The Abominable Tariff

On May 19, 1828, President John Quincy Adams nearly started the Civil War 30 years early when he signed a new tariff into effect.

The tariff was designed to help American manufacturers compete against British imports. At the time, Britain’s well-established manufacturers could produce merchandise for significantly less than young America’s industries. It was soon being called the “Tariff of Abominations” as it imposed a 38 percent surtax on selected imports and a 45 percent addition to the cost of some imported raw materials.

Then, as now, consumers paid the tariff surtaxes.

When they heard about the new tariff, foreign governments struck back. Rather than responding with their own tariffs, they simply stopped buying American cotton.

Many Americans were unhappy with the new tariff, but none more than Southerners. The increased cost on imports was intended to help domestic manufacturers, who were generally located in the North. The South hadn’t focused on manufacturing but on agriculture, specifically cotton. Now cotton-exporting states of the South were paying the high price of aiding northern businesses.

The tariff’s unpopularity was a heavy contributor to Adams’s failure to be re-elected in 1828. Andrew Jackson of Tennessee would become president.

John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a champion of southern rights, had been Adams’s vice president, and he would soon be vice president again in the new administration. Calhoun strongly opposed the tariff and secretly wrote a document titled “South Carolina Exposition and Protest” in December 1828.

Calhoun didn’t claim authorship because he still hoped to run for president. But it was fairly obvious who wrote it.

Rather than just denouncing the tariff, Calhoun claimed that states had the right to overturn federal law. Under this state’s right, South Carolina could declare the tariff invalid within its borders.

Calhoun reasoned that states could overturn federal laws if the federal laws trespassed on their rights. The tariff was unconstitutional because it promoted northern industry at the expense of southern interests. Other southern states — Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia — agreed with him but took no action.

Jackson responded to Calhoun’s Exposition by declaring that only Congress had the full authority to enact tariffs. Calhoun accused Jackson of despotism. But this was as far as the two men went. Calhoun began working on a tariff revision with Henry Clay, which Jackson hoped would defuse the conflict. A compromise was worked out and a modified tariff was put into effect in July 1832.

But southern lawmakers still weren’t satisfied. South Carolina passed an official Ordinance of Nullification in November of that year, which not only nullified the tariff but also warned that if the federal government used force to collect tariffs, the state would secede from the Union.

Andrew Jackson was the wrong president to threaten with disunion.

Jackson asked Congress to enact at Force Bill authorizing the use of federal forces to enforce the tariff. He sent warships into Charleston Harbor and said he’d hang anyone who threatened nullification or secession, declaring the state was on the brink of insurrection and treason. In a “Proclamation to the People of South Carolina,” he asserted that, contrary to what Calhoun said, the constitution didn’t allow states to decide which laws they’d follow.

Calhoun angrily resigned as Jackson’s vice president.

Later Jackson confided that the problem with South Carolina had never really been the tariff. That was just a pretext. What Calhoun and his backers had wanted all along was disunion and a confederacy of southern states. “The next pretext,” he predicted, “will be the negro, or slavery question.”