Nullification

Nullification. The origins of the doctrine of nullification lie in the 1790s, when strict construction of the Constitution, states' rights, and hostility to national “consolidation” became the principles of the new Jeffersonian Republican party.When a Congress dominated by the Federalist party passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 to stifle domestic dissent in anticipation of war with France, Republican leader Thomas Jefferson, in his draft of the Kentucky Resolutions, declared “nullification” the “natural right” of a state in response to a federal act deemed unconstitutional. James Madison's complementary Virginia Resolutions asserted that states “have the right and are in duty bound to interpose for arresting the evil” of unconstitutional federal legislation. Exactly how a state could exercise the right of nullification remained unclear.

In response to high import duties adopted by Congress in 1828 and 1832, many citizens of South Carolina ardently embraced ideas of nullification and interposition. A high protective tariff, as distinct from low import duties levied to raise revenue, they had come to believe, represented an unconstitutional tax designed to enrich the industrializing Northeast at the expense of the agricultural South. Moreover, South Carolina's leaders, governing the only state with a population more than half slave, feared that the enhanced federal authority encouraged by the protective tariff could eventually be turned against the institution of slavery. John C. Calhoun, the foremost exponent of nullification theory, repeatedly invoked the language and principles of 1798. As his “Fort Hill Address” of 1831 insisted, “This right of interposition, thus solemnly asserted by the State of Virginia, be called what it may—State‐right, veto, nullification, or by any other name—I conceive to be the fundamental principle of our system.” A state's right to declare null and void within its borders a federal branch of the solemn constitutional compact among sovereign and independent states, Calhoun concluded, would serve to prevent the creation of a “consolidated” government dictating the agenda of a numerical majority. Once a state convention had vetoed a federal law, the contested legislation could be legitimated only through a constitutional amendment ratified by conventions in the requisite three‐quarters of the states. When a South Carolina convention voted in 1832 to nullify the contested tariffs, and no other state followed suit, the possibility that President Andrew Jackson, an ardent nationalist, might use military means to enforce federal authority was averted only by a congressional compromise in 1833 that promised lower import duties. Calhoun always portrayed nullification as a process designed to preserve the union, but he himself acknowledged that secession could follow interposition if repeated abuses of the Constitution went uncorrected.

Although the outcome of the Civil War seemed to negate the principle of state sovereignty that underpinned both secession and nullification, in 1956 and 1957 eight southern states, led by Virginia, exhumed the doctrine of interposition against court‐ordered school desegregation. The Supreme Court had the final say, upholding a lower court ruling in United States v. Louisiana (1960) “that interposition is not a constitutional doctrine. If taken seriously, it is illegal defiance of constitutional authority.”
See also Antebellum Era; Early Republic, Era of the; Segregation, Racial; States' Rights Party; Tariffs.

Bibliography

William W. Freehling , Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836, 1966.
Numan V. Bartley , The New South, 1945–1980: The Story of the South's Modernization, 1995.

Shearer Davis Bowman