American Perspective

Union at Risk, historian Richard Ellis confronts the most singularly formative event of Andrew Jackson's two presidential terms: The Nullification Crisis of 1832 and 1833. In response to tariffs enacted by the Congress in Washington in the late 1820s, the State of South Carolina declared their legal independence from national laws. Avoiding the tariffs, South Carolina poses a real threat to the Jackson administration with serious national repercussions; responsively, Jackson issued a Proclamation asserting the foremost power of the Federal government.

Because legal action means little to a state already refusing Washington's insistence, Jackson found executive support in the Force Act, allowing national laws to be enforced on a state-wide basis with troops. The assuagement of the crisis by Henry Clay brought solvent end to this doctrinal crisis between states' rights and national policy.

Richard Ellis argues that this decisive moment in 19th century politics not only connected to other areas of the Jackson administration, from National Bank conflict to Supreme Court relations and Indian policy, but lays the foundation for the sectional conflict integral to the ideology of the Civil War. Traditional approach to history proffers an idea among most historians that Andrew Jackson's presidency was characterized by a coherent ideological politic, with the Nullification Crisis standing out as a singular anomaly.

This perspective approaches South Carolina as a perniciously petulant adolescent in the national arena, pushing towards rebellion while disagreeing forces brought questions of unionism and nationalism to the greater national attention than that of monopolies and social and corporate special industries. Jackson countered with a united front, isolating the South Carolina political outlaws with the Compromise Tariff of 1833 and peacefully resolved crisis. Ellis marks a different approach.

Instead of aligning himself with the more traditional views, he purports the Nullification as "one of the central events" (ix) shaping the Jacksonian Democracy when examining constitutional and ideological facets of the tiered American government. Ellis reminds the historian that the South Carolina rebels were not cut off from support, as was intended by Washington, but instead found further allies throughout the South and among certain individuals and parties in the North.

In fact, Ellis argues, the whole saga did not turn out so much in Jackson's interest at all; "at the end of the crisis," he wrote, "it was Jackson, not the nullifiers, who was isolated." (180) Washington's blundering, Ellis insists, allowed for South Carolina to seek and gain the sympathy of other powers that ended more in their favor and that of Calhoun, not Jackson. As he marches through the familiar history of this prominent moment in the American fabric, he approaches old problems with new answers.

The most notable predicament presented by the Nullification Crisis is reconciling the imperative defensive of the country exhibited by Andrew Jackson and the president's sincere conviction to the principles of states' rights. Through investigatory history, he makes reliable discourse into the revolutionary period to trace the doctrinal intent of the states' rights ideology, concluding with the theory that the nullification was largely a battle between different approaches to states' rights conceptualization, rather than an argument between sectionalism and nationalism.

Ellis presents a vision of Jackson as a president who believed in majority rule, divided sovereignty, decentralized power, and the Union. His opponent in Nullification, Calhoun, urged for state sovereignty, minority rights, and the legitimacy of secession. Each advocated states' rights, but they did so differently; each politician exhibited his approach in a manger congruent to their larger thought, not like the eventual anomaly Nullification is presented to be by traditional thought.

According to Ellis, though, Jackson's major misstep was in underestimating the conviction of South Carolina's principled states' rights program. While he calculated his approach to the South Carolina situation with centralized strength through the Proclamation and power through the Force Bill, he did not take into account the power of South Carolina's leaders to use the opportunity to turn the tables from the national debate of nullification to that of tariff reform and the right of the Executive to compel a state to remain in the Union.

The new conversation, as spun by Carolinian pundits, struck a powerful chord throughout the South, and Jackson found many of his states' rights companions in the North citing the legitimacy of their cause. Ellis makes his most powerful argument to rationalize the ensuing repercussions; according to him, Jackson sided with Henry Clay not out of theoretical accord, but instead "as a face-saving device." (181) Accepting the Clay tariff concession and compromise, Jackson faced a split nation and a weakened democracy just as the Bank War resumed.

According to Ellis, he was a weakened executive now forced to deal with a more united front, a powerful blow to his administration. Ellis argues that the Nullification, incongruous Union, and the newly supine President left a cadre of legacies, all far-reaching, and dangerous to the role of the Federal government and concept of Union as the South adopted widespread secessionist thought, states' rights, and the legality of the proslavery argument.

Essentially, Ellis argues that Jackson's handling of the Nullification Crisis resulted in a national closet of problems, the greatest of which was the production of a southern Whig movement. Critics argue that Ellis fails to make his point in many ways; commonly, his argument does not convincingly overturn the conventional idea that the Jacksonian isolation of South Carolina permitted Calhoun to seek accommodation.

The suasion offered to explain the early Southeastern argument for secession does not surmount the commonly held and well-reasoned association with the rise of popular anti-slavery movements and the rise of slavery-related discussion brought on by the annexation of Texas and other incidents. Ellis also undermines the wave of Calhoun-like thinkers, whose new approach to politic incorporated perpetual slaver and minority projection under the banner of states' rights. Simply enough, Jacksonian democracy grew socially hackneyed and Calhoun was the new variety. Additionally, he struggles with his subject.

While his length dive into history presents a new scope for analysis, he accomplishes this structured, narrow, deep focus at the expense of the broader perspective, which in particular light of the Nullification Crisis is inextricably important.

He spends more time discussing the Calhoun problem, the resolution of minority issues, the argument between states and theorists about the actual meaning of States' Rights, and the misstep provided by Washington and amended by Henry Clay than recognizing the greater movement widening throughout the South and the strengthening forces of opposition north of the Mason-Dixon line.

His interpretation of the Nullification Crisis resolved in a more decisive and polarized ending than other histories exhibit; he neglects to address the bipartisan approach to the movement starting in South Carolina and provides too early a conceptualization of the Jacksonian Democracy. His discussion of the Nullification Crisis in light of states' rights and the developing Jacksonian Democracy has an.