When a northern imposition of tariffs, ratified in Pennsylvania in 1828, began to damage southern income, the 'abomination,' as this legislation was labeled, became a flashpoint for Southern identification with anti-federalist principles. This spoke to one of the strengthening ideological holdings in the South as it pertained to maintaining a slave-labor system in spite of the nation's prevailing cultural, ethical and economical trends.
The South would generally hold that the Constitution was conflictive to the independence of states.
In the unfolding dispute between the regions, South Carolina would be a leader for the concept of nullification, which as explicated in a doctrine anonymously written by southern leader John C. Calhoun, would entitle states to undermine Federal laws that were inconsistent the individual states' constitutions. An act which elicited a military response against South Carolina from then president, Andrew Jackson, this underscored the extremity of distinction in economic interest which had become apparent between the United States and the South. By no coincidence, South Carolina would also be the first state to officially secede from the Union several decades hence.
As the prevailing trends in the new nation, and indeed throughout the world, suggested that the days of free labor were waning, the South grew increasingly defensive of its philosophical opposition to Federalism. Its promotion of Federal authority over individual states rights suggested that Northern abolitionist movements demanding...
could have far-reaching effects on life in the South. During this period, "the Revolutionary-era assertion that slaves were a valid form of property grew into a demand that slaveholders could bring and treat that property as such anywhere upon the territory of the United States, a reflecting of the crux of American political history: 'a fight between
democracy and the rights of property'" (Rosenberg, 1) Here, any efforts to draw an origin in distinction between North and South to disagreements emerging during the late 18th and early
19th century regarding Constitutionality must be considered erroneous. At their core, these
claims must truly be traced to the implications of slavery, both racial and economic. There is evidence that the splitting seams of the United States as the 19th century commenced were the manifestation of distinctions taken on 200 years prior.
Works Cited
APVA. (1997). History of
Jamestown. The Association for Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. Ret. Online at http://www.apva.org/history/.
Morrison, Michael. (1997). Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of
Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil
War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Rosenberg, Daniel. (2005). Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery,
Property Rights and the Economic Origins of the Civil War. The Historian, Vol. 67.
Woodworth, Steven E. (2000). Cultures in Conflict: The American Civil War. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
