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To: LS
Well, the message to take from the nullification controversy is that here was the BIGGEST example of the negative impact of the tariff . . . and yet ONLY South Carolina got upset, and even then, not enough to secede.

That is a gross misrepresentation of the issue. Anger over the Tariff of Abominations extended throughout the south even if the other states did not take the step South Carolina did with nullification. It is silly to complain that it was "not enough to secede" over when in fact South Carolina pushed the issue to the verge of secession before the tariff supporters in Congress caved and agreed to the 1833 Compromise tariff.

The "Tariff of Abominations" shows clearly that the tariff was NOT the issue that cause the South to secede.

That's absurd. Excepting of the Civil War itself, the nullification crisis was the closest any state had ever come to seceding! And they probably would have had the tariff supporters in Congress not caved.

34 posted on 03/17/2005 12:31:35 PM PST by GOPcapitalist ("Marxism finds it easy to ally with Islamic zealotism" - Ludwig von Mises)
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To: GOPcapitalist

It was clearly a relatively insignificant issue compared to slavery. Slavery dominated every thought, every deed, every writing of the southerners, slaveholder and non alike. It underlay every law, and even the tariff was viewed in the context of slavery. Again, see Thornton.


35 posted on 03/17/2005 12:54:39 PM PST by LS (CNN is the Amtrak of news)
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To: GOPcapitalist
[LS] The "Tariff of Abominations" shows clearly that the tariff was NOT the issue that cause the South to secede.

[GOPcapitalist] That's absurd. Excepting of the Civil War itself, the nullification crisis was the closest any state had ever come to seceding! And they probably would have had the tariff supporters in Congress not caved.

Concurring bump. If anyone could have made the federal government's writ run in 1833, it was "King Andrew", but the correlation of forces, as the Soviets used to like to call it, was much more favorable to the South in 1833 than in 1863, and it would have been a near-run thing whose outcome would have been dependent on South Carolina's ability to attract support from the other tariff-chump (as opposed to tariff-beneficiary) States.

Nullification had a constitutional-law problem in that it wasn't sustainable by argument. Madison backed away from the Nullifiers, even though they showed that they understood very well what Madison himself had written in response to the Federalists' police-state Alien and Sedition Acts at the turn of the century, before the Democratic Republicans gained national office, defusing that first crisis.

Jefferson Davis, in his inaugural as president of the provisional Confederate government, explained the Nullifiers' problem succinctly, that their theory flew in the face of the Supremacy Clause, which the Peoples of all the States had ratified with the rest of the Constitution, and that it wasn't possible to remain in the Union while insisting that one's sovereignty allowed one to change both the terms of Union and the laws of the federal government unilaterally, which would break the compact of the Constitution.

36 posted on 03/17/2005 1:18:49 PM PST by lentulusgracchus ("Whatever." -- sinkspur)
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