or not, the day of open opposition to the pretended powers of the Constitution cannot be far off, and it is that it may not go down in blood that we now call upon you to resist. We feel ourselves standing underneath its mighty protection, and declaring forth its free and recorded spirit, when we say we must resist. By all the great principles of liberty—by the glorious achievements of our fathers in defending them—by their noble blood poured forth like water in maintaining them—by their lives in suffering, and their death in honor and in glory;—our countrymen! we must resist. Not secretly, as timid thieves or skulking smugglers—not in companies and associations, like money chafferers or stock jobbers—not separately and individually, as if this was ours and not our country's cause—but openly, fairly, fearlessly, and unitedly, as becomes a free, sovereign and independent people. Does timidity ask WHEN? We answer NOW!"
These inflammatory utterances, in South Carolina especially, stirred the Southern heart more or less throughout the whole cotton belt; and the pernicious principles which they embodied found ardent advocates even in the Halls of Congress. In the Senate, Mr. Hayne, of South Carolina, was their chief and most vehement spokesman, and in 1830 occurred that memorable debate between him and Daniel Webster, which forever put an end to all reasonable justification of the doctrine of Nullification, and which furnished the ground upon which President Jackson afterward stood in denouncing and crushing it out with the strong arm of the Government.
In that great debate Mr. Hayne's propositions were that the Constitution is a "compact between the States," that "in case of a plain, palpable violation of the Constitution by the General Government, a State may interpose; and that this interposition is constitutional"—a proposition with which Mr. Webster took direct issue, in these words: "I say, the right of a State to annul a law of Congress cannot be maintained, but on the ground of the inalienable right of man to resist oppression; that is to say, upon the ground of revolution. I admit that there is an ultimate violent remedy, above the Constitution and in defiance of the Constitution, which may be resorted to when a revolution is to be justified. But I do not admit that, under the Constitution, and in conformity with it, there is any mode in which a State Government, as a member of the Union, can interfere and stop the progress of the general movement by force of her own laws under any circumstances whatever." Mr. Webster insisted that "one of two things is true: either the laws of the Union are beyond the discretion and beyond the control of the States, or else we have no Constitution of General Government, and are thrust back again to the days of the Confederation;" and, in concluding his powerful argument, he declared that "even supposing the Constitution to be a compact between the States," Mr. Hayne's doctrine was "not maintainable, because, first, the General Government is not a party to the compact, but a Government established by it, and vested by it with the powers of trying and deciding doubtful questions; and secondly, because, if the Constitution be regarded as a compact, not one State only, but all the States are parties to that compact, and one can have no right to fix upon it her own peculiar construction."
While the comparatively miserable condition of the cotton-growing States of the South was attributed by most of the Southern Free Traders solely to the Protective Tariff of 1828, yet there were some Southerners willing to concede—as did Mr. Hayne, in the Senate (1832)—that there were "other causes besides the Tariff" underlying that condition, and to admit that "Slaves are too improvident, too incapable of that minute, constant, delicate attention, and that persevering industry which are essential to manufacturing establishments," the existence of which would have made those States prosperous. But such admissions were unwilling ones, and the Cotton-lords held only with the more tenacity to the view that the Tariff was the chief cause of their condition.
The Tariff Act of 1832, essentially modifying that of 1828, was passed with a view, in part, to quiet Southern clamor. But the Southern Cotton States refused to be mollified. On the contrary, the Free Traders of South Carolina proceeded to extreme measures, putting in action that which they had before but threatened. On November 19, 1832, the leading men of South Carolina met in Convention, and a few days thereafter—[November 24,1882]—unanimously passed an Ordinance of Nullification which declared the Tariff Acts of 1828 and 1832 "Unauthorized by the Constitution," and "null, void, and no law, nor binding on this State, its officers, or citizens." The people of the State were forbidden by it to pay, after the ensuing February 1st, the import-duties therein imposed. Under the provisions of the Ordinance, the State Legislature was to pass an act nullifying these Tariff laws, and any appeal to the United States Supreme Court against the validity of such nullifying act was prohibited. Furthermore, in the event of the Federal Government attempting to enforce these Tariff laws, the people of South Carolina would thenceforth consider themselves out of the Union, and will "forthwith proceed to organize a separate Government, and do all other acts and things which sovereign and independent States may of right do."
At the subsequent meeting of the Legislature, Mr. Hayne, who had been a member of the Convention, having resigned his seat in the United States Senate, was elected Governor of the State. He declared in his message that he recognized "No allegiance as paramount to that which the citizens of South Carolina owe to the State of their birth or their adoption"—that doctrine of "paramount allegiance to the State" which in after-years gave so much trouble to the Union and to Union-loving Southerners—and declared that he held himself "bound by the highest of all obligations to carry into effect, not only the Ordinance of the Convention, but every act of the Legislature, and every judgment of our own Courts, the enforcement of which may devolve upon the Executive," and "if," continued he, "the sacred soil of Carolina should be polluted by the footsteps of an invader, or be stained with the blood of her citizens, shed in her defense, I trust in Almighty God * * * even should she stand alone in this great struggle for constitutional liberty, encompassed by her enemies, that there will not be found, in the wide limits of the State, one recreant son who will not fly to the rescue, and be ready to lay down his life in her defense." In support of the contemplated treason, he even went to the length of calling for an enrolling of volunteer forces and of holding them ready for service.
But while South Carolina stood in this treasonable and defiant attitude, arming for war against the Union, there happened to be in the Presidential chair one of her own sons—General Jackson. Foreseeing what was coming, he had, prior to the meeting of the Convention that framed the Nullification Ordinance, ordered General Scott to Charleston to look after "the safety of the ports of the United States" thereabouts, and had sent to the Collector of that port precise instructions as to his duty to resist in all ways any and all attempts made under such Ordinance to defeat the operation of the Tariff laws aforesaid. Having thus quietly prepared the arm of the General Government for the exercise of its power, he issued in December a Proclamation declaring his unalterable resolution to treat Nullification as Treason—and to crush it.
In that famous document President Jackson said of Nullification: "If this doctrine had been established at an earlier day, the Union would have been dissolved in its infancy. The Excise law in Pennsylvania, the Embargo and Non-intercourse law in the Eastern States, the Carriage-tax in Virginia, were all deemed unconstitutional, and were more unequal in their operation than any of the laws now complained of; but fortunately, none of those States discovered that they had the right now claimed by South Carolina. * * * The discovery of this important feature in our Constitution was reserved for the present day. To the statesmen of South Carolina belongs the invention, and upon the citizens of that State will unfortunately fall the evils of reducing it to practice. * * * I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, 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. * * * To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union, is to say that the United States are not a Nation, because it would be a solecism to contend that any part of a Nation might dissolve its connection with the other parts, to their injury or ruin, without committing any, offense."
Farther on, in his moving appeal to the South Carolinians, he bids them beware of their leaders: "Their object is disunion; be not deceived by names. Disunion, by armed force, is Treason." And then, reminding them of the deeds of their fathers in the Revolution, he proceeds: "I adjure you, as you honor their memory, as you love the cause of freedom to which they dedicated their lives, as you prize the peace of your country, the lives of its best citizens, and your own fair fame, to retrace your steps. Snatch from the archives of your State the disorganizing edict of its Convention—bid its members to reassemble and promulgate the decided expression of your will to remain in the path which alone can conduct you to safety, prosperity, and honor—tell them that, compared to disunion, all other evils are light, because that brings with it an accumulation of all—declare that you will never take the field unless the Star-spangled banner of your country shall float over you—that you will not be stigmatized when dead, and dishonored and scorned while you live, as the authors of the first attack on the Constitution of your country! Its destroyers you cannot be."
After asserting his firm "determination to execute the laws—to preserve the Union by all constitutional means"—he concludes with the prayer, "May the great Ruler of Nations grant, that the signal blessings with which He has favored, ours may not, by the madness of party, or personal ambition be disregarded and lost; and may His wise providence bring those who have produced this crisis to see the folly before they feel the misery, of civil strife; and inspire a returning veneration for that Union, which, if we may dare to penetrate His designs, He has chosen as the only means of attaining the high destinies to which we may reasonably aspire."
The firm attitude of General Jackson, together with the wise precautionary measures he had already taken, and the practical unanimity with which his declaration to crush out the Treason was hailed in most of the Southern as well as the Northern States, almost at once broke the back of Nullification.
[In this connection the following letter, written at that time by the great Chief Justice Marshall, to a cousin of his, on the subject of State Sovereignty, is of interest, as showing how clearly his penetrating intellect perceived the dangers to the Union hidden in the plausible doctrine of State Rights:
RICHMOND, May 7, 1833.
"MY DEAR SIR:
"I am much indebted to you for your pamphlet on Federal Relations, which I have read with much satisfaction. No subject, as it seems to me, is more misunderstood or more perverted. You have brought into view numerous important historical facts which, in my judgment, remove the foundation on which the Nullifiers and Seceders have erected that superstructure which overshadows our Union. You have, I think, shown satisfactorily that we never have been perfectly distinct, independent societies, sovereign in the sense in which the Nullifiers use the term. When colonies we certainly were not. We were parts of the British empire, and although not directly connected with each other so far as respected government, we were connected in many respects, and were united to the same stock. The steps we took to effect separation were, as you have fully shown, not only revolutionary in their nature, but they were taken conjointly. Then, as now, we acted in many respects as one people. The representatives of each colony acted for all. Their resolutions proceeded from a common source, and operated on the whole mass. The army was a continental army commanded by a continental general, and supported from a continental treasury. The Declaration of Independence was made by a common government, and was made for all the States.
"Everything has been mixed. Treaties made by Congress have been considered as binding all the States. Some powers have been exercised by Congress, some by the States separately. The lines were not strictly drawn. The inability of Congress to carry its legitimate powers into execution has gradually annulled those powers practically, but they always existed in theory. Independence was declared `in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies.' In fact we have always been united in some respects, separate in others. We have acted as one people for some purposes, as distinct societies for others. I think you have shown this clearly, and in so doing have demonstrated the fallacy of the principle on which either nullification or the right of peaceful, constitutional secession is asserted.
"The time is arrived when these truths must be more generally spoken, or our Union is at an end. The idea of complete sovereignty of the State converts our government into a league, and, if carried into practice, dissolves the Union.
"I am, dear sir,
"Yours affectionately,
"J. MARSHALL.
"HUMPHREY MARSHALL, ESQ.,
"FRANKFORT, KY."]
The Nullifiers hailed with pretended satisfaction the report from the House Committee on Ways and Means of a Bill making great reductions and equalizations of Tariff duties, as a measure complying with their demands, and postponed the execution of the Ordinance of Nullification until the adjournment of Congress; and almost immediately afterward Mr. Clay's Compromise Tariff Act of 1833 "whereby one tenth of the excess over twenty per cent. of each and every existing impost was to be taken off at the close of that year; another tenth two years thereafter; so proceeding until the 30th of June, 1842, when all duties should be reduced to a maximum of twenty per cent."—[Says Mr. Greeley, in his History aforesaid.]—agreed to by Calhoun and other Nullifiers, was passed, became a law without the signature of President Jackson, and South Carolina once more became to all appearances a contented, law-abiding State of the Union.
But after-events proved conclusively that the enactment of this Compromise Tariff was a terrible blunder, if not a crime. Jackson had fully intended to hang Calhoun and his nullifying coadjutors if they persisted in their Treason. He knew that they had only seized upon the Tariff laws as a pretext with which to justify Disunion, and prophesied that "the next will be the Slavery or Negro question." Jackson's forecast was correct. Free Trade, Slavery and Secession were from that time forward sworn allies; and the ruin wrought to our industries by the disasters of 1840, plainly traceable to that Compromise Tariff measure of 1833, was only to be supplemented by much greater ruin and disasters caused by the Free Trade Tariff of 1846—and to be followed by the armed Rebellion of the Free Trade and Pro-Slavery States of the South in 1861, in a mad attempt to destroy the Union.
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