up in relatively plausible constitutional argument. A South Carolina state convention was called for November 19. The convention was largely boycotted by South Carolina’s Unionists, and adopted a nullification ordinance, which declared the 1828 and 1832 tariffs nullified and forbade their collection in the state; required a state loyalty oath for all state employees except members of the legislature; forbade appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court of any matter arising from the ordinance; and stated that any use of force by the federal government against a state would be grounds for secession. The convention then voted to authorize and pay for a force of military resistance; this was taking matters to the verge of insurrection, and with the wrong president. Jackson ordered the war secretary to put the federal forts in Charleston Harbor on alert and put General Winfield Scott in command of all federal forces in South Carolina. About 8,000 South Carolina Unionists volunteered for the federal militia to suppress the nullifiers if necessary. For good measure, Jackson told a congressman that “If one drop of blood be shed there in defiance of the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man of them I can get my hands on to the first tree I can find.” When South Carolina senator Robert Hayne expressed skepticism to Senator Thomas Hart Benton that Jackson would follow through, Benton replied: “When Jackson begins to talk about hanging, they can begin to look for rope.”10 (Benton had been Jackson’s aide at New Orleans, with the rank of colonel, and then represented his interests in Washington. They quarreled and Benton shot and wounded Jackson in a frontier brawl, though they were later reconciled. Among Benton’s several famous sayings was: “I don’t quarrel, but I fight, sir; and when I fight, a funeral follows.” He and Jackson were birds of a feather, but he renounced slavery in later years, and thus was denied a sixth term as U.S. senator from Missouri.)
In his message to the Congress on December 4, 1832, Jackson recommended further downward revision of the tariff, and in his Proclamation to the People of South Carolina six days later (drafted by Livingston and a very substantial state paper), Jackson described nullification as a “practical absurdity” and reaffirmed the supremacy of a sovereign and indivisible federal government. No state could disobey federal law and none could leave the Union, and any attempt to do so “by armed force is treason.” Calhoun resigned as vice president a couple of months before the end of his term, on December 28, having already been reelected to the U.S. Senate replacing Hayne, who had just been elected governor of South Carolina. South Carolina called for a general convention of other states in solidarity, but was rebuffed. On January 16, 1833, Jackson sent Congress his Force Bill, authorizing the collection of tariff duties in South Carolina by the U.S. Army if necessary, though what was actually foreseen was offshore collection, which would have made armed clashes less likely.
Daniel Webster again led the Unionist forces in debate, against Calhoun, and it was a memorable single-warrior combat, though Webster had the better of the argument and was the ne plus ultra of American political orators of the time. Henry Clay, exercising again his great talent for conciliating the apparently irreconcilable, introduced a compromise tariff. Both Jackson’s Force Bill and Clay’s tariff passed and both were signed into law by Jackson on March 2, 1833, two days before he was reinaugurated. Six weeks before, South Carolina, supposedly in response to Clay’s approaching tariff bill, but certainly not without awareness of Jackson’s aroused threats, suspended its nullification ordinance, and rescinded it when the tariff was enacted, but also purported to nullify the Force Bill.
By this powerful show of force and purpose, coupled with conciliatory gestures to slave-holding, Jackson had shut down any thought of insurrection for perhaps a generation. Henceforth the cause of Union would rest chiefly on the ability of the free states to attract more immigration and spread westward more quickly than the more sluggish and agrarian slave states, so that insurrection would become unfeasible because of the greater strength of the Union states. This demonstrated Jackson’s strategic grasp, even if intuitively, of how to keep the Union together. The young republic had made its point in the world, but the world could also see that it was threatened by internal contradictions. Jackson loved the Union more than he approved slavery, and the United States owes him much for deferring the supreme test between the two unequal halves of the country until the Unionists, by the narrowest of margins and with the benefit of the most distinguished leadership in the country’s history, were strong enough to throttle the secessionists. Jackson may not have reacted for exactly this reason, but he saved the Union for a significant time at a decisive moment, and applied the only strategy that was going to preserve the country’s full potential for national greatness and benign world influence.
The 81-year-old (in 1832) James Madison, like Jefferson, had been disconcerted when their party was taken over by the comparative ruffian and warmonger Jackson, but they also had come to recognize the danger posed by the slavery issue. Jackson had politely referred to Madison as “a great civilian” but added that “the mind of a philosopher could not dwell on blood and carnage with any composure.”11 Jackson had no such difficulties. He never lacked the steely resolve to deal severely with people and events. Once again, the American system seemed miraculously to have demonstrated that the office does seek the man, as it had turned up a leader who had terrible lapses of humanity, moderation, and scruple, but was providentially able to produce a policy of finely calibrated appeasement and intimidation of the slave-holding interest that would keep North and South together under the same constitutional roof for an indispensable further period of national maturation. By whatever combination of intuition, good fortune, and design, it was masterly strategy for the ultimate elimination of the Union’s great internal weakness (slavery).
Jackson’s next major step, the veto of the renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States, stirred another immense controversy. Clay urged the head of the Bank, Nicholas Biddle, to submit his application for recharter four years early, in 1832, to force Jackson’s hand and make an election issue of it. Biddle did so, and it was useful to Jackson, as the Bank was unpopular in the South and West, and seen as an elitist eastern organization that overly contracted credit in the faster-growing areas of the country. This also helped Jackson counter the nullifiers and appear generally as the champion of the little people. Biddle was judged too restrictive of credit through his ability to enforce ratios on smaller banks, and he was not accorded the credit the Bank generally deserved for avoiding inflation and keeping an orderly money supply. Shutting the Bank down was a mistake other than politically. Both houses of the Congress voted to renew, but they could not override Jackson’s veto. Jackson’s actions proved to be unsuccessful, but not as catastrophically mistimed as Madison’s inability to renew the charter in 1811.
Following the reelection of Jackson, Clay and Calhoun joined forces to get a House vote approving retention of government deposits in the Bank of the United States. Jackson felt he had won a clear mandate to get rid of the Bank, and Biddle thought his position justified his replying to Jackson’s war on him and his Bank by tightening credit, which he did. By the end of 1833, Biddle’s tactics had induced significant financial distress in the country, and Jackson had overcome a divided cabinet to remove federal government deposits from the Bank and place them in 23 state banks.
Jackson named Roger Taney, the attorney general, secretary of the Treasury to carry out the changes he sought, and as always with Jackson, there were insults and ruffled feathers all round. Clay got a censure vote against both Jackson and the Treasury through the Senate. Jackson’s transgression was that he refused to hand over to the Senate a paper he had read to his cabinet about the Bank recharter question. Jackson lodged a protest that he had been accused of an impeachable offense without being given an opportunity to defend himself. The Senate declined to confirm Taney at Treasury, but Jackson had him serve ad interim, and named him successfully, over strenuous opposition, as chief justice of the United States in 1835 when John Marshall died after 34 years in his office.12 Taney was the first senior American official who was a Roman Catholic; he would serve 29 years as chief justice, with very mixed results. Benton eventually had the censure of Jackson expunged.
Inflation was abetted by the use of land-sale speculators’ notes as a form of transactional debt, and the huge increase in western land sales generated great increases in activity, and consequently in the de facto money supply, since these notes served
