Nullification Crisis begins

On November 24, 1832, a South Carolina convention in Columbia adopted the Ordinance of Nullification, declaring the Tariff of 1828 and the Tariff of 1832 null and void within the state after February 1, 1833. Vice President John C. Calhoun had supplied the constitutional theory behind the ordinance, while Governor Robert Y. Hayne and South Carolina legislators prepared the state militia for a possible confrontation with the federal government. President Andrew Jackson answered the ordinance with his December 10, 1832 Proclamation to the People of South Carolina, insisting that the Constitution created a government, not a mere league of states.

The crisis centered on whether a single state could veto a federal law while remaining in the Union created by the Constitution of 1787. Calhoun defended nullification through the compact theory of the Constitution, but Jackson treated nullification as a path to secession and an attack on federal supremacy. Congress and the Jackson administration understood that the tariff dispute had become a test of whether Article VI and federal statute law would prevail over a state convention.

Congress responded in March 1833 with the Force Bill, which authorized Jackson to use military power to enforce the tariff laws, and with Henry Clay's Compromise Tariff of 1833, which gradually lowered duties. South Carolina rescinded its nullification ordinance after the Compromise Tariff passed, but the Nullification Crisis left behind the constitutional arguments later invoked during the secession crisis of 1860-1861.