WHILE JACKSON WAS sitting watch by Rachel’s bed in Nashville, John Calhoun in Columbia released his tract on the tariff to the world. His name appeared nowhere on the document, which was issued over the signatures of seven members of a select committee of the South Carolina legislature. He didn’t acknowledge his authorship, partly because he held to the traditional belief of unsigned editorialists that an argument should stand on its merits rather than on the identity of the author, and partly because it might have been awkward for the vice president of the United States to be seen arguing against an assertion of federal power. Thomas Jefferson, when vice president, had withheld his identity as author of the Kentucky resolutions against the Alien and Sedition Acts, and Calhoun judged that what suited Jefferson suited him.
Calhoun got straight to the point. “The act of Congress of the last session, with the whole system of legislation imposing duties on imports—not for revenue, but for the protection of one branch of industry at the expense of others—is unconstitutional, unequal and oppressive, and calculated to corrupt the public virtue and destroy the liberty of the country,” he declared. It was unconstitutional because it went beyond the powers granted to the central government by the Constitution. To be sure, the Constitution gave Congress the authority to establish impost duties. But this authority was given as a taxing power, for revenue, not as a power for protecting the commerce of one region. Indeed a tariff for protection was antithetical to a tariff for revenue, for the protection kept imports out, thereby depriving the government of revenue. The tariff advocates cited precedent as a basis for their law; Calhoun rejected this argument on its face. “Ours is not a government of precedents.” Britain had a government of precedents: the common law. America had a government of the Constitution. “The only safe rule is the Constitution itself.”
The Constitution had been stretched before, but never in such a blatantly sectional manner, Calhoun said. In this lay the inequality of the tariff. The tariff system subordinated the South to the North. “We are the serfs of the system, out of whose labor is raised not only the money paid into the Treasury but the funds out of which are drawn the rich rewards of the manufacturer and his associates in interest.” The tariff let Northern manufacturers raise the price of goods they sold to the South, while the South could secure no comparable advantage for its products. “Our market is the world,” Calhoun said. “We have no monopoly in the supply of our products; one half of the globe may produce them.” The high prices the South was forced to pay to the North increased its own costs of production, threatening its market share abroad. “Once lost, it may be lost forever,” Calhoun said of the South’s overseas business. “And lose it we must, if we continue to be constrained, as we now are, on the one hand, by the general competition of the world, to sell low; and, on the other, by the Tariff, to buy high. We cannot withstand this double action. Our ruin must follow.”
The tariff system would transform America into something like Europe; here its corrupting quality became most evident. “No system can be more efficient to rear up a moneyed aristocracy,” Calhoun said. “Its tendency is to make the poor poorer and the rich richer.” The monopolies would destroy the staple producers of the South, with worse to follow. “After we are exhausted, the contest will be between the capitalists and operatives”—workers—“for into these two classes it must, ultimately, divide society.”
What was to be done by South Carolina and the rest of the aggrieved South? The only sure check on the power of the central government was the power of the states, Calhoun said. Jefferson and James Madison had made this argument in the Kentucky and Virginia resolves, and it remained true. “Power can only be restrained by power,” Calhoun wrote. Alexander Hamilton had agreed in praising the dual nature of American federalism. “The different governments will control each other,” Hamilton had said, and Calhoun concurred.
Calhoun proposed a procedure by which South Carolina could exercise its check. The state should call a convention to weigh the tariff and its effects. “It will belong to the Convention itself to determine, authoritatively, whether the acts of which we complain be unconstitutional; and if so, whether they constitute a violation so deliberate, palpable and dangerous as to justify the interposition of the State to protect its rights. If this question be decided in the affirmative, the Convention will then determine in what manner they ought to be declared null and void within the limits of the State.”
Calhoun conceded that the Constitution did not explicitly give states the right to review federal law. Neither did it explicitly give the Supreme Court the right to review federal law. Yet the court did review federal law. So should the states. And the states had a constitutional advantage over the court, on account of the Tenth Amendment, which unambiguously reserved to the states and the people those powers not delegated to the central government. “Like other reserved rights,” Calhoun said of the states’ right of review, “it is to be inferred from the simple fact that it is not delegated.”
Calhoun and South Carolina had withheld his protest until after the presidential election. He asserted that the delay reflected no hesitation or lack of conviction. Speaking of and for his fellow South Carolinians, he declared, “They would be unworthy of the name of freemen, of Americans, of Carolinians, if danger, however great, could cause them to shrink from the maintenance of their constitutional rights.” Speaking for the committee, Calhoun concluded: “With these views the committee are solemnly of the impression, if the present usurpations and the professed doctrines of the existing system be persevered in, after due forbearance on the part of the State, that it will be her sacred duty to interpose—a duty to herself, to the Union, to the present and to future generations, and to the cause of liberty over the world—to arrest the progress of a usurpation which, if not arrested, must, in its consequences, corrupt the public morals and destroy the liberty of the country.”