Debate Driven By Districts: Nullification at the Local Level in South Carolina

Protective tariffs have long been a controversial topic in the United States, as individual states often have grievances with their implementation. The most dangerous of these controversies was the Nullification Crisis, a sectional conflict that almost led to South Carolina’s secession from the Union 30 years before the Civil War. Despite the wealth of scholarship that has covered the Nullification Crisis, no analysis has fully concentrated on the debates that drove the conflict on the local level. These local meetings and debates sought to settle where individual districts stood on key issues underscoring the crisis, such as the tariff itself, opinions on President Jackson, and on deciding whether nullification was truly the answer to their grievances. By analyzing these local debates and synthesizing them with the existing scholarship, this paper identifies where overgeneralizations have been made about local actors and how placing them in their proper context enhances our understanding of the Nullification Crisis and how sectional crises develop and evolve in 19th Century America.