From compromise to Union supremacy: states' rights trampled
Nullification
Calhoun, John Caldwell (1782 - 1850) US statesman; vice president (1824-32), a champion of the southern states and a defender of slavery. His famous Nullification theory claimed the rights of states to nullify congressional laws that they considered unconstitutional. He encouraged the annexation of Texas to provide another slaveholding state and to strengthen the power of the South. (X-Refer)
Mass politics
In the 1830's, the emergence of the party system, the suffrage being granted to all white males under Andrew Jackson's presidency created a new political trend. Politics was no longer the exclusive sphere of an elite. More and more Americans got involved into politics especially when the extension of slavery or the tariff were the issues of the day.
Manifest Destiny
The emergence of Manifest Destiny followed the “victory“ of the United States over Britain at the end of the 2nd War of Independence (1812-14). It created a feeling of American superiority and nationalism.
Manifest Destiny, in American history, is the supposed belief that America was the land of the chosen people of God, and consequently promised to a great destiny. This assumption justified the conquest of the frontier or the annexation of Indian and Spanish territories. America came to be regarded by Americans as the model nation, important enough to extol its image of a redeeming country, under God and His providence.
The phrase “manifest destiny“ was coined by J. O'Sullivan in 1845, the year when Polk was elected president on an expansionist platform. The next year, the Oregon treaty was signed. Manifest Destiny was already a very popular doctrine.
(WASP) civilization and progress were thus to advance into the wilderness. WASP institutions (democracy, individual liberties, public education) were thought to be superior and therefore should be spread across the continent. Protestantism was also thought to be a superior form of religion, better than Spanish Jesuits’ Catholicism.
An associated notion was that of the “natural law tradition“: Those who wasted the land (Spanish missions, Indians) must yield.
(Source of the following: Caroll and Noble 167) American expansionists in the first half of the 19th century argued that the United States had a “Manifest Destiny“ to stretch its influence until the Pacific coast. Central to the concept of Manifest Destiny was the belief in American superiority: democracy, political liberty, the Protestant religion. Expansionists wanted to protect the virgin lands of the West from the Spanish Jesuits.
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle.aspx?refid=761555881¶=28#p28 Saturday 5 October 2002 The Mexican War had ushered in the era of manifest destiny, a belief that territorial expansion of the United States was inevitable. Pierce shared in this American expansionist fever. He was eager to annex Hawaii and to acquire Alaska. However, he meant first to purchase Cuba from Spain and to acquire additional territory from Mexico. Cuba had long been regarded by the Southern states as a natural addition to their territory, and Mexican land was needed to make possible a planned transcontinental southern railway. Both projects would aid the slave states and were thus bound to bring about a resumption of the slavery controversy.
Politics of conscience
A new form of politics—called politics of conscience—emerged with the rise of abolitionism after the 1830s. It “deplored compromise as an unacceptable sacrifice of moral principles“ (Knupfer 164) and eroded the compromise tradition.
Noah Webster
http://www.ctstateu.edu/noahweb/biography.html Saturday 5 October 2002
Noah Webster was born on October 16, 1758, in the West Division of Hartford. ... Noah thought that Americans should learn from American books, so in 1783, Noah wrote his own textbook: A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. Most people called it the “Blue-backed Speller“ because of its blue cover. For 100 years, Noah's book taught children how to read, spell, and pronounce words. It was the most popular American book of its time. Ben Franklin used Noah's book to teach his granddaughter to read. ... When Noah was 43, he started writing the first American dictionary. He did this because Americans in different parts of the country spelled, pronounced and used words differently. He thought that all Americans should speak the same way. He also thought that Americans should not speak and spell just like the English. Noah used American spellings like “color“ instead of the English “colour“ and “music“ instead “ of “musick“. He also added American words that weren't in English dictionaries like “skunk“ and “squash“. It took him over 27 years to write his book. When finished in 1828, at the age of 70, Noah's dictionary had 70,000 words in it.
... When Noah Webster died in 1843 he was considered an American hero.
WEBSTER, Daniel, 1782-1852
http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=W000238 Saturday 5 October 2002
WEBSTER, Daniel, a Representative from New Hampshire and a Representative and a Senator from Massachusetts; born in Salisbury, N.H., January 18, 1782; ... Webster’s reply to Senator Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina in January 1830 in opposition to the principles of Nullification won him nation-wide fame, as did his widely-circulated ‘7th of March’ speech in 1850, in which he argued for excluding slavery from the territories; unsuccessful Whig candidate for president in 1836; ... his death in Marshfield, Mass., October 24, 1852...
John C. Calhoun 
http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/B/calhoun/jcc.htm Saturday 5 October 2002
March 18, 1782 in South Carolina, Calhoun was born, and educated at Yale College. From 1808 to 1810 an economic recession hit the United States and Calhoun realized that British policies were ruining the economy. He served in South Carolina's legislature and was elected to the United States House of Representatives serving three terms. In 1812, Calhoun and Henry Clay, two famous “warhawks“, who preferred war to the “putrescent pool of ignominous peace“, convinced the House to declare war on Great Britian. Calhoun was secretary of war under President James Monroe from 1817 to 1825 and ran for president in the 1824 election along with four others, John Q. Adams, Henry Clay, Crawford, and Andrew Jackson. However, Calhoun withdrew from the race, due to Jackson's support, and ran for vice president unopposed. Calhoun was vice president of the United States in 1824 under John Quincy Adams and was re-elected in 1828 under Andrew Jackson. Jackson was for the Tariff of 1828 and caused Calhoun to be opposed to Jackson, which led to Calhoun's resignation in 1832. Because he could not do anything about Jackson's views toward tariffs, which benifitted only industrial North and hurt slaveholding South, John C. Calhoun became the only vice president to resign. Calhoun wrote an essay about this conflict, “The South Carolina Exposition and Protest“, in which he asserted nullification of federal laws, and in 1832 the South Carolina legislature did just that. The next year in the Senate Calhoun [Hayne] and Daniel Webster opposed each other over slavery and states' rights in a famous debate. In 1844 President John Tyler appointed Calhoun secretary of state. In later years he was reelected to the Senate, where he supported the Texas Annexation and defeated the Wilmot Proviso. John Caldwell Calhoun died in Washington, D.C. on March 31, 1850 and was buried in St. Phillips Churchyard in Charleston. In 1957, United States Senators honored Calhoun as one of the five greatest senators of all time.
Backer, Larry Catá. “Critical Turnings in Federalism.” ECSA Conference. June 1999. University of Pittsburgh. Thursday, October 23, 2008 < http://aei.pitt.edu/2219/01/002228.PDF >. 6-7.
“Calhoun ... championed a vision of federalism based on the locus of the sovereign authority of the United States in the people of the several states, which then created both state and general governments as their agents.“
Henry Clay 
http://www.henryclay.org/hc.htm Saturday 5 October 2002
Henry Clay began his political career in 1803 when he was elected to the Kentucky General Assembly. In that body his Jeffersonian views were pitted against the conservative federalist one of Humphrey Marshall, ... Clay’s was to be a major voice in the troubled years in American-British relations from 1808-1814. He served as commissioner to the joint American-British peace negotiations in Ghent, Belgium in 1814. Back home after 1815, Henry Clay became involved in nearly every national issue. He opposed the Adams-D’Onis Treaty, and supported the independence of the Latin American republics. The issues, however, which thrust him into the political limelight were the Missouri Compromise, the banking issues, opposition to Andrew Jackson, and promotion of his American System. No doubt the most important of these was the negotiation of the Missouri Compromise which was fundamental in maintaining American unity, providing some kind of workable sectional policy regarding slavery expansion, and some kind of western policy. At heart Henry Clay favored the gradual abolition of slavery as demonstrated in his strong support of the American Colonization Society attempt. There burned deeply in the Clay psyche a yearning to be President of the United States. He made his first gamble for this office in 1824 with only a remote chance of winning. In 1832 he once again attempted to be elected president. He suffered his most disappointing loss for the office in 1844. At the moment Henry Clay lay dying in Washington, he must have looked back upon his career as lawyer, state representative, United States Senator, Congressman, Speaker of the House, a peace commissioner, Secretary of State, on the Missouri Compromise, the compromise tariff bill revision in 1833, his American System, the Texas question, and the Compromise of 1850, his greatest victory.
... Perhaps Henry Clay’s greatest honor was the post mortem one he received when a great majority of American historians honored him as having been one of the greatest United States Senators. The name of Henry Clay was stamped deeply on the American political scene during his lifetime. But perhaps his true greatness has emerged since in the overflowing stream of impressive monographs and biographies of his life and achievements. In his image is reflected that of a young republic undergoing the trials and tribulations of becoming a mature, powerful nation.
Statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C.
http://flickr.com/photos/65193799@N00/14130889/
The Tariff of Abominations (1828), Nullification and Union supremacy
http://www.snowcrest.net/siskfarm/nullif.html
(Sources: Davisdon, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle and Stoff's Nation of Nations, A Narrative History of the American Republic, Alfred A. Knopf, c1991; and Alfred H. Kelly & Winfred A. Harbison, The American Constitution, Its Origins and Development, Fourth Edition, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. c1970.)
Congress had raised duties in 1816 and again in 1824. The tariff of 1824 included high duties on imported agricultural goods such as hemp, wheat and liquor to protect western farmers; imported textiles to protect New England interests; and iron to protect mining and forging industries of Pennsylvania. South Carolina had been particularly hard hit by the depression of 1819. The tariffs increased the prices of their imported goods by as much as 50 percent. South Carolina asserted that the tariffs were unfair as a tax on Southern agriculture for the benefit of Northern industry.
When Congress raised the duties even higher in 1828 with the so-called “Tariff of Abominations,“ South Carolina's Legislature published the “South Carolina Exposition and Protest,“ or South Carolina Doctrine, protesting the tariff as unconstitutional and advancing the theory of nullification. The Exposition declared that a sovereign State had the right to determine through a convention whether an act of Congress was unconstitutional and whether it constituted such a dangerous violation “as to justify the interposition of the State to protect its rights.“ If so, the convention would then decide in what manner the act ought to be declared null and void within the limits of the State, and the declaration would be obligatory on her own citizens, as well as the national government.
U.S. Vice President John C. Calhoun was the (secret) author of the nullification theory. The Union, he argued, was a compact or league between sovereign States. Sovereignty by its very nature was indivisible and absolute. Ultimate sovereignty could not be inherent in both the federal and State governments. The American colonies had always existed as distinct political communities, which became free, independent and sovereign states at the revolution. The Articles of Confederation had recognized that separate sovereignty. The Constitution of the United States had also been drafted by delegates acting and voting as states and the compact had been ratified by the separate states, each acting as a sovereign entity. Although the various States had delegated a portion of their functions to the federal government, they had not surrendered their ultimate sovereignty, which was by nature indivisible. The Constitution was not supreme law, but a contract or agreement between sovereign states that set up a federal government to perform certain functions for the contracting parties. As such, the States possessed the final authority to interpret the Constitution. The central government could not pretend to sovereignty. There was no such thing as an American nation. The “people“ were a political fiction, which under central government had come to mean the collective popular majority. The numerical majority would become tyrannical and disregard the Constitution in order to destroy minority rights. The only safeguard for minority rights was State sovereignty and nullification.
Nullification was “simply a declaration on the part of the principal, made in due form, that an act of the agent transcending his power is null and void.“ (The American Constitution at 309.) The central government was not a separate sovereignty, but simply an agent of the several States. Thus the people of each State, acting in special conventions, had the right to nullify federal law that exceeded the powers granted to Congress through the Constitution. If a popular convention declared a law unconstitutional, it would become null and void in a State. Congress could then either yield and repeal the law or propose a constitutional amendment expressly giving it the power in question. If the amendment was ratified by three-fourths of the States and added to the Constitution, the nullifying State could then either accept the decision or exercise its ultimate right as a sovereign state and secede from the Union. When Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina explained Calhoun's theory on the floor of the Senate, Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts replied that the Union was not a compact of sovereign states.
When Congress passed another tariff in 1832, moderating some of the duties of the prior act but continuing the protective system, South Carolina's legislature called for the election of delegates to a popular convention on November 10 to decide whether the State would nullify the new tariff according to Calhoun's formula. The convention overwhelmingly adopted an ordinance of nullification drawn by Chancellor William Harper by a vote of 136 to 26. The ordinance declared the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 “unauthorized by the Constitution“ and “null, void, and no law, nor binding upon this State, its officers or its citizens“ after February 1, 1833. The convention also established legal penalties for any State or federal officer who attempted to collect the tariff duties. It declared that in no case at law or equity in the courts of the State could the validity of the ordinance or implementing legislation be questioned and that no appeal could be taken to the Supreme Court of the United States. The legislature further enacted a replevin act authorizing the owner of imported goods that were seized by customs officials for nonpayment of duties to recover them (or twice their value) from customs officials. The law also authorized the governor to call out the militia to enforce the laws of the State. The nullifiers declared that any effort of the federal government to employ naval or military force to coerce the State, close its ports, destroy or harass its commerce, or enforce the tariff acts, would impel the people of South Carolina to secede from the Union and organize a separate independent government.
http://members.tripod.com/~CARIART/Andrew_Jackson.jpg
In November 1832, President Andrew Jackson sent seven small naval vessels and a man-of-war to Charleston with orders to be ready for instant action. In December, 1832, he issued a “Proclamation On Nullification“ to the people of South Carolina written by Secretary of State Livingston, stating that the Union was perpetual, and under the Constitution, there was no right of secession. The United States was a nation and not a league and secession was revolutionary and would destroy the nation. The power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, Jackson stated, was “incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed,“ (Robert Kelley's The Shaping of the American Past, Fifth Edition, Prentice Hall, c1990, pg 266.) ...
Jackson claimed he could have 100,000 men on the side of the Union in a matter of weeks. The South Carolina legislature authorized its Governor to call a draft, and appropriated $200,000 for arms. On the 16th of January[1833] , Jackson requested that Congress take steps that would “solemnly proclaim that the Constitution and the laws are supreme and the Union indissoluble.“ (The American Constitution at 313.) He also sent to Congress the “Force Bill“ (often called the “Bloody Bill“), reaffirming the President's powers to call up State militias, the army and navy to quell any insurrection and granted greater powers to use the courts to enforce collection of duties. The bill asserted the supreme sovereignty of the national government and its right to enforce its statutes directly upon individuals by force, if necessary. The Force Act passed in the Senate 32-1, with nearly all the nullifiers having walked out to avoid casting any vote and in March, the House passed the Force Act 149-48. On March 1, the Senate passed a Compromise Tariff. The nullifiers reassembled their popular convention on March 11 and repealed the nullifying ordinance, then proceeded to nullify the Force Act. (Jackson chose to ignore the latter.) .
http://countrystudies.us/united-states/history-50.htm. Accessed 21st Nov. 2004. Nullification leaders in South Carolina had expected the support of other Southern states, but without exception, the rest of the South declared South Carolina's course unwise and unconstitutional. Eventually, South Carolina rescinded [re’sind = annuler, repeal] its action. Both sides, nevertheless, claimed victory. Jackson had committed the federal government to the principle of Union supremacy. But South Carolina, by its show of resistance, had obtained many of the demands it sought, and had demonstrated that a single state could force its will on Congress.