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Eventually, the South Carolinians succeeded, and legislators met at a special convention in 1832 to nullify the Tariff of Abominations within the state. Jackson, enraged at the action, dispatched the navy to the South Carolina coast and prepared an army task force of Unionist troops.

The Compromise Tariff of 1833

Fortunately, no shots were ever fired, for the ever-diplomatic Henry Clay proposed a compromise. He suggested that Congress draft a new tariff that would lower the duties over time to the percentage stipulated by the Tariff of 1816. Northern manufacturers protested the loss of their protection, but South Carolinians jumped at the opportunity to resolve the situation without bloodshed. As a result, Congress passed the Compromise Tariff of 1833.

To prevent any future nullification showdowns, Congress simultaneously passed the Force Bill, which authorized the president to use military force to collect tariff duties. Clay thus ended a crisis that could have thrown the North and South into a civil war thirty years earlier than it actually occurred.

Worsening Sectionalism

The Nullification Crisis marked a turning point in North-South relations. More than anything else, southerners saw the Tariff of Abominations as a northern attack on their way of life. Since the political duel over Missouri, southerners had grown increasingly suspicious of what they perceived to be northern designs to stifle them. Indeed, northerners in general were growing increasingly critical of the South’s dependence on slavery. The Nullification Crisis proved to be a boiling point: whereas the regions, though different, had coexisted peacefully in the past, they grew increasingly more hostile toward each other after 1832. This trend would continue until the outbreak of the Civil War.

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