Nullification Crisis

12 Key excerpts on "Nullification Crisis"

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  The Origins of the American Civil War

  • Brian Holden Reid(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  53 In 1832–33 South Carolina advanced the case for slavery in a halting and incomplete manner, but there can be no doubting its importance in inflaming the crisis in the first place. The Nullification Crisis was, in more ways than one, a rehearsal for the secession crisis of 1860–61 and the outbreak of civil war.

  In four years from 1803, South Carolina legalized the slave trade and purchased 40,000 slaves from Africa. This eased the shortage of labour in the dank and inhospitable coastal belt, but it also added to that morbid sense of insecurity which characterized South Carolinians when surrounded by Negro slaves. Such paranoia was just as strong a part of the idle if tense planter outlook as their ‘aristocratic’ refinements: residing in mansions adorned with decanters of port wine, crystal goblets, tinkling pianos, and well-stocked libraries. South Carolina prided herself in the elegance and refulgence of her society, though it was of a shallow, provincial kind.54 Nonetheless, the spread of nouveaux riches pretensions ensured that South Carolina politics would be influenced by the changing fads and churlish moods associated with the employment of slave labour. But South Carolina was an extreme case, and her lead was not followed by the rest of the south. It has been well said that by the 1830s, ‘No other state in the Deep South had achieved such complete unification by the years of the Nullification Controversy’. It should be emphasized that just as national identity was nurtured and elevated during these years, so too was state identity. The development of affection for and attachment to the Union and the state was a simultaneous process and frequently they were in competition for the loyalty of their citizens. In the South the state became more quickly the focus of more parochial and passionate loyalties which jostled out an initial enthusiasm for the Federal Union. It was the ability of either the state or the Federal government to protect slavery which was to decide who won that competition in the South. South Carolina’s planters were divided into two groups, those in the upcountry, who deeply resented Congress’s tariff policy, and the tidewater (or lowcountry) nabobs, who were more nervous about northern anti-slavery mumblings. Their different perspectives, however, combined into one shared cause; this vigorous coalescence ‘lashed each other into an increasingly frenzied campaign’.55

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  The People and Their Peace

  Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South

  • Laura F. Edwards(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  Blaming the tar-iff for the state’s economic and political woes, influential political leaders asserted states’ rights over national authority and, eventually, threatened to nullify the tariff. The national dynamics of the Second Party System framed the ensuing political conflict in significant ways. The crisis involved key issues—the tariff and federalism—that the architects of partisan poli-tics used adroitly not only as an organizational tool but also to define the parties’ platforms. Adding fuel to the fire were the ambitions of career poli-ticians hungry for power, most notably John C. Calhoun. But the notion of a singular crisis— the Nullification Crisis—is a reflection of the attention that scholars have paid to national party politics: the debates in Congress over the tariff; the tensions between President Jackson and Vice President Calhoun during the first administration; and the president’s showdown with Calhoun and South Carolina nullifiers after his reelection in 1832. From this perspective, the crisis peaked when South Carolina passed the Nullification Ordinance in 1832 and Jackson declared it void, threatening to use force to keep the state in line. It dissipated soon thereafter when the president tempered his position and appeased nullifiers by supporting the reduction of protective duties, which Congress passed in the Compromise Tariff. In March 1833 another South Carolina constitutional convention re-scinded the Nullification Ordinance.8 The contours of national party politics, however, do not contain the dynamics of nullification as a political movement. Nullifiers’ position on states’ rights was so extreme that it placed them outside the orbit even of the Democratic Party, the party critical of centralized federal authority. Significantly, South Carolina Unionists did not align themselves with the Whigs, the party of nationalism, but with Jackson’s Democrats.

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  Andrew Jackson and the Rise of the Democrats

  A Reference Guide

  • Mark R. Cheathem(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 13

  NATIONALISM VERSUS STATES ’ RIGHTS

  J ackson possessed little inclination to help any Indian group, and the Worcester decision came at an especially tense moment in his first term. The state of South Carolina was threatening to leave the Union, so he had to tread carefully in order to keep other southern states, such as Georgia, from joining the Palmetto State in asserting its right to secede. The Nullification Crisis of 1832–1833 held serious consequences for the nation, highlighting the way in which sectionalism could trump partisanship.

  THE SEEDS OF NULLIFICATION

  The Nullification Crisis was rooted in the very definition of the nation itself. In the 1780s, the Articles of Confederation demonstrated Americans’ fear of a centralized national government that held too much power, a fear that carried over into the Antifederalists’ critique of the Constitution. A decade later, the Alien and Sedition Acts prompted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which outlined the doctrines of interposition and nullification. Secession as a solution for political differences had also not been unknown, as the 1804 Essex Junto and the 1814–1815 Hartford Convention demonstrated when New England Federalists threatened disunion in response to the vision of southern and Jeffersonian power controlling the country.

  South Carolina served as the locus of nullification sentiment during Jackson’s first term. The state had struggled to recover from the Panic of 1819, and many residents blamed the national government, specifically its tariff policies, which they believed unfairly taxed southern states. Along with concern about the government’s tariff policies, South Carolinians also worried about its protection of slave property. Denmark Vesey’s thwarted slave revolt in 1822 terrified them and prompted a crackdown on slave privileges and movements in the state. For example, the state legislature passed a law in December 1822 that required black sailors to sit in jail until the ships on which they served left the Charleston harbor. This law violated a U.S.-British agreement on free naval passage and prompted significant debate within both the South Carolina legislature and the Adams administration. The national government never moved beyond protesting the action, which undoubtedly emboldened the emerging states’ rights faction in South Carolina. Various antislavery proposals to limit slavery or use government revenue to fund African colonization efforts further fueled those committed to defending South Carolina’s (and the South’s) right to stand up to government encroachment.1

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  A Companion to the Era of Andrew Jackson

  • Sean Patrick Adams(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Exposition , and it set the following February 1 as the date on which nullification would go into effect. Any show of coercion from the federal government, warned the convention, would impel South Carolina to employ necessary counterforce, and perhaps even secede from the Union.

  It is at this point in the narrative, where South Carolina stood on the precipice of open hostilities with the federal government, historians of the Nullification Crisis arrange themselves into several explanatory camps. Perhaps the central question occupying scholars is, why South Carolina? What was it about that state – alone among the slave states – that created the conditions in which the Nullification Crisis could mature? One answer, posited by William Freehling (1965) and James M. Banner, Jr. (1974), points to South Carolinians’ self-identification as a citizenry under siege. South Carolina, this argument claims, felt its position to be the most precarious and thus reacted the strongest to what it saw as the serious economic and constitutional threats posed by protective tariff legislation. In the state’s lowcountry districts, the population ratio of black to white was nearly ten to one, due to the armies of enslaved laborers within this coastal area’s numerous rice plantations. To a slaveowning class sensitive to internal threats, this uneven ratio caused considerable anxiety, particularly after the 1822 Denmark Vesey rebellion scare and the rise of the invigorated and militant abolitionist movement in the North, which had made significant waves by the early 1830s. Moreover, the state’s overall population was declining at a worrisome rate; emigration from South Carolina had intensified during the 1820s as repeated cotton cultivation had exhausted the soil and planters looked to the “cotton frontier” of the Old Southwest for more favorable prospects. These socio-economic anxieties, Freehling and Banner both assert, created a hothouse environment for South Carolina’s unique and contrarian political culture, one that served as a significant counterpoint to the general trends of Jacksonian democracy, which increasingly emphasized broader suffrage and the rhetorical significance of the white “common man.” For Freehling, South Carolina’s profound anxieties sprang primarily from the conditions of the slave society which had evolved in the state. South Carolina’s planter elite, which included such figures as Calhoun, Hamilton, Robert Hayne, and other leaders of the Nullification movement, was acutely sensitive to any threat to the stability of slavery. Even though poor whites of both the coastal and upcountry counties showed little inclination to attack the institution, large slaveowners in South Carolina felt that their “peculiar institution” might be imperiled by the rise of the “common man” in their state-level political culture. Threats from Washington appeared even more dire. If, as the slaveowners saw it, the federal government could move beyond its constitutional bounds by promulgating a protective tariff, it might also do so concerning slavery should the precedent be allowed to stand (Freehling, 1965: 359–360). In Banner’s estimation, the “problem” was that “South Carolina, the last refuge of the anti-party tradition, would not govern itself by the political code of the rest of the nation,” because “[t]he transfer from personal [i.e. Calhoun’s personal dominance of South Carolina politics] to institutionalized power so necessary to party government had not occurred there” (Banner, 1974: 92–93). For nearly two decades, the Freehling-Banner thesis – which was in essence an argument for South Carolina exceptionalism – held sway in scholarly circles.

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  Challenging the Legacies of Racial Resentment

  Black Health Activism, Educational Justice, and Legislative Leadership

  • Tiffany Willoughby-Herard(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In advocating nullification, John C. Calhoun does not simply invoke the Thomas Jefferson who authored the Kentucky Resolution; he parrots the Jefferson of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson's statement that “whensover the general government assumes undelegated powers” (as he asserts during the controversy over the Alien and Sedition Acts) reads almost identically to the letter and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence when it says that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of its ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” Calhoun's opponents understood the implications of nullification to justify the right of a state to secede from the Union, and they denounced him for it. However, the nullifiers insisted that it is they, rather than their opponents, who truly embody the spirit of the American Revolution.

  This oft-forgotten episode set a template for future conflicts involving federalism—particularly those that involve the rights of African-Americans. It is not simply the case that this crisis foreshadowed the outbreak of the Civil War. Rather, it sowed the seed for the tendency to mask defenses of unchallenged White privilege in the guise of ostensibly race-neutral language with terms like “federalism,” “states’ rights,” “local control,” “individual rights,” and “personal responsibility.” The Nullification Crisis inaugurates the emergence of a reactionary political tradition in American politics whereby universal liberties for all American citizens are nominally declared in constitutional provisions and legal statutes but, with respect to African Americans, are denied in practice. Thus, the principle of nullification becomes the status quo with respect to how the nation deals with the paradox between its assertion of the universal rights of equality of all men and what Carter G. Woodson calls the “qualified citizenship” of African-Americans (Woodson 1921). Nullification, rather than dying in the embers of the “Irrepressible Conflict,” instead resurfaces again and again throughout American history.

  For example, the Thirteenth Amendment, enacted in 1865, abolished slavery—or so Americans are told. The text of Section 1 of the amendment reads:

  Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted [author's emphasis], shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

  The Thirteenth Amendment cemented the military settlement on the battlefield, denying Southern states the right to hold Black men and women in bondage simply because of their skin color. But it empowered individuals, for the first time, to use massive incarceration of African-Americans to accomplish essentially the same objective that the amendment expressly forbids. As a consequence, scores of Blacks were rounded up for relatively minor offenses and sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber yards, railroads, and farm plantations until they could “repay their debts” to society.20 Similar examples of nullification can be derived from a study of both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Fourteenth Amendment, for example, conferred citizenship rights on the newly freed slaves. But the Supreme Court, through a series of decisions that narrowly construed the nature of those rights, insured that the citizenship rights of the newly freed slaves and their descendants would be of a decidedly inferior variety to those enjoyed by Whites.21 Finally, the Fifteenth Amendment reads: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” But the amendment neglects to preclude the states from using other means—no matter how thinly veiled—to accomplish the same end.22

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  Federalism, Secession, and the American State

  Divided, We Secede

  • Lawrence M. Anderson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 States' Rights in South Carolina

  From nullification to the First Secession Crisis

  The previous chapter compared the state as it existed in Europe with the state as it existed in the U.S. and discussed the origins of challenges to central state authority in the U.S. The defi ning feature of the American state is federalism. A defi ning feature of federalism is, apparently, territorial-based challenges to central state authority. Secession is the ultimate territorialbased challenge to central state authority. This chapter explores the institutional and structural bases of South Carolinian radicalism and the crises and events through which South Carolina came to exemplify the states' rights tradition in the U.S. The central episodes that are explored in this chapter are the Nullification Crisis and the first secession crisis.

  These episodes are critical to South Carolina's learning curve on the road to secession. Here, South Carolina learned that using the tariff as a stalking horse for slavery would not result in the desired outcome: disunion. While the protectionist tariff certainly represented an overstepping of federal authority, the tariff itself was not salient enough an issue to mobilize support for radical action. Slavery would have to be the issue. Here, too, South Carolina learned the dangers associated with attempting to get the South to act in concert to protect its interests. The South, such as it was, faced an impossible conundrum: it was too divided to secede as a unit on any issue, including slavery, and it was too divided to provide adequate protection of slavery in the face of an increasingly monolithic North. Learning of this conundrum, which South Carolina did in 1852, provided an object lesson of what not to do when a new issue arrived in 1860.

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  The Growth and Collapse of One American Nation: The Early Republic 1790 - 1861

  The Early Republic 1790-1861

  • Donald J Fraser, Dotti Albertine(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Fraser & Associates

    (Publisher)

  HAPTER 10

  Nullifiers, Bank Wars Redux, and the King … that the Constitution of the United States is, in fact, a compact, to which each State is a party …

  —JOHN C. CALHOUN , FORT HILL ADDRESS , 1831

  1

  The people of the United States formed the Constitution, acting through the State legislatures in making the compact …but the terms used in its construction show it to be a Government in which the people of all the States, collectively, are represented.

  —ANDREW JACKSON , NULLIFICATION PROCLAMATION , 1832

  2

  I f the Nullification Crisis shows Jackson at his finest, the continuing Bank War showed the opposite. The president handled nullification deftly, keeping the personal separate from the political, and showed a command of the concept of America as a nation that was in keeping with the best traditions of the Framers of the Constitution. While Jackson was genuinely concerned that the bank was a corrupting influence on the country, his inability to find a realistic alternative would bedevil the American economy for many years.

  The Nullification Crisis

  The Nullification Crisis that occurred between the state of South Carolina and the Jackson administration was, in many ways, baked into the American constitutional system. It reflected the two major pieces of unfinished business from the founding era, federalism and slavery, which would once again be entwined during the Nullification Crisis. Federalism dealt with the nature of a divided system of sovereignty: how much power should be allocated to the national government, and how much should be left to the states. During the revolution, two competing ideological approaches had come to the forefront. One maintained that too much centralized power was a danger to the survival of republican government and liberty. The other, that only through a more powerful centralized government could the United States defeat the British. Under the Articles of Confederation, the balance was tipped too far toward the states, with the document declaring that the states were sovereign. The Framers of the Constitution took a major step in moving the balance toward centralization, but they too did not ultimately establish the precise boundaries for where sovereignty resided between the states and the federal government. They needed to obscure the issue in order to get the Constitution ratified, since the Framers were undertaking an unprecedented attempt to establish a dual-tiered government, something considered impossible before this time. Such a government was sometimes referred to as imperium in imperio (a government within a government). James Wilson, speaking before the ratifying convention in Pennsylvania, had come up with the novel approach that sovereignty resided in the people, who doled it out to both the federal and state governments. Madison expressed a similar view in Federalist No. 46: “The federal and State governments are in fact but different agents and trustees of the people.” Yet references to the people provide no clear answer to the question: who decides interpretive questions about the Constitution? And as Joseph Ellis has pointed out, the demarcation between state and federal sovereignty is but the most obvious of the disagreements that mark the ongoing debate in America. “The source of the disagreement goes much deeper, however, involving conflicting attitudes toward government itself, competing versions of citizenship [and, I would add, who can be an American], differing postures toward the twin goals of freedom and equality.”3

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  The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina

  1514-1861

  • Lawrence S. Rowland, Alexander Moore, George C. Rogers, Jr.(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of South Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  18 Nullification Crisis and the Rise of the Rhett Faction As the prosperity of the first cotton boom began to subside during the 1820s, a crisis developed which was the pivotal political event of the antebellum era in the Beaufort District. This was the Nullification Crisis, which pitted the interests of South Carolina against those of the federal government. The tariff policy of the federal government taxed imported goods in order to protect do-mestic manufacturers. It also placed an ad valorem tax on exported cotton. The tariff was, thus, popular in the North but harmful to the South, whose com-modities became relatively less valuable. South Carolina, therefore, challenged the right of Congress to pass laws harmful to the state's interest. This led to the political turning point of 1832. The political leaders of the Beaufort District played conspicuous and decisive roles in the Nullification Crisis. It was this event which launched the careers of the most famous and influential politicians that the old Beaufort District produced in the antebellum era: Robert Barnwell Rhett, Robert Woodward Barnwell, and William]. Grayson. Just as the Nullification Crisis was a watershed in the political life of South Carolina, it also caused a fundamental shift in the political leadership of the Beaufort District. The district, particularly the sea islands of St. Helena Parish, had always had a reputation for staunch federalism. And even after the Federalist Party had long since been eclipsed in the old South by the Jefferson-Jackson Democratic Party, the political leadership of the southern parishes retained a strong, aristocratic echo of the old Federalists in the persons ofWilliam Lowndes (1782-1822), who represented the Beaufort and Colleton Districts in the U.S. Congress, and William Elliott (1788-1863), who represented St. Helena Parish in the South Carolina Senate from 1818 to 1821 and again in 1831.

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  Nullification and Secession in Modern Constitutional Thought

  • Sanford Levinson(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Kansas

    (Publisher)

  1. The 21st Century Rediscovery of Nullification and Secession in American Political Rhetoric Frivolousness Incarnate, or Serious Arguments to Be Wrestled With? Sanford Levinson NULLIFICATION AND UNCOOPERATIVE FEDERALISM: DISTINCT, BUT HOW TRULY DIFFERENT? What inspires this book is the perception that there may well be said to be a nullificationist (and even secessionist) impulse coursing through contemporary America, not to mention similar impulses abroad identified by Hirschl in his own contribution. The degree to which one perceives the presence of such strains surely depends on the definitions one uses, and there are important differences among the various participants in this volume. Read and Allen, for example, want to confine the use of the term “nullification” to a particular kind of legal claim by a state that it has authority to both opine that a law is unconstitutional and, by virtue of offering that opinion, actually to invalidate it and render it without force. Gienapp also emphasizes the difference between Jefferson’s truly nullificationist language in the Kentucky Resolution and the more modest, though ultimately no less interesting, language of interposition articulated by James Madison in the Virginia Resolution and subsequent Report. I will be offering in this essay, as is true of several other authors, a more functionalist understanding noting that the central aim—which is the placing of severe, even fatal, hurdles in the way of enforcing given federal laws—may well be achieved even in the absence of declarations of invalidity. I begin with a bill passed by the Missouri legislature in 2013, though vetoed by Governor Jay Nixon, that was aptly described as an attempt to nullify federal gun-control laws. 1 According to one reporter, “The Missouri legislation called for misdemeanor charges punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine against federal agents

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  John C. Calhoun's Theory of Republicanism

  • John G. Grove(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Kansas

    (Publisher)

  Calhoun did, of course, believe in an ultimate right of secession in cases of blatant and irreversible injustice as a natural result of the compact theory of the Constitution. This is a difficult conclusion to deny if one accepts the premises of the compact theory. The theoretical defeat of secession, as most of its adversaries discovered, hinged on the rejection of the compact theory in its entirety. As such, the greatest arguments against secession put forward a rival vision of the Constitution’s basis. Nullification and secession, therefore, both derived logically from the compact theory of the Union, but they were separate powers, with the former intended to avoid the terrors of the latter. While Calhoun occasionally made reference to secession, it was almost always as an evil to be avoided unless circumstances were such that the portions of the Union could no longer peaceably and constructively live together. Throughout his career, he never believed that such a point had been reached. He was to the very end an enemy of secession.

  The Practicality of Nullification

  The manner in which the Nullification Crisis played out historically makes a practical evaluation of Calhoun’s arguments difficult. As Calhoun recognized, the outcome of South Carolina’s attempt to nullify would depend on whether the act was accepted as legitimate by the other states. Only if all actors accepted Calhoun’s conception of the Union, and thereby the right of state interposition, could the full process take place. The national dialogue and state conventions called for by Calhoun would have the opportunity to settle the matter of the tariff. As it happened, however, the right to nullify itself was rejected by nearly all—a defeat for Calhoun’s vision of the Union far greater than any political defeat surrounding the tariff. The full effect of Calhoun’s vision, therefore, cannot be judged by the outcome of the Nullification Crisis.

  There were two distinct principles for which Calhoun struggled. First, and most important, was the principle of state interposition. This was the principle that protected the federal union as Calhoun conceived of it. True popular rule, limited government, and the rights of the states, he believed, all depended on this principle. Only through this principle could the Constitution remain superior to government, could the people of each state retain their place as sovereigns in the American political system, and could the basic interests of each section of the country be protected.

  The secondary principle for which Calhoun fought was the specific question of the national government’s power to tax. Did the federal government possess the authority to tax for the purpose of supporting the economic life of one portion of the Union at the expense of another? Or was the power to tax limited to the purpose of revenue? This question is not unrelated to Calhoun’s overall interpretation of the Union: granting a national majority the power to tax for any purpose whatsoever is granting it the power to regulate, restrain, and potentially exploit the minority in essential ways, undermining Calhoun’s conception of the Union as one of equally sovereign members. Nevertheless, this principle did not possess the centrality that the theory of state interposition did. Calhoun could conceivably lose this battle and win the war over the nature of the Constitution.

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  Henry Clay and the American System

  • Maurice G. Baxter(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  40

  Within a few days news arrived at the capital that a South Carolina convention had adopted an ordinance nullifying the tariff statute as unconstitutional and setting up barriers to its enforcement. It proclaimed that this sovereign state would prohibit state officers from compliance. If the national government did not respect nullification, South Carolina would secede from the Union.

  Jackson reacted quickly. In animated conversations he slashed at the miscreant state and its nefarious strategist. The old general vowed he would himself head troops to put down traitors. But characteristically he also assembled a careful if vigorous countermove to nullification. After hurriedly drafting a long statement of his views, he asked Secretary of State Edward Livingston to rework the paper in the context of constitutional law and political principles. Livingston could draw upon his extensive governmental experience and legal scholarship. The final form of Jackson’s proclamation to the people of South Carolina on December 11, 1832, therefore advanced persuasive doctrine, as well as the chief executive’s own convictions. It emphasized the perpetuity of the Union, created by the American people acting through their states. It rejected the claim of a state’s right to nullify a national law or to secede. And it upheld the role of the Supreme Court in interpreting the Constitution. As for secession, he warned, it becomes an insurrection; and “disunion by armed force is treason.”41

  Clay’s reaction to Jackson’s proclamation was mixed. He privately observed that “although there are some good things in it, especially what relates to the Judiciary, there are some entirely too ultra for me.” The senator objected to passages pointing toward consolidation of federal power, which would “irritate instead of allaying any excited feeling.” He had in mind states’ righters such as those in Virginia who disapproved both South Carolina’s nullification and broad national authority.42 General reaction was mixed. Protectionists such as Niles and Webster applauded, but the president’s trusted lieutenant Van Buren also found features of the paper on national power too ultra. The crisis afflicting the country involved such differences of opinion.43

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  Union and States' Rights

  A History and Interpretation of Interposition, Nullification, and Secession 150 Years After Sumter

  • Neil H. Cogan(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • University of Akron Press

    (Publisher)

  83

  One last note on the widespread advocacy of nullification and secession: prior to the Civil War, Americans of vastly different ideological stripes argued for nullification and secession. Abolitionists used multiple mechanisms of nullification in many Northern states, especially in the context of fugitive slaves.84 For example, in response to a U.S. marshal’s arrest of Sherman Booth for violating the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered his release via writ of habeas corpus.85 Later, Booth was convicted in federal district court of violating the act, and again the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered his release via writ of habeas corpus.86 The U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that it faced attempted state nullification of federal law87 and ruled that the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s action violated the Supremacy Clause.88

  That was not the end of Wisconsin’s nullification efforts, however. The Wisconsin legislature issued a resolution stating that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision was “without authority, void, and of no force.”89 The resolution relied on the central nullificationist argument. The Constitution is a state compact, so the states, and not the federal government, each have ultimate interpretative authority within their respective jurisdictions:90 “[T]he several States which formed the instrument, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infractions.”91

  The Civil War silenced nullification and secession advocates.92 Conventional wisdom held that the Civil War eliminated whatever plausibility these claims might once have had.93 The conventional law school curriculum bears this out. Nullification and secession either are not mentioned or are described as claims silenced by the Civil War.94 Other than a brief upsurge in nullification and secession rhetoric during the Civil Rights Era,95 these issues were rarely raised in the political or legal literature.96

  C. Revival of Claims for Nullification

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