Here's a good read on the history of Nullification.
freedmenspatrolModerator | Antebellum U.S. Slavery Politics 3 points4 points5 points 2 years ago*
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To some degree nullification was at odds with secession, as it's a strategy for a minority to protect itself within a hostile nation. Secession, of course, is about blowing the joint and daring the rest to stop you. The two did come together, however, in that theorists like John C. Calhoun held that nullification could be appealed to a constitutional convention. But if that convention found against the nullification, the nullifiers could secede.
South Carolina's first practical act of nullification, as it happens, had everything to do with slavery. This is a bit obscure, so forgive a short prologue. The 1820s came in with the Missouri crisis (over the proposal to let Missouri into the Union if and only if slavery was set on a road to ultimate extinction there) It presented the first time that antislavery politics had really gone national and came in quick succession with efforts of the American Colonization Society (Their Plan: deport the slaves to Africa.) to secure some kind of federal support. That looked dangerously like a pathway to compensated emancipation. Previous antislavery efforts were focused on moral persuasion of individual slaveholders and state-level efforts, like those which had given every northern state graduated emancipation plans by 1804. Proslavery southerners didn't love any of those alone, but together they look like the world turning against the Slave Power.
Add on top the Panic of 1819 and resulting depression. Further north, even further north in the slave states, planters could switch to a barter system, plant their own wheat, etc to get by through hard times. They had the option to reduce their involvement in the broader market to weather the storm. South Carolina, where the cotton boom first hit, had a very different situation. The Carolina planters had expanded massively in the upcountry since the invention of the cotton gin made it profitable to do so. That took capital that they did not have and so had borrowed. Thus they could not turtle up, economically, and wait for the sun to shine on them once more. They had bankers coming for payment. To make their financial agony especially exquisite, cotton prices took a dive. Bad weather and lower margins still on Carolina's other staple crop, lowcountry rice, put everyone in a tight bind.
But wait, there's more. There's been some dispute in recent years over just what, if anything, there really was to the Denmark Vesey slave revolt conspiracy. I'm not qualified to comment on that controversy, but the important part for our purposes is that the slaveholders believed it. The conspiracy blew up in and around Charleston in 1822. The leader, Denmark Vesey, was a former slave working in Charleston at the time. He had briefly been in Haiti and the Haitian Revolution's example scared the daylights out of white slaveholders. They imagined that Vesey proposed to bring the Haitian Revolution to their shores, killing every white person he and his people could reach. Once they took guns from the city's arsenal, they would arm field slaves from the hinterland and general disaster would ensue. One of Vesey's lieutenants confessed that the conspirators tried to reach out to the Haitian government via black sailors. To tie these disparate events together a bit, some witnesses claimed inspiration also from remarks made in favor of keeping slavery out of Missouri during the debates over its admission.
Put all of this together and you get many buildings' worth of bricks deposited in the chamber pots. Whatever their protests to the contrary, slaveholders didn't always sleep easy even in the best of times. Clearly they had to do something and quitting slavery was out of the question. They had far too much of their money and their personal identities invested. Thus South Carolina passed the Negro Seaman Act. This required that all black sailors passing through Charleston, then a relatively busy port, free and slave alike, spend their time in the city inside a jail cell. Clearly, the slaves in South Carolina got their ideas from such fell influences.
Aside the obvious, to us, human rights issue this law violated treaties between the United States and the United Kingdom which granted both nations' sailors free access to one another's ports. The British protested. Per the Constitution, treaties were supreme over state law. A Supreme Court justice, from South Carolina no less, gave a circuit ruling (at the time, they traveled around heading circuit courts in addition to having sessions in Washington as a group) to that effect. The Carolinians kept jailing seamen all the same. The Carolina Senate insisted that this was a matter of self-preservation and trumped all laws and treaties to the contrary. Washington opted not to press matters further.
That didn't do all that much to ameliorate the panic in the state, what with the depression still on and all, but it did teach the Carolina radicals a lesson: if they dared, the nation would blink. Between hard times' persistence, that as ground zero for the cotton boom Carolina got planted and planted again to exhaustion, the state's inconveniently small size, and virgin lands opening up (at the expense of the Native Americans) just to the Southwest, those who could quit the state and took their slaves with them in worryingly large numbers. With all these calamities besetting South Carolina, her white elites decided they should put that lesson to use as, somehow, the federal tariff had to be at fault. Why?
Well...slavery. The protectionists of the era argued that, long term, a high tariff would generate domestic production of manufactured goods. This would create American jobs, since imported goods would naturally cost more. South Carolinians in the 1820s did not consider themselves to have the luxury of taking the long view. Furthermore, they didn't really need jobs like more northerly states did. They had slaves. Most of those slaves did agricultural labor on large plantations and so enriched (or should be enriching) their white owners. If you wanted to make it big in Carolina, you bought land and slaves to work it, rather than building a factory. Furthermore, they believed that the high tariff suppressed demand for cotton. The tariff, so they imagined, was just money right out of their already tight margins. They were drowning in red ink and the Yankees wanted to pour more on top, stealing cotton right out of their barns.
There are lots of problems with the simple theory, not the least of which is that Americans would need blankets and other cotton goods at most any price and that by far most of the tariff was collected in New York City's docks rather than Charleston's, but they believed it. They couldn't blame their exhausted soil, their small state, competition with virgin lands elsewhere, or a rather cavalier attitude toward keeping the books (The fashion was to live like gentry who didn't need to worry about money, facts be damned.) It had to be the diabolical tax man stealing into the barn at night and making off with their bales. That the tariff kept going up further made it an attractive scapegoat on which they could try their theory for surviving and preserving themselves in a nation that now seemed aligned against them.
When the Tariff of Abominations, as they called it, jacked the rate to 50%, it was time to flex the might of the minority against the majority. The Vice-President, John C. Calhoun, blazed new ground in states' rights ideology. Before his Exposition and Protest, most states' rights types relied on the Supreme Court to strike down laws that exceeded the authority of the national government. But that Court got its members named by the majority's President and confirmed by the majority's Senate. That would not do. Instead Calhoun placed individual state conventions as the ultimate authority, within their bounds absolutely sovereign.
There was a lot of back and forth over the details here, but they can't obscure the central fact: Calhoun was called upon by his fellow Carolina slaveholders to save Carolina slavery. The Nullification Crisis was all about that, a fact not missed by Calhoun's one-time running mate and latter-day adversary, Andrew Jackson. Nor did Calhoun deny it himself. William Freehling goes into it a bit in his
Road to Disunion, Volume One, from which I've drawn much of this:
The same old-fashioned [eighteenth century political] assumptions lay behind Calhoun's answer to another criticism of his theory: that by protecting white slaveholders from majority attack, he would consolidate black enslavement. Calhoun rejoiced in that charge. He hoped state nullification would stop the federal government from overturning the social hierarchy. Blacks had no right to a freedom that would Africanize America. Property-less whites had no right to tax away gentlemen's property. The upper class had every right to veto the lower. Good paternalism must provide good government for all races.
Then Andrew Jackson's government did not blink as expected.
Paternalism was how slaveholders fancied their relationship to their human property, incidentally. As the antebellum period wore on, Northerners took more and more interest in just what that might mean for them. They didn't like it.
The short version: Nullification theory was developed and practiced as a reaction to increasing pressures on slavery, both real and perceived, on the political and economic stages as informed by the peculiarities of the situation in Carolina at the time. I thus don't think we can consider either the nullification crisis or the tariff taken up as the casus belli for it as unrelated to slavery at all. The other slave states did not rise up with the Carolina radicals then, but they didn't have the same pressures upon them either. Things looked very different to most of them in 1860-1. There the ones who didn't follow Carolina out, and the ones who took their time about it, again had different circumstances.
