mercial that we can only expect to find her offering a strong support in return for the advantages which she gained from Clay's measures. The strength of the American system in Virginia lay largely in the west and in the commercial districts as well along the Potomac as in the tidewater region. The counties along the Ohio and the Great Kanawha were primarily interested in wool-growing and in the salt industry; at the same time it was thought that there were possibilities for extensive manufacturing there in the future. Along with protection were urged appropriations for internal improvement schemes which were always popular there, means of transportation being necessary to the development of the mineral resources of western Virginia. North Carolina at the time presented largely only possibilities. In the western part of the state there was a desire for internal improvements and a not unimportant pro-bank feeling. On the other hand, the antitariff sentiment in that section was, in the early thirties, even stronger. But there were reasonable hopes for an awakening in North Carolina; the situation there required only strong and active leaders and political events were soon to bring them forward. In the other southern states, anti-tariff feeling was all but unanimous while internal improvements and the bank had but a small and scattered following.*

The advocates of federal paternalism were, then, at the beginning of our period clearly in a minority in the southern states. Indeed, as the sectional self-conscious

2

5 Ambler, Sectionalism in Virginia, passim, maps. "Niles' Register, XLV, 242; XLIX, 185.

Cf. petitions for internal improvements, House Journal, 21 Cong., 120, 162.

sess.,

See Niles' Register, XLIII, 194, 220, etc. See also Mangum MSS.

ness of the South steadily developed, the cause of Clay and his system became daily more and more hopeless. Thus it would seem that if the Whig party of the thirties had been the nationalistic organization that it proved itself to be in its prime, it could scarcely have dreamed of success in the South. This idea, therefore, must at once be dismissed as untenable. Early whiggery was, in the South especially, quite a different thing from an endorsement of the measures for which Henry Clay stood. During the early years of the movement it never pretended to be more than an anti-Jackson-Van Buren or opposition party on a broad basisa party hospitable to every faction that was willing to join the cause.

For, strangely enough, the nationalists were to find an element of strength in one of the greatest disadvantages from which they suffered—namely, in the fact that they were now out of touch with the federal administration. Regarded with contempt by the party in power, they were powerless to do more than offer a feeble and futile opposition to it until circumstances linked them in common cause against Jackson with allies who, though on the opposite extreme in constitutional interpretation, were soon ready for any policy by which they might break the power of the president. The addition of these new elements for the Whig coalition that was soon to form was made possible by schism in the ranks of those who had raised Jackson to the presidency. It is important that the first faction to break from earlier associations was the one that was led by political exigencies to carry its doctrines of strict construction and the sovereignty of the states to their utmost extremity.

State rights doctrines had long found a stronghold in the South. It was in the South that Jefferson and Madison had promulgated the doctrines of the Republican party of 1798 in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. Jefferson, moreover, had continued to be the champion of these principles in the old Dominion during the succeeding decades, when events tended to force that interpretation of federal relations into the background. With him cooperated John Randolph of Roanoke, while Nathaniel Macon actively directed the particularistic forces in the neighboring state of North Carolina. In South Carolina and Georgia the want of such leaders, combined with other causes, made the period from 1798 to the early twenties one of comparative inactivity as far as the development of state rights theories there was concerned."

Amid the fervent outburst of nationalism that followed the War of 1812 it was apparently in vain that such southern leaders as Macon endeavored to rouse the South to the dangers of a liberal construction of the constitution. It was a sectional appeal; for, as Macon pointed out, "The states having no slaves may not feel as strongly, as the states having slaves about stretching the constitution; because no such interest is to be touched by it." There was logic in his argument that "if Congress can make banks, roads, and canals under the constitution, they can free any slave in the United States"; but it was logic which southerners seemed for the time to fail to appreciate.10

Phillips, Georgia and State Rights, 98-116; Houston, Nuflification in South Carolina, 6-7.

10 See Macon's letters to Bartlett Yancey, dated March 8, April 15, 1818, Dec. 26, 1824, Dec. 8, 1825; Wilson, Congressional Career of Nathaniel Macon, 46-47, 49, 72, 76.

When, however, the insistent demand of the manufacturing states to the north for protection to American industry brought the beginning of a high tariff system, a revival and development of strict construction and particularistic doctrines took place. The South then found itself forced to contribute toward a cause in which it had no material interest. As soon as the logical results of this situation were realized, able leaders stepped forward to protect the interests of their section by appealing to the rights of the individual states. Floyd, Tazewell, and Tyler in Virginia, together with Hayne of South Carolina and men like Mangum of North Carolina and Gilmer and Berrien of Georgia, labored with Macon and Randolph to check the progress of the American system on account of the heavy burdens it was placing on the South. They were soon denying the constitutionality of the various measures which were put forward despite the growing opposition of the planting states. It remained but for Calhoun, following the already radical lead of South Carolina, to evolve a remedy by which, though claiming not to have gone an inch beyond the opinions of the Republican party of 1798," he was led to the extremes of particularism. At once he became the champion of the "adhesive rights of southern freemen". His theory of nullification was to provide a certain solution when everything else had failed. His doctrines spread rapidly through the southern Atlantic states and also into Alabama and Mississippi."

With Calhoun in the vice-presidential chair and with evidences of friendship from President Jackson at the

11 Calhoun Correspondence, ed. Jameson, 298.

12 Ibid., 302-303. Floyd MSS., etc.

Cf. letters in Mangum MSS., Duff Green MSS.,

opening of his first administration the southern particularists had very natural hopes of strengthening their position. The "tariff of abominations" had greatly added to their following, and local issues, as the Creek Indian difficulties in Georgia, had led to frequent assertions of the reserved rights of the states and sometimes to open defiance of the claims of the general government." Jackson had led many to believe that he was decidedly friendly to the particularist cause from his course in regard to the controversy between Georgia and the Cherokees." In 1830 the nullifiers of South Carolina were claiming him as their friend." But suspicion was aroused when his administration brought about the fulfillment of none of the cherished hopes of the southern state rights leaders. In spite of their protests, the bank, the tariff, and the judiciary remained as engines of oppression to crush to earth the people of the South. Calhoun early became dissatisfied with the halting course of his chief which to him clearly did not seem to help toward a cordial union of the South for a redress of grievances. In the spring of 1830, at the close of the first year of their joint administration, a bitter personal controversy brought to an end all friendly relations between the two men." When the cabinet was reorganized in the summer of 1831, Calhoun saw his friends swept from the favor of the

16

12 Niles' Register, XXXII, 16; Ames, State Documents on Federal Relations, 113-124.

14 Clay, Private Correspondence, 329, 331.

15 Poinsett to Jackson, Oct. 23, 1830, Poinsett MSS.

16 Southern Times, March 15, 1831, quoted in Niles' Register, XL, 104-106.

17 See correspondence in Shipp, Life and Times of Wm. H. Crawford, 208-209, 238-250; Calhoun Correspondence, 260, ff.