The Union was under siege. South Carolinian firebreathers were thundering defiance against federal law and federal authority, threatening armed resistance and touting each state’s right to nullify national law and unilaterally secede. When push came to shove, however, the national government pushed hardest. As the crisis careened toward calamity, the nullifiers encountered a buzzsaw. His name was Andrew Jackson.
Earlier this year, as a guest on the podcast “We the People,” the distinguished historian Allen Guelzo was asked about Abraham Lincoln’s views of Jackson. “I can describe Lincoln’s views of Andrew Jackson in one word,” Guelzo responded. “Bad.”
I have long resonated with this view. Jackson was, after all, the man who conceived and implemented “Indian Removal”; who defied the Supreme Court’s more humane decisions regarding Native peoples; who inflated presidential power and launched the executive branch in a dangerous, populist direction; who fought duels and killed a man at cold close range; who married a woman who was still legally married to another man; who displaced from office my beloved John Quincy Adams; who owned and traded slaves with an unrepentant chill.
And yet, in a crisis of the Union that preceded the Civil War by thirty years, Old Hickory stood firm. He stared down the proto-secessionists and kept the Union strong. In a long and checkered public career, it was Jackson’s finest hour. In a season when our national unity has frayed on many fronts — and on the 192nd anniversary of his neglected “Proclamation on Nullification” of Dec. 10, 1832 — there is much we can learn from this strong-willed past president whom I otherwise dislike.
It began, like the Civil War itself, with trouble in South Carolina. Congressional tariffs, designed to protect Northern manufacturing, redounded to the detriment of Southern agriculture. Southern firebreathers denounced the Tariff Act of 1828 as the “Tariff of Abominations.” Vice President John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s most famous son, published an anonymous tract called the “South Carolina Exposition and Protest,” in which he decried the tariff and defended the doctrine of nullification — the idea that each state had the right to declare null and void any federal law it deemed unconstitutional. When an additional Tariff Act in 1832 failed to soothe Southern concerns, South Carolina’s legislature put Calhoun’s precept into practice, adopting a Nullification Ordinance on Nov. 24, 1832, which pronounced the Tariff Acts of 1828 and 1832 unconstitutional and declared them null and void in the state of South Carolina.
The implications were momentous. If states could nullify federal laws and resist their enforcement, it was hard to see how the federal union could long endure. Many predicted schism among the states, dissolution of the Union, and a bloody civil war. President Andrew Jackson wrote to an intelligence officer that nullification “leads directly to civil war and bloodshed and deserves the execration of every friend of the country.”
Jackson found himself posted precariously on the horns of a poignant dilemma. On the one hand, he felt constitutionally obligated — and morally committed — to preserve the Union, by force if necessary. On the other hand, he had to be careful not to appear so heavy-handed that he would drive other Southern states into South Carolina’s recalcitrant fold.
His response mingled quiet conciliatory gestures, firmly measured rhetoric and covert preparations for war. Skillful politician that he was, he stood firm but bought time. He held his military forces ready, sought congressional authorization to deploy them, but avoided precipitate moves. While Jackson watched and waited vigilantly, Henry Clay, “the Great Compromiser,” brokered in Congress what came to be known as The Compromise of 1833, which placated the South by reforming the tariff and mollified Northern nationalists by authorizing the use of force against states who might defy the federal law.
Historians have sometimes pitted Jackson as implacable and trigger-happy in this crisis, but as historian Jon Meacham notes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the seventh president, Jackson was the first to propose a compromise tariff reform. Jackson, Meacham writes, “held back only when he chose to hold back, and struck only when he chose to strike. He had an intuitive sense of timing that served him well, and this capacity to find the right moment of action never served America better than it did in the winter of 1832-33.”
Jackson’s most enduring literary monument from this episode — indeed, from his entire presidency — was his proclamation on nullification, dated Dec. 10, 1832. “As a composition,” observed one New York politician, “it is splendid, and will take its place in the archives of our country, and will dwell in the memory of our citizens alongside the farewell address of the ‘Father of his Country.’” Jackson’s proclamation never rivaled Washington’s farewell address, but it was one of only four documents that Abraham Lincoln consulted in the early months of 1861 as he drafted his famous First Inaugural. Today, alas, Jackson’s proclamation is all but forgotten. In a season of national rancor and division, it rewards revisiting.
Jackson denounced nullification as “incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it is founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.” That great object, Jackson continued, was popular self-government. The Constitution, he wrote, creates “a government in which all the people are represented.” It underscores “the unity of our political existence” and constitutes us “one nation.” The states did not retain “undivided sovereignty,” and the right of unilateral secession was a fevered figment of the South Carolinian imagination. Jackson announced that “disunion, by armed force, is treason,” and he warned that he had no discretion, under his oath of office, to do otherwise than meet that threat, if necessary, to enforce the nation’s laws.
The constitutional questions of nullification and secession were, one hopes, resolved by the Civil War. But it is worth remembering Jackson’s proclamation regarding nullification, issued 192 years ago today, for its ringing endorsement of the Constitution as a charter of national unity. In a powerful recent book, “American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again,” Yuval Levin articulates how the Constitution’s structures not only require mutual accommodation and understanding but also help cultivate the civic virtues on which our national unity depends. One of my law school mentors, Yale’s Professor Bruce Ackerman, once wrote that, more than any aspect of our history or culture, “the Constitution constitutes us as a people.”
That is the underlying message of Andrew Jackson’s proclamation of Dec. 10, 1832. It is a lesson worth remembering in our bitterly divided times. It is also worth remembering that we can learn from those with whom we disagree and whom we might even dislike — as I have learned from Andrew Jackson. This complicated, sometimes rebarbative figure rose magnificently to the occasion in one of our early national crises. He stared down secession and drove it, at least for a season, into the shadows. It was, I believe, his finest hour.