NULLIFICATION

NULLIFICATION, the theory which holds that a state can suspend, within its boundaries, a federal law, was a deeply held conviction for many "states' rights" advocates in the nineteenth century, and one of the factors that led to the Civil War (1861–1865). Nullification has its roots in the Enlightenment era of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Political thinkers, such as John Locke, questioned the validity of "divine-right monarchies," and suggested that people had the right to over-turn laws, or entire governments, that did not benefit the governed.

The American Revolution (1775–1783), in which Americans declared themselves independent of Great Britain, was a practical extension of Enlightenment political thought. So was the first government of the United States—the Articles of Confederation—which had no strong central government and reserved most major statutory power for the individual states.

However, the Articles were too weak to function adequately, and in 1787 national leaders drafted the Constitution, which created a strong federal government but reserved many rights to the states. Almost immediately, Antifederalists and later Democrat-Republicans charged that the federal government had amassed too much power.

President John Adams, a Federalist, angered Democrat-Republicans when he sought broad protectionist powers with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. In the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, both Democrat-Republicans, said that the Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional and that states should nullify them. They reasoned that states had given power to the Constitution by approving it in the ratification process, and they could take that power away if it became abusive. While no state nullified the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson and Madison had sanctioned the idea.

In 1828, nullification nearly split the nation. To help domestic manufactures, Congress enacted a high tariff on imported goods. Southerners, afraid that European states would retaliate with high tariffs on cotton and other southern exports, decried the act as the "Tariff of Abominations" and called for its repeal. Vice President John C. Calhoun, a South Carolinian, penned his "South Carolina Exposition and Protest," in which he invoked the theory of nullification to deal with the tariff.

When Tennessean Andrew Jackson was elected President in 1828, Southerners expected him to back a reduced tariff. Instead, Congress enacted an even higher tariff in 1832. Enraged, Calhoun, now a South Carolina senator more stridently called for nullification.

Spurred by Calhoun's rhetoric, the South Carolina legislature passed an Ordinance of Nullification, making the federal tariff null and void and making it a state offense to collect the tariff after 1 February 1833. Jackson surprised Southerners when he backed congressional passage of a "Force Bill" that authorized federal troops to occupy South Carolina and collect the tariff. In the meantime, Congress also passed a "compromise," or reduced tariff. Pleased with the compromise but shaken by Jack-son's threat of force, the South Carolina legislature reconvened in March 1833 and rescinded the Ordinance of Nullification. But to avoid looking cowed by the U.S. Congress, legislators "nullified" the federal Force Bill before they adjourned.

Northern states also dabbled with nullification. In 1814, old line Federalists in New England, angry over Democrat-Republican policies that caused the War of 1812 (1812–1815), sought to nullify federal mandates. And in 1850, some Northern states nullified new fugitive slave laws, part of the Compromise of 1850, that mandated Northern authorities return escaped slaves to the South. Traditionally, though, nullification and states' rights doctrines were the hallmarks of the antebellum South.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brinkley, Alan et al. American History: A Survey. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.

R. StevenJones

See alsoAlien and Sedition Laws .

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

nullification in U.S. history, a doctrine expounded by the advocates of extreme states' rights . It held that states have the right to declare null and void any federal law that they deem unconstitutional. The doctrine was based on the theory that the Union is a voluntary compact of states and that the federal government has no right to exercise powers not specifically assigned to it by the U.S. Constitution. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions declared (1799) nullification to be the rightful remedy by the states for all unauthorized acts done under the pretext of the Constitution. A closely reasoned reinforcement to the doctrine of nullification was set forth—in response to the tariff of 1828, which favored Northern interests at the expense of the South—by John C. Calhoun in his South Carolina Exposition (1828). The strong pro-Union stand of President Jackson brought forth further remonstrances from Southern leaders. After enactment of the tariff act of 1832 South Carolina called a state convention, which passed (1832) the ordinance of nullification. This ordinance declared the tariff laws null and void, and a series of enactments in South Carolina put the state in a position to resist by force any attempt of the federal government to carry the tariff act into operation. President Jackson in reply dramatically issued a strong proclamation against the nullifiers, and a force bill was introduced into the U.S. Senate to give the President authority to use the armed forces if necessary to execute the laws. Jackson, however, felt that the South had a real grievance and, behind his show of force, encouraged friends of compromise, led by Henry Clay, to prepare a bill that the South would accept. This compromise tariff was rushed through Congress, and after its passage (1833) the South Carolina state convention reassembled and formally rescinded the ordinance nullifying the tariff acts. To preserve its prerogative it adopted a new ordinance nullifying the force bill. But the issue was not pressed further until the election of Abraham Lincoln, when the doctrine of secession was brought to the foreground.

Bibliography: See C. S. Boucher, The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina (1916, repr. 1968); C. M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun: Nullifier, 1829–1839 (1949); W. W. Freehling, ed., The Nullification Era (1967); M. D. Peterson, Olive Branch and Sword: The Compromise of 1833 (1982).

nullification A US doctrine holding that a state had the right to nullify a federal law within its own territory. The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798–99 asserted the right of each state to judge whether acts of the federal government were constitutional. The nullification theory was fully developed in South Carolina, especially by John Calhoun, in response to the high protective tariffs of 1828 and 1832. South Carolina's Ordinance of Nullification in 1833 prohibited the collection of tariff duties in the state, and asserted that the use of force by the federal government would justify secession. Although this ordinance was repealed after the passing of new federal legislation in the same year, the sentiments behind nullification remained latent in Southern politics, and were to emerge again in the secession crisis prior to the AMERICAN CIVIL WAR.

nullification In US history, the idea that a state may choose not to enforce a law passed by the federal government. First advanced in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions (1798), it influenced Southern thinking on states' rights before the Civil War. It was tested in 1832, when the South Carolina legislature nullified the Tariff Law of 1828, declaring it unconstitutional. The crisis was defused when South Carolina accepted a compromise Tariff Act (1833).