The Tariff Crisis

The crisis over the Tariff of 1828 continued into the 1830s and highlighted one of the currents of democracy in the Age of Jackson: namely, that many southerners believed a democratic majority could be harmful to their interests. These southerners saw themselves as an embattled minority and claimed the right of states to nullify federal laws that appeared to threaten state sovereignty. The relationship between the north and south was tenuous when Andrew Jackson came to office in 1828. Ever since the Constitutional Convention of 1787, northerners and southerners had fought over slavery and tariffs. Each region wanted to make sure their economies were protected in the new Union. Several times states threatened to leave the Constitutional Convention
Congress passed a high protective tariff on imported, primarily manufactured goods. The south, being predominantly agricultural and reliant on the north and foreign countries for manufactured goods, saw this tariff as an affront to their economy (Wilson). Many southerners blamed their economic problems squarely on the tariff for raising the prices they had to pay for imported goods while their own income shrank. Vice President John C. Calhoun called it a “tariff of abominations” that was meant to favor the north and this tariff led him to pen his “South Carolina Exposition and Protest,” in which he argued that if a national majority acted against the the interest of a regional minority, then individual states could void—or nullify— federal law (Corbett). The theory of nullification, or the voiding of unwelcome federal laws, provided wealthy slaveholders, who were a minority in the United States, with an argument for resisting the national government if it acted contrary to their
It also eventually became a factor in causing the southern states to nullify the Union itself, bringing about their secession and the creation of the Confederacy. Although the Compromise Tariff of 1833 was passed, which mollified the South Carolina legislature and caused them to withdraw the Ordinance of Nullification, unrest in the southern states continued, eventually leading to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. It also had a tremendous effect on the framers of the Confederate Constitution that they thought it was necessary to write into their Constitution a clause that forever settled the issue of protective tariffs within their new country. Unlike the Federal Constitution, which requires a supermajority of states to call for an amendment, the Confederate Constitution only requires three states to call for an amendment to be brought up before a national convention