Ordinance Of Nullification

As Foote says, the “cotton capitalists” of the South at first believed that their interests were the same as “capitalists in general”; however, “anti-slavery and pro-tariff agitation was beginning to teach them otherwise” (10). In 1832, Southern protests over the tariff issue caused the state of South Carolina to threaten to secede from the Union. The state government instituted an “Ordinance of Nullification,” which was based on the view that an individual state has the right to refuse to obey a federally-imposed tariff law. In response, President Andrew Jackson’s administration claimed that the states do not have the right to either disobey federal laws or to secede from the Union. Based on this claim, Jackson threatened the use of military …show more content…
Regarding this, Winston Churchill wrote in his book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: “It is almost impossible for us nowadays to understand how profoundly and inextricably Negro slavery was interwoven into the whole life, economy, and culture of the Southern states” (463). In fact, as Churchill further pointed out, slavery was supported by the words of many southern preachers, who taught their congregations that the system was “ordained by the Creator and sanctified by the Gospel of Christ” (463). The Civil War expert Bruce Catton likewise notes that slavery was more than just an economic issue to southerners because the institution was considered to be part of their “social fabric.” In Catton’s words, “when northerners interfered with slavery, they interfered with the well-being and hopes of the whole southern community” (21). Furthermore, the slavery issue was related to the issue of a state’s rights in contrast to those of the federal government. As Klein says, “at the heart of the dispute lay the question of what power Congress had over slavery” (39). At the start of the war, northern politicians were not yet concerned so much with the idea of ending slavery outright as with preventing it from expanding to the new territories of the west. Nevertheless, according to …show more content…
At that time, it was decided that the slavery issue in the two new territories (Kansas and Nebraska) would be left to the principle of popular sovereignty (Catton 29). It was soon learned that the issue could not be so simply resolved, and violent fights broke out between pro-slavery and pro-abolition factions in the territories. In 1857, the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case added more fuel to the fire. Even though Scott, a negro slave, had spent many years living in a free state, the Supreme Court declared that he was still the “property” of his owner. Many northerners objected to this decision not only because of its unfairness but also because it would open the way for slavery to be expanded to other states - since nothing could be done to prevent a slave-owner from taking his “property” to any state that he wanted to. John Brown’s raid in 1859 was another slavery-related incident that contributed to the ever-increasing hostility between the northern and southern states. John Brown, an abolitionist, led a small group of men in an effort to take over a federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. The idea was to obtain weapons to be used in helping the slaves carry out their own revolt against their masters. After John Brown was captured and hanged, many people in the south claimed that the raid had been “the work of the Republican party,” while “in the north millions regarded John