states’-rights southerners denied the federal government’s authority to make treaties or to recognize sovereign peoples within their states. Resistance centered in Georgia, where Governor George Troup brought native lands under the state’s jurisdiction
and then turned them over to poor whites by way of lotteries, thus tying states’
rights to white hunger for Indian land. At one point, Troup sent stat surveyors
onto Creek territory before federal purchase from the Indians was complete, telling President Adams that if he resisted state authority he would be considered a “public enemy.”
The Cherokees in Georgia pressed the issue in 1827 by declaring themselves a
republic with its own constitution, government, courts, and police. The Georgia legislature promptly declared Cherokee law null and void, extended Georgia’s author-
ity into Cherokee country, and began surveying the lands for sale. Hinting at the old connection between state sovereignty and the protection of slavery, Governor
Troup warned that the federal “jurisdiction claimed over one portion of our popu-
lation may very soon be asserted over another.” Alabama and Mississippi quickly
followed Georgia’s lead by extending state authority over Indian lands and denying federal jurisdiction.
Indian Removal
President Jackson agreed that the federal government lacked
the authority to recognize native sovereignty within a state
and declared that he could not protect the Cherokees and the other Civilized Tribes from state governments. Instead, he offered to remove them to federal land west of the Mississippi, where they would be under the authority of the benevolent federal government. Congress made that offer official in the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
The Cherokees, with the help of New England missionaries, had taken their
claims of sovereignty to court in the late 1820s. In 1830, John Marshall’s Supreme Court ruled in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia that the Cherokees could not sue
Georgia because they were not a sovereign people but “domestic dependent
nations”—dependents of the federal government, and not of the state of Georgia,
although somehow “nations” as well. The Court’s decision in Worcester v. Georgia
(1832) declared that Georgia’s extension of state law over Cherokee land was
unconstitutional. President Jackson ignored the decision, however, reportedly telling a congressman, “John Marshall has made his decision: now let him enforce it! “In
the end, Jackson sat back as the southwestern states encroached on the Civilized
Tribes. In 1838, his successor, Martin Van Buren, sent the army to march the
18,000 remaining Cherokee to Oklahoma. Four thousand of them died along this
Trail of Tears of exposure, disease, starvation, and white depredation.
Indian removal had profound political consequences. It violated Supreme Court
decisions and thus strengthened Jackson’s reputation as an enemy of the rule of law and a friend of local, “democratic” solutions. At the same time, it reaffirmed the link between racism and white democracy in the South and announced Jackson’s
commitment to state sovereignty and limited federal authority.
Southerners
In 1828 a Democratic Congress passed a tariff, hoping to
and the Tariff
win votes for Jackson in the upcoming presidential election.
Assured of support in the South, they fished for votes in the
Jacksonian Democracy and the South
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mid-Atlantic states and the Northwest by protecting raw wool, flax, molasses,
hemp, and distilled spirits. The result was a patchwork tariff that pleased northern and western farmers but that worried the South and violated Jackson’s own ideas
of what a “judicious” tariff should be. Protective tariffs hurt the South by diminishing exports of cotton and other staples and by raising the price of manufactured goods. More ominous, they demonstrated the power of other sections to write laws
that helped them and hurt the outnumbered South. Calling the new bill a “Tariff of Abominations,” the legislature of one southern state after another denounced it as (this was Virginia’s formulation) “unconstitutional, unwise, unjust, unequal, and oppressive.”
South Carolina, guided by Vice President Calhoun, led the opposition to the
Tariff of 1828. During the War of 1812 and the ensuing Era of Good Feelings,
Calhoun’s South Carolina—confident of its future and deeply engaged in inter-
national markets for its rice and cotton—had favored the economic nationalism
of the American System. Then the Missouri debates and the Denmark Vesey
slave conspiracy of 1822 (see Chapter 9) sent South Carolinians looking for
ways to safeguard slavery. Their fears grew more intense when federal courts
shot down a state law forbidding black merchant seamen from moving about
freely while their ships were docked at Charleston. Carolinians were disturbed
too by persistent talk of gradual emancipation—at a time when their own com-
mitment to slavery was growing stronger. Finally, southerners noted that in the
congressional logrolling that made the Tariff of 1828, many western representa-
tives had abandoned their old Jeffersonian alliance with the South to trade
favors with the Northeast.
With the growth in the Northeast of urban markets for western produce,
the American System’s promise of interdependence among regions was begin-
ning to work, but in ways that united the Northwest and Northeast against the
export-oriented South. The Tariff of 1828 was the last straw: It benefited the
city and commercial food producers at the expense of the plantation, and it
demonstrated that the South could do nothing to block the passage of such
laws.
Nullification
As early as 1827, Calhoun concluded that southern states
could protect themselves from national majorities only if
they possessed the power to veto federal legislation within their boundaries.
In 1828, in his anonymously published essay Exposition and Protest, he argued
that the Constitution was a contract between sovereign states and that the states (not the federal courts) could decide the constitutionality of federal laws. A state convention (like the conventions that had ratified the Constitution) could nullify any federal law within state borders. “Constitutional government and the government of a majority,” Calhoun argued, “are utterly incompatible.” Exposition and
Protest echoed the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves of 1798 and 1799 and antici-
pated the secessionist arguments of 1861: The Union was a voluntary compact
between sovereign states, states were the ultimate judges of the validity of federal law, and states could break the compact if they wished.
Nullification was extreme, and Calhoun and his friends tried to avoid using it.
They knew that President Jackson was a states’-rights slaveholder who disliked the 396