nullification: Definition, Synonyms from Answers.com
Nullification, the theory which holds that a state can suspend, within its boundaries, a federal law, was a deeply held conviction for many "states' rights" advocates in the nineteenth century, and one of the factors that led to the Civil War (1861–1865). Nullification has its roots in the Enlightenment era of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Political thinkers, such as John Locke, questioned the validity of "divine-right monarchies," and suggested that people had the right to over-turn laws, or entire governments, that did not benefit the governed.
The American Revolution (1775–1783), in which Americans declared themselves independent of Great Britain, was a practical extension of Enlightenment political thought. So was the first government of the United States—the Articles of Confederation—which had no strong central government and reserved most major statutory power for the individual states.
However, the Articles were too weak to function adequately, and in 1787 national leaders drafted the Constitution, which created a strong federal government but reserved many rights to the states. Almost immediately, Antifederalists and later Democrat-Republicans charged that the federal government had amassed too much power.
President John Adams, a Federalist, angered Democrat-Republicans when he sought broad protectionist powers with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. In the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, both Democrat-Republicans, said that the Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional and that states should nullify them. They reasoned that states had given power to the Constitution by approving it in the ratification process, and they could take that power away if it became abusive. While no state nullified the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson and Madison had sanctioned the idea.
In 1828, nullification nearly split the nation. To help domestic manufactures, Congress enacted a high tariff on imported goods. Southerners, afraid that European states would retaliate with high tariffs on cotton and other southern exports, decried the act as the "Tariff of Abominations" and called for its repeal. Vice President John C. Calhoun, a South Carolinian, penned his "South Carolina Exposition and Protest," in which he invoked the theory of nullification to deal with the tariff.
When Tennessean Andrew Jackson was elected President in 1828, Southerners expected him to back a reduced tariff. Instead, Congress enacted an even higher tariff in 1832. Enraged, Calhoun, now a South Carolina senator more stridently called for nullification.
Spurred by Calhoun's rhetoric, the South Carolina legislature passed an Ordinance of Nullification, making the federal tariff null and void and making it a state offense to collect the tariff after 1 February 1833. Jackson surprised Southerners when he backed congressional passage of a "Force Bill" that authorized federal troops to occupy South Carolina and collect the tariff. In the meantime, Congress also passed a "compromise," or reduced tariff. Pleased with the compromise but shaken by Jack-son's threat of force, the South Carolina legislature reconvened in March 1833 and rescinded the Ordinance of Nullification. But to avoid looking cowed by the U.S. Congress, legislators "nullified" the federal Force Bill before they adjourned.
Northern states also dabbled with nullification. In 1814, old line Federalists in New England, angry over Democrat-Republican policies that caused the War of 1812 (1812–1815), sought to nullify federal mandates. And in 1850, some Northern states nullified new fugitive slave laws, part of the Compromise of 1850, that mandated Northern authorities return escaped slaves to the South. Traditionally, though, nullification and states' rights doctrines were the hallmarks of the antebellum South.
Bibliography
Brinkley, Alan et al. American History: A Survey. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.
The doctrine that states can set aside federal laws. Urged in the late 1820s by John C. Calhoun, nullification precipitated a crisis between Calhoun and President Andrew Jackson. The doctrine was foreshadowed by Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Kentucky Resolutions. (See Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions.)