Tariffs, Treaties and a Bank: A Historian's Notes on 1832–1834

Field Notes: Testing the Constitution, 1832–1834

1Entry 1, Columbia, South Carolina. In the state archives I held a printed copy of the Ordinance of Nullification, adopted by a South Carolina convention on November 24, 1832. It declared the national tariffs of 1828 and 1832, taxes on imported goods, "null, void" in the state and said they would not be collected there after February 1, 1833. Many South Carolina planters said the tariffs protected Northern factories while raising the prices Southerners paid. John C. Calhoun, who resigned as Vice President in December 1832 to become a senator, argued that a state could refuse to enforce a national law it judged unconstitutional.

2Entry 2, Columbia. President Andrew Jackson, a Southerner who often defended states' rights, answered with a proclamation on December 10, 1832. He called the power of one state to cancel a national law "incompatible with the existence of the Union." In March 1833 Congress passed two laws together: a Force Bill letting the President use the army and navy to collect the tariff, and a compromise tariff that lowered rates step by step over about ten years. A South Carolina convention then withdrew its ordinance.

3Entry 3, New Echota, Georgia. This was the capital of the Cherokee Nation, which had its own written constitution, courts and newspaper. Georgia passed laws claiming power over Cherokee land and ordered white people living there to get a state license. Samuel Worcester, a missionary, refused and was sentenced to four years of hard labor. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia's laws had no force inside the Cherokee Nation, because the nation's treaties were with the national government. Georgia ignored the ruling, and President Jackson took no steps to enforce it. Worcester stayed in prison until Georgia's governor released him in early 1833. Today the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band in Oklahoma and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina govern their own citizens.

4Entry 4, Washington, D.C. At the library I read the Senate Journal for 1832. Congress passed a bill to renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, and on July 10 Jackson vetoed it. In 1819 the Supreme Court had ruled that Congress had the power to create such a bank, but Jackson wrote that each officer who swears to support the Constitution "swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others." The Senate then voted on overriding the veto.

5Entry 5, Washington. In 1833 Jackson had Roger Taney, his Treasury Secretary, move the national government's money out of the bank. Taney had been named while the Senate was out of session. When senators returned, they voted to censure, or formally criticize, Jackson in March 1834. In June they voted on Taney's nomination, the first time the Senate turned down a President's choice for the cabinet.