Nullification Controversy Research Articles

The Papers of Andrew Jackson. Volume 10: 1832 ed. by Daniel Feller, Thomas Coens, and Laura-Eve Moss

Reviewed by: The Papers of Andrew Jackson. Volume 10: 1832 ed. by Daniel Feller, Thomas Coens, and Laura-Eve Moss Kenneth R. Stevens The Papers of Andrew Jackson. Volume 10: 1832. Edited by Daniel Feller, Thomas Coens, and Laura-Eve Moss. ( Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2016. Pp. xxxvi, 914. $92.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-267-6.) The Papers of Andrew Jackson is the gold standard of historical documentary editing. Under the direction of Sam B. Smith, Harold D. Moser, and [End Page 958] now Daniel Feller, the project has produced ten volumes in a projected series of seventeen. The work under review is the fourth volume of Andrew Jackson's presidential years, with each year published in a separate volume. It includes all known correspondence to and from Jackson as well as state papers, various drafts and memorandums, and financial and legal documents from the year 1832. The papers are arranged chronologically, and the informative headnotes that preface many of the documents provide context. Each document is annotated to include provenance, persons named, and appropriate bibliographical and archival references. The index is carefully constructed and thorough. In addition to the published letters and documents, the volume includes in the front matter an abbreviated chronology of the year and a comprehensive chart of official presidential papers with citations indicating where they appear in James D. Richardson's A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897 (10 vols.; Washington, D.C., 1896), the Journal of Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States of America, and the United States Congressional Serial Set, as well as the page numbers if published in Volume 10 of The Papers of Andrew Jackson. The front matter also provides a record of Jackson's connection with the Donelson family. The editors include a comprehensive calendar at the back of the volume, which lists all published and unpublished papers that year, along with their provenances and brief annotations describing their contents. Overall, an immense amount of research and effort has been concentrated in this volume. A few topics, many from previous years, occupy a considerable portion of the volume. Among those were Jackson's ongoing feud with Vice President John C. Calhoun. After Calhoun broke the tie vote in the Senate to deny Martin Van Buren's appointment as minister to Britain, the president wrote John Coffee that the vice president was "one of the most base hypocritical & unprincipled villains in the United States" (p. 37). Jackson obsessively sought evidence that Calhoun had acted against him over his 1818 Florida incursion. Eventually Calhoun resigned the vice presidency, and Van Buren assumed his place. Indian removal is another major theme. The volume includes Jackson's correspondence with tribal representatives who were either resisting or implementing relocation. The letters lay bare the callousness of the process as well as Jackson and his political allies' self-justification. This correspondence shows Jackson's involvement in working out the details of removal while insisting that his policy was "wise & humane" (p. 656). The year 1832 was crucial in other areas as well. Jackson received a bill from Congress renewing the charter of the Bank of the United States on July 4 and returned his veto on July 10. Documents in the volume on the bank controversy include several drafts of the veto message by Jackson and his assistants. Of course, many letters and documents illuminate the nullification controversy and Jackson's response to South Carolina's gambit, including multiple drafts of the president's proclamation. It is easy to oversimplify Jackson's positions on these issues, but the documents in this volume demonstrate that his positions were developed carefully over time and were not rash and impulsive. Interestingly, the papers do not include much about slavery or race. Jackson seems to have spent more time thinking about his horses than his slaves. In one interesting letter, more than a hundred citizens protested the "long standing" [End Page 959] custom of "employing free blacks as Messengers and servants in the different Offices of Government" while there were many white persons who would "gladly accept these situations" (p. 150). The letter is endorsed by Jackson: "Made known to...

Trials and Errors: Denmark Vesey and His Historians

N 1964, Richard C. Wade ignited a historiographical controversy in the pages of the Journal of Southern History and in his monograph, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 820-o-86o. Revising the standard about the plot organized by free black carpenter Vesey to destroy Charleston, South Carolina, in the summer of 1822, Wade concluded that it was probably never more than loose talk by aggrieved and embittered men rather than a full-blown effort to rebel against slavery. Not all historians accepted new interpretation. A number of students of the antebellum South and its peculiar institution, including, among others, William W. Freehling in Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, i816-i836 and in his Denmark Vesey's Antipaternalistic Reality, Eugene Genovese in Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, and Sterling Stuckey in Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America regard episode as a genuine, but unsuccessful, attempt by a group of enslaved people to gain their freedom. Michael P. Johnson, in Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (co-authored with James L. Roark), never questioned the existence of the plot that Vesey and his associates organized. The recent publication of three books on dramatic episode has not only rekindled interest in the efforts of Vesey and his associates to liberate themselves but has also inspired Johnson, who once accepted the majority opinion of Freehling et al., or as he now calls it this heroic interpretation (p. 915), to write a long and highly critical article on these works serving to reignite a debate that began more than thirty-five years ago. After many years in the interpretive wilderness, Richard Wade has now found an ally in Michael Johnson.'

States' Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776-1876

Forrest McDonald has long been recognized as one of our most respected and provocative intellectual historians. With this new book, he once again delivers an illuminating meditation on a major theme in American history and politics. Elegantly and accessibly written for a broad readership, McDonald's book provides an insightful look at states' rights-an issue that continues to stir debate nationwide. From constitutional scholars to Supreme Court justices to an electorate that's grown increasingly wary of federal power, the concept of states' rights has become a touchstone for a host of political and legal controversies. But, as McDonald shows, that concept has deep roots that need to be examined if we're to understand its implications for current and future debates. McDonald's study revolves around the concept of imperium in imperio literally within sovereignty or the division of power within a single jurisdiction. With this broad principle in hand, he traces the states' rights idea from the Declaration of Independence to the end of Reconstruction and illuminates the constitutional, political, and economic contexts in which it evolved. Although the Constitution, McDonald shows, gave the central government expansive powers, it also legitimated the doctrine of states' rights. The result was an uneasy tension and uncertainty about the nature of the central government's relationship to the states. At times the issue bubbled silently and unseen beneath the surface of public awareness, but at other times it exploded. McDonald follows this episodic rise and fall of federal-state relations from the Hamilton-Jefferson rivalry to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, New England's resistance to Jefferson's foreign policy and the War of 1812, the Nullification Controversy, Andrew Jackson's war against the Bank of the United States, and finally the vitriolic public debates that led to secession and civil war. Other scholars have touched upon these events individually, but McDonald is the first to integrate all of them from the perspective of states' rights into one synthetic and magisterial vision. The result is another brilliant study from a masterful historian writing on a subject of great import for Americans.

The Political Constitution of Federalism in Antebellum America: The Nullification Debate as an Illustration of Informal Mechanisms of Constitutional Change

The requirements of the U.S. Constitution are often assumed to be either clear or defined by the judiciary through interpretation, or both. Examination of the nullification crisis of 1833 indicates that this view of the U.S. Constitution is misleading. The nullification crisis provoked three competing visions of the appropriate understanding offederalism in the context of textual ambiguity and judicial activity. The subsequent development offederalism was determined by that political conflict and compromise. The nullification controversy provides an important example of the openness of constitutional norms, the significance of political debate in the shaping of constitutional meaning, and the complexity of antebellum political thought.

A Troublesome Legacy: James Madison and "The Principles of '98"

The passing of generation of men who founded American republic was not a tranquil one. Growing agitation over sectional issues, which had arisen periodically since before Declaration of Independence, gradually made their achievement appear increasingly unstable. In 1836, as he lay dying, James Madison, last survivor among revolutionary statesmen, was especially gloomy. He therefore offered as Advice to My Country that the Union of States be cherished and perpetuated. Let open enemy to it be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened, and disguised one as serpent creeping with deadly wiles into Paradise.1' Madison's concern for future of Union had been stirred by nullification controversy of early 1830s and growing appeal of states' rights. Harkening back to example of their fellow southerners thirty-five years before, South Carolina's Nullifiers had claimed right to negate federal statutes within their own state. The states, they insisted, remained sovereign under federal Constitution. Madison vigorously disagreed, but there is an irony in his worried response to South Carolina's argument, for Nullifiers' states' rights principles owed much to Madison's own actions and public writings four decades before.

Francis W. Pickens and the Politics of Destruction (review)

278CIVIL WAR HISTORY derstanding of the Old South's struggle toward self-identity, a tragic course in which values, both Christian and customary, no less than selfinterest , played a decisive part. B ERTRAM WYATT-B ROWN University of Florida Francis W. Pickens andthe Politics of Destruction. By John B. Edmunds, Jr. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Pp. 270. $25.00.) This carefully researched study of Francis W. Pickens fills a significant gap in the biographical literature of prominent antebellum southerners because no onehas hitherto written a full length biography of this important South Carolina leader. Other historians may have been daunted by the formidable task of finding and reading his widely scattered papers, but now, through the diligence ofJohn B. Edmunds, Jr., Pickens's political life has been pieced together into a single portrait. Pickens was a central figure in the political life of antebellum South Carolina. While he was never quite so important a figure as John C. Calhoun, he holds a solid place in the second tier of that state's powerful political leaders—alongside such men as the more thoroughly studied James Henry Hammond or Robert Barnwell Rhett. The strength of this biography of Pickens is that it carefully follows all the complicated maneuvers in the political career of a man whose life spanned the great events of antebellum South Carolina history. We learn about the man himself as well as a great deal about his political world. Pickens was often in important political positions at critical historical moments. He was in Congress for the Nullification controversy. During his early years in politics he was closely allied withJohn C. Calhoun and for a while remained a loyal supporter during the various twists and turns in Calhoun's political career. He served in the South Carolina Senate during the 1840s, but a split with Calhoun led to several unsuccessful attempts to become governor, senator and congressman. Then Pickens reemerged as a central political figure during the years just before the Civil War. By creating links to the Democratic party, he was appointed ambassador to Russia in 1858. His ultimate political triumph (and tragedy) occurred on his return to South Carolina in 1860. At the very moment of secession, he became governor of the state and retained that post during the difficult early years of the Civil War. No other American governor quite faced the kinds of issues Pickens had to handle—almost immediately as head of an independent republic on the edge of battle and then later as governor of a Confederate state at war and partially occupied by "foreign" troops. Of course, no governor of South Carolina could have been successful at such a moment in history. It is no surprise that neither his contemporaries nor his biographer re- BOOK REVIEWS279 garded him as a skillful statesman. In the end, the Civil War destroyed Pickens as it destroyed his world. He died in 1869, an outcast in a state controlled by political leaders he distrusted and feared. The great strength and weakness of this study of Pickens's life is that it is a traditional political biography of a man and his times. As with many such biographies, the central focus is on a man and his attempts to achieve and then govern in public office. The book tells us a great deal about the nature of political success and failure in nineteenth-century South Carolina. But, as with many such biographies, the focus on public office follows from a definition of politics which is narrow and leaves much unexplored. Pickens did not just "govern" in legislatures and statehouses, he also "governed" slaves on plantations. The book tells us nothing about Pickens's life on his plantation or about his relations with any slave. Pickens also "governed" in a family, but we learn very little about his family relations. Edmunds tells us that Pickens married three times, yet we learn almost nothing about his relations with women. We learn little more about Pickens's children than that they had names. The existence of an illegitimate child is mentioned only briefly, almost as an afterthought. All these omissions would be...

"Liberty and Union": An Analysis of Three Concepts Involved in the Nullification Controversy

THE PERIOD FROM 1828 TO 1833 WITNESSED A GREAT DEBATE OVER policies which freemen in Union ought to pursue. The very nature of Union and its destiny came in, as a consequence, for profound consideration. The ideas of nullification and secession served to precipitate debate and to provide much of its form. But there was far more on other side than just matter of preserving Union. Opposition to Nullifiers, it was true, reflected widespread agreement that liberty and Union were not to be so easily separated. Within this consensus among defenders of Union, however, real and significant differences did obtain. The idea of freedom could, with peculiar urgency, lend itself to many interpretations in a society still in process of being built. The nullification controversy thus involved not alone decision to save and to order existing Union; it pointed as well to kind of liberal society to be realized on yet unsettled continent.' As many contemporaries saw it, impending retirement of national debt provided a unique occasion for seminal debate. John G. Watmough of Pennsylvania told House of Representatives in January 1833 that he had long feared the gratifying for Union could not arrive without bringing with it evils and developing springs of political action which 1 The historians who find consensus in American experience run risk of blurring earnest debate about nature of freedom itself. This is especially case in regard to period before Civil War, for then Union of freemen was still in process of being determined. John Locke may have come to wilderness without a dialectical foil, as Louis Hartz has argued in The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since Revolution (New York, 1955), but wilderness remained as an unsettled possibility after he got here.

Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836

Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836

Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836. By William W. Freehling. (New York and London: Harper & Row, 1966. Pp. xiii, 395. $5.95. ) This is an important and significant work. A fresh study of the nullification crisis has long been needed; the early efforts of Boucher and Houston (now fifty and seventy years old respectively) have served the scholar long and well but their inadequacies have become increasingly apparent in the many decades since their publication. This work now fills the need, but its distinguishing characteristic goes beyond this contribution. Not only has the author employed a vast amount of material not available to the earlier writers, as well as the new insights into the pre-Civil War decades which historians have since developed, but he has also placed the nullification controversy in a new and meaningful perspective. His work is not primarily that of a revisionist; rather it breaks new ground in its analysis and interpretation as the author closely scrutinizes the developments during two crucial decades in the key state of the antebellum South. The nullification crisis, which most text writers have considered simply as one of several challenges to the leadership of Andrew Jackson and as an episode in the formulation of a Jacksonian program, takes on novel and exciting dimensions in this larger perspective. The crisis, Professor Freehling contends, was the "central occurrence in the broader transition of South Carolina from the enthusiastic nationalism of 1816 to the extreme sectionalism of 1836." In relating the story of this transition, he has discussed the political history of South Carolina, as well as the economic fortunes and misfortunes of South Carolinians, for nullification to a very large degree was an outgrowth of the state's political and economic experience. The struggles between the nullifiers and the unionists (the latter, as southern unionism generally, deserving, Freehling correctly points out, much more study than they have received) are provided extended treatment. The theoretical foundations of the actions of South Carolinians are expertly analyzed and the reactions of the state to the growing northern abolition movement, manifested in the development of an elaborate proslavery argument, are detailed. Perhaps most significant of all is the theme that runs throughout the book: that the "nullification impulse was to a crucial extent a revealing expression of South Carolina's morbid sensitivity to the beginnings of the antislavery campaign ." The central importance of nullification to the southerners' fears and anxieties concerning their "peculiar institution" is, in this reviewer's opinion, 74 a primary contribution of the study. It was more than coincidence that nullification followed closely on the heels of Garrison's publication of the Liberator and the Nat Turner revolt in Virginia. South Carolina's prominence and leadership in the antebellum South gives this study a wider relevance; although the state's situation was in many respects unique in the South, South Carolinians were nevertheless articulating fears that were felt in varying degrees throughout the section. Attitudes that evolved in the Palmetto State during these crisis years were the same that came to fruition in 1860-1861 (although the book's title, Prelude to Civil War, may be overstating the case a bit) . Lesser-known personalities in the nullification controversy are brought to light and older ones are seen in new perspective. John C. Calhoun, always regarded as the prime mover of nullification, is convincingly portrayed as devoted to both the South and the Union, trying desperately to save both. Lagging behind the fire-eaters, he was reluctant to push nullification to its logical end—secession—and during the crisis, Freehling suggests , he was "almost paralyzed by conflicting loyalties to nation and section." The author accepts, with some reservation, the view of Charles G. Sellers that southern guilt feelings about slavery constituted an important basis for southern actions in the antebellum years. In over-reacting to the growth of northern abolitionism (which at the time posed little real threat to the South) and in magnifying its real importance, the South in effect created its own crisis and inadvertently served to stimulate the antislavery movement. In all of this, nullification played a key role. This book is based on...

Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836

Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836

Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816 1836.

Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816 1836.

The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, by Chauncey S. Boucher

The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, <i>by Chauncey S. Boucher</i>

Nullification controversy in South Carolina

Nullification controversy in South Carolina. By Chauncey S. Boucher, Ph.D., assistant professor of American history, Washington university. (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1916. 399 p. $1.25 net) Get access George L. Sioussat George L. Sioussat Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 3, Issue 4, March 1917, Pages 547–549, https://doi.org/10.2307/1889160 Published: 01 March 1917

The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina

The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina

&lt;italic&gt;The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina&lt;/italic&gt;. By &lt;sc&gt;Chauncey Samuel Boucher&lt;/sc&gt;, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of American History in Washington University. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1916. Pp. xi, 399.)

&lt;italic&gt;The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina&lt;/italic&gt;. By &lt;sc&gt;Chauncey Samuel Boucher&lt;/sc&gt;, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of American History in Washington University. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1916. Pp. xi, 399.)