Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (icecream ebook reader txt) 📗

Andrew Jackson’s vice president, Calhoun fought the tariff through his political lieutenants in Congress, insisting that South Carolina had the authority to nullify any federal law it deemed unsatisfactory (including tariffs) unless three-quarters of the other states had the opportunity to review the law and approve it. Early in 1830, Robert Hayne of South Carolina, acting as Calhoun’s mouthpiece, delivered a long and powerful polemic on the floor of the Senate, defending the state sovereignty of South Carolina against a “consolidated” Union. Hayne was argued down by Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster, who proclaimed (in words that subsequent generations of American schoolchildren were required to memorize) that the federal government was “the people’s constitution; the people’s government” and the power of the Union should not be splintered by one state under the specious plea of liberty. “Liberty and Union,” Webster concluded, must be “now and forever, one and inseparable.”30

Undeterred by Webster’s eloquence, Calhoun hoped to play on the anti-tariff sympathies of President Jackson, calculating that Jackson would not use force to impose a tariff he did not welcome, and certainly not in the state in which he had been born. Jackson was invited by Calhoun and his friends to a Jefferson’s birthday dinner on April 13, 1830, in the hope that Calhoun might prod an anti-tariff statement out of Jackson. After dinner, the toasts went round the table, beginning with Calhoun and building one by one to a carefully orchestrated anthem of praise for state sovereignty. But when Jackson rose to present his toast, he stared point-blank at Calhoun and proposed, “Our Federal Union: it must be preserved!” then held his glass aloft as a sign that the toast was to be drunk standing. Calhoun and the others struggled weakly to their feet, Calhoun spilling a trickle of wine as he trembled in shock. “The Union,” Calhoun gasped in response, “next to our liberty the most dear.” 31

Calhoun had greatly misjudged Jackson’s loyalty to the Union. Realizing that he had lost all hope of influencing Jackson, he resigned his vice presidency and returned to South Carolina. On November 24, 1832, the Calhounites led a specially called convention in South Carolina to nullify the collection of the tariff within South Carolina, threatening secession from the Union if the federal government interfered. Jackson replied on December 10, 1832, with a proclamation announcing that nullification was “incompatible with the existence of the Union. … The Constitution forms a government, not a league.” On that note, nullification was dealt a staggering blow, and Jackson went on to take a further swipe at secession by adding, “To say that any state may at pleasure secede from the Union is to say that the United States is not a nation.”

Jackson had no more love than Calhoun for banks, tariffs, and federally funded “improvements” projects, but he was also the president of the United States, and he was not used to challenges from what he called a “coward, hypocrite, conspirator, traitor and fool” such as Calhoun. Jackson obtained from Congress a Force Bill, which authorized him to use the army and navy to suppress South Carolina resistance. Before force became necessary, however, the more conciliatory Henry Clay had produced a compromise measure that provided for the graduated reduction of the tariff. On March 15, 1833, Calhoun and the South Carolinians rescinded their nullification ordinance. 32

They did not, however, renounce the principle of secession. That meant that whatever else Americans might hold in common, their political structure—a Union of sometimes grudging and suspicious states—remained vulnerable in any crisis in which any state with a grievance might try to end its cooperation with the others and stalk out of the Union. “Altho I am for the Union & no Nullifier,” wrote one uneasy Virginian in January 1833, “yet my southern feelings & prejudice are so strong, that I know I should hate to see a Southern man vanquished by a northern one. …”33 Jackson might have prevented disunion over the tariff, and Clay might have demonstrated how compromise was the best method for disarming confrontation, but as far as Calhoun was concerned, that did not mean that the remedy of secession would not be available for future use if a more demanding set of circumstances called for it. And, as many Americans could already see, such a set of circumstances was very likely to appear in the form of the issue of slavery, as it was practiced in the Southern states. No one less than Andrew Jackson had already glumly predicted, after the nullification crisis had passed, that “the nullifiers in the South intend to blow up a storm on the slave question. …” Nullification might be defeated, he told his aide John Coffee, but “they will try to arouse the Southern people on this false tale. This ought to be met, for be assured these men will do any act to destroy the union, & form a southern Confederacy, bounded north, by the Potomac river.” 34

But even with all the forces that appeared to be pulling Americans apart—from the fissiparous nature of the federal Union to the clashing economic visions of Whig and Democrat—none of them had the weight to outbalance the forces making the American Union stronger with every decade, nor did they have the power by themselves to fracture the Union. That sort of disruption would require the introduction of a catalyst, which would act on all the divisions of Americans to worsen them.

That catalyst would be slavery.

SOCIOLOGY FOR THE SOUTH

Jefferson Davis did not like Yankees.

Born in Kentucky and raised in Mississippi, Davis found it something of a novelty to meet Northerners when he arrived at the United States Military Academy at West Point as a cadet in 1824. But it was not a novelty he enjoyed. He found Yankees tight-fisted, chilly, and unsociable. “The Yankee part of the corps [of cadets]… are not… such associates as I would at present select.” Northerners were dedicated to making money, pinching pennies, and building factories; they were all