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nel of intercourse reopened, by which the produce of Europe was transmitted to the New World, the Americans thought fit to establish a system of import duties, for the twofold purpose of protecting their incipient manufactures, and of paying off the amount of the debt contracted during the war. The southern states, which have no manufactures to encourage, and which are exclusively agricultural, soon complained of this measure. Such were the simple facts, and I do not pretend to examine in this place whether their complaints were well founded or unjust.
As early as the year 1820, South Carolina declared, in a petition to Congress, that the tariff was “unconstitutional, oppressive, and unjust.” And the states of Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, subsequently remonstrated against it with more or less vigour. But Congress, far from lending an ear to these complaints, raised the scale of tariff duties in the years 1824 and 1828, and recognised anew the principle on which it was founded. A doctrine was then proclaimed, or rather revived, in the south, which took the name of nullification.
I have shown in the proper place that the object of the federal constitution was not to form a league, but to create a national government. The Americans of the United States form a sole and undivided people, in all the cases which are specified by that constitution; and upon these points the will of the nation is expressed, as it is in all constitutional nations, by the voice of the majority. When the majority has pronounced its decision, it is the duty of the minority to submit. Such is the sound legal doctrine, and the only one which agrees with the text of the constitution, and the known intention of those who framed it.
The partisans of nullification in the south maintain, on the contrary, that the intention of the Americans in uniting was not to reduce themselves to the condition of one and the same people; that they meant to constitute a league of independent states; and that each state, consequently, retains its entire sovereignty, if not de facto, at least de jure; and has the right of putting its own construction upon the laws of congress, and of suspending their execution within the limits of its own territory, if they are held to be unconstitutional or unjust.
The entire doctrine of nullification is comprised in a sentence uttered by Vice-President Calhoun, the head of that party in the
