Nullification

• Author: William M. Wiecek
• Pages: 1832-1833

Page 1832

THOMAS JEFFERSON first suggested the doctrine of nullification in the second Kentucky Resolutions (1799), where he asserted that the sovereign states are the only proper judges of whether the federal government has violated the Constitution and "that a nullification ? [by] those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts?isthe rightful remedy." (See VIRGINIA AND KENTUCKY RESOLUTIONS.) In the 1820s, South Carolinians Robert J. Turnbull and Whitemarsh Seabrook laid the doctrinal foundations of an expanded nullification argument by denouncing the expansion of federal authority. In Consolidation (1824), THOMAS COOPER argued that the states remained independent sovereigns, having given only limited and express powers to Congress.

JOHN C. CALHOUN systematized and refined the Carolinians' constitutional arguments. He maintained that the people of the separate states never relinquished their SOVEREIGNTY, and that sovereignty was indivisible. In ratifying the Constitution, the states created a government of limited, specified, and delegated authority. Calhoun used the legal doctrine of agency to explain the federal relationship: "The States ? formed the compact, acting as sovereign and independent communities. The General Government is but [their] creature ? a government emanating from a compact between sovereigns ? of the character of a joint commission? having, beyond its proper sphere, no more power than if it did not exist." ("Address on the Relation of the States and the Federal Government," 1831.) When the federal government (the agent) exceeded its authority, the states (the principals), in the exercise of their sovereign power, could "interpose" their authority by nullifying the federal statute or action, which would be void in the nullifying states. If three-fourths of the other

Page 1833

states adopted a constitutional amendment empowering the federal government to perform the nullified act, the state then had the choice of acquiescing or of withdrawing from the compact (the federal Constitution) by SECESSION. But Calhoun emphasized that nullification was a peaceable alternative, not a preliminary step, to secession.

Calhoun's theory found application in a dispute, ostensibly over protective tariffs, that produced the Nullification Crisis of 1832. For a decade, Carolinians had declared that their objections to specific federal programs such as INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS or the national bank were merely specific...