The Tariff of 1828 Was So Hated Its Enemies Called It the Tariff of Abominations

Here is a puzzle. A bill is introduced in Congress by men who do not want it to pass. They load it with provisions so extreme that, in their calculation, it will be voted down and the blame will fall on their political rivals. They count the votes carefully. Then the bill passes anyway, becomes law and nearly breaks up the Union.

That is not a satire. It is a fair summary of how the Tariff of 1828 came to be, and the story is one of the best teaching cases in American history for anyone who wants to understand tariffs, federalism and the limits of clever politics. It is also useful for a particular audience: the two camps of conservatives who now argue about trade. One camp says tariffs are taxes on Americans and distort the economy. The other says a country needs to protect its industries and its workers. Both can learn something from 1828, and I will say what.

The background: a young country and its tariffs

Start with the constitutional text. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power "To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises." Duties on imports were the main source of federal revenue for the first century of the republic, since there was no income tax until the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913. The very first revenue act of the new government, in 1789, was a tariff. So the question was never whether the federal government could levy tariffs. It was how high, on what and for whose benefit.

In 1791 Alexander Hamilton, as Treasury Secretary, submitted a Report on Manufactures arguing that tariffs and other aid could help young American industries grow. Congress did not adopt his program in full, but the idea lived on. After the War of 1812, which cut off British manufactured goods and spurred domestic manufacturing, a protective tariff was passed in 1816, and the idea of tariffs as a tool of national development gained support, especially in the Northeast and the Middle states. Henry Clay of Kentucky later gave the idea a name, the American System, which paired protective tariffs with federal spending on roads and canals. (For the conservative case that Hamilton's argument has force, see Hamilton's Report on Manufactures and the conservative case for tariffs.) A new tariff in 1824 raised duties further.

The geography of interest mattered enormously. The North had manufacturers who wanted protection from British competition. The South, and in particular the cotton-growing states, had no such industries. Southern planters sold cotton abroad, mostly to Britain, and bought manufactured goods in return. A tariff on imports raised the prices they paid, and because it reduced British sales in America, they feared it would also reduce Britain's ability to buy American cotton. To a Southern planter, a protective tariff looked like a tax on his purchases for the benefit of Northern factories. The sectional fault line ran straight through the tariff schedule.

The 1828 act: a scheme that backfired

Now to the bill. By 1827 and 1828, supporters of Andrew Jackson were organizing to defeat President John Quincy Adams in the election of 1828. Adams favored protection and internal improvements. The Jackson coalition included Southerners who opposed high tariffs and Northerners and Westerners who wanted them, and the leaders needed a tariff bill that would not split their own side.

The legend, which most historians accept in outline, is that Jackson's allies, among them Senator Martin Van Buren of New York, a master of political arrangement, designed a bill with high duties on raw materials, such as wool, hemp, flax and iron, as well as on manufactured goods. The raw-material duties would please the farmers and miners of the West and Middle states, while making the whole package so unattractive to New England manufacturers, who used those raw materials, that the bill would fail. The blame, they figured, would fall on the Adams men.

It did not work. The bill passed Congress, with enough New England votes to carry it, and President Adams signed it into law on May 19, 1828. It raised duties on a wide range of imports, in many cases to levels well above those of earlier tariffs. I will not hand you an exact percentage, because the effective rate depended on the item and on the way duties were measured, and historians describe the average in different ways. The point is that it was a very high protective tariff, and its opponents in the South gave it a name that stuck: the Tariff of Abominations.

I would add a note of caution on the story of the plot. Historians differ on how deliberate the scheme was and on how much the final bill reflected design rather than the ordinary horse-trading of a legislature. What no one disputes is that the act's high duties on raw materials and finished goods made it intolerable to the South, and that it was passed during a bruising election season.

Calhoun's Exposition and Protest

The most important response came from South Carolina and from its most famous son, John C. Calhoun. Calhoun was the Vice President of the United States, serving under Adams, and in a twist of political fate he was also running for reelection on Jackson's ticket. He had once been a nationalist who supported the tariff of 1816. By 1828 he had changed his mind completely.

In the autumn of 1828, at the request of the South Carolina legislature, Calhoun wrote a lengthy document that was published anonymously in December as the South Carolina Exposition and Protest. Its argument was constitutional and radical. Calhoun said that the tariff was not a revenue measure but a protective measure, designed to benefit one section at the expense of another, and that Congress had no constitutional authority to levy a duty for the purpose of protection. More important, he argued that the states, as the parties that had created the Union, had the right to judge when the federal government had exceeded its powers, and to nullify, that is, to declare void within their borders, a federal law they judged unconstitutional.

He drew on an older tradition. Thomas Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions and James Madison's Virginia Resolutions, written in 1798 and 1799 in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, had asserted that the states could object to unconstitutional federal acts. Calhoun pushed the idea much further, into a doctrine under which a single state could block the enforcement of a federal law.

I want to be fair to the objection. The South had a real grievance about the economics of the tariff, and the constitutional claim that protection was not a legitimate purpose of a revenue power had a respectable pedigree on the early states' rights side. But the remedy, nullification, did not follow from the grievance.

1830 to 1832: the argument sharpens

Over the next years the debate intensified. In January 1830, Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina and Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts held their famous debate, in which Hayne defended the states' rights position and Webster answered with a stirring defense of the Union, ending with a plea for liberty and Union, "one and inseparable." Calhoun, now openly breaking with Jackson, set out his case in the Fort Hill Address of 1831.

Congress responded to the Southern anger with a new act, the Tariff of 1832, which lowered some of the highest duties but kept the protective principle. For South Carolina's leaders it was not enough.

On November 24, 1832, a special convention in South Carolina passed the Ordinance of Nullification. It declared the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null and void within the state and forbade the collection of the duties after February 1, 1833. It also warned that any attempt by the federal government to use force would lead the state to consider secession.

Jackson's answer: the Proclamation and the Force Bill

Many people expected Jackson, a Southerner and a champion of states' rights in other contexts, to side with South Carolina. He did not. Jackson disliked the tariff, and he supported lowering it. But he regarded nullification as an attack on the Union itself.

On December 10, 1832, he issued a Proclamation to the People of South Carolina, a long and forceful document, drafted with help from his Secretary of State, Edward Livingston. He argued that the Constitution created a government that acted directly on the people, not merely on the states, and that no state had the right to annul a federal law. Among its most quoted lines is the warning that "disunion, by armed force, is TREASON." (Read the proclamation yourself; its language about the nature of the Union is a primary source worth the time.)

Jackson also asked Congress for legal authority to enforce the tariff, including the use of force if necessary. The result was the Force Bill, formally the Enforcement Act, which Congress passed and Jackson signed on March 2, 1833.

Meanwhile, Calhoun resigned the vice presidency on December 28, 1832, to take a seat in the Senate, where he could defend South Carolina's position directly. The country watched a confrontation between a President and a state that could have turned violent.

The Compromise Tariff of 1833

The crisis ended in a bargain. Henry Clay, the architect of the American System and a supporter of protection, worked with Calhoun to craft a compromise. The Compromise Tariff of 1833 provided for a gradual reduction of duties over about ten years, bringing most of them down to a modest level by 1842. It was signed on March 2, 1833, the same day as the Force Bill. The combination, a firm assertion of federal authority plus a real reduction in the tariff, allowed both sides to claim something.

South Carolina's convention then met again, repealed its ordinance against the tariffs, and, in a final gesture of defiance, declared the Force Bill null. It was a symbolic act, since the Force Bill was never needed. The crisis ended without bloodshed, but the question of whether a state could nullify a federal law had not been settled in the South's mind. Three decades later it was settled by war.

What the story teaches

Let me put the lessons in numbered points, first for the general reader, then for each conservative camp.

1. Tariffs are a tax, and taxes that fall unevenly breed resentment. The tariff's burden fell more heavily on one region than another. When a law's costs and benefits line up along a regional or class divide, the politics become dangerous. That is a warning to anyone who thinks that protection is costless.

1. Constitutional grievances do not justify unconstitutional remedies. South Carolina had a case that the tariff was unfair. It did not have a case that it could void a federal law. The Constitution provides a way to change a bad law: persuade Congress, elect a different Congress and, if necessary, amend the Constitution. Article VI makes the Constitution and the laws made under it "the supreme Law of the Land." Madison himself, in his later years, rejected the nullifiers' use of his 1799 Virginia Resolutions. A conservative who values the rule of law cannot approve of a state declaring itself judge of its own case.

1. Clever politics is a poor guide to policy. The men who designed the bill to fail were undone by their own arithmetic. A law written to embarrass a rival is a law written for the wrong reason, and it has consequences beyond the election.

1. Compromise can be a conservative virtue. The crisis ended because Jackson held firm on the Union and Clay and Calhoun found a way to lower the temperature. A prudent statesman knows when to insist and when to give.

For the free-trade conservative

The free-trade camp has a strong case in this history. The 1828 act shows how protection becomes a bidding war among special interests, with duties on the raw materials one industry needs raised to please another. The tariff produced no gain that outweighed the harm to Southern farmers and to the Union's unity. It also shows how quickly a trade measure can become a constitutional crisis. For the economic logic of why open trade benefits both sides, see Comparative advantage explained with Ricardo's wine and English cloth and a trade deficit is not a loss, and the accounting identity proves it. And the same story of a protective program that spread its costs thinly appears in the sugar program makes every family pay more so a few growers earn more.

For the tariff-hawk conservative

The tariff-hawk camp should take the story seriously too, and it has points to make. Tariffs were a main source of revenue in the early republic, and Hamilton's argument for protecting infant industries has serious defenders. The nation industrialized behind tariff walls in the nineteenth century, and the lesson of 1828 is not that tariffs are always wrong. It is that how you impose them matters. A tariff that is narrowly targeted, tied to a clear national interest and constitutionally grounded is a different thing from a sweeping log-rolled schedule that falls on one region. And the constitutional power of Congress to set duties is undisputed. (See Who can raise tariffs? Article I, Section 232 and the delegated power for who holds that power today, and The China shock was real, and what free traders and tariff hawks each get right for the modern debate.) But the hawk must also answer the South's complaint: a policy that enriches one group and burdens another needs a better justification than "it is good for industry."

Why it still matters

The tariff question has not gone away, and neither has the constitutional question underneath it. The Constitution gives Congress, not the President, the power over duties, and Congress has delegated pieces of that power over time. An honest conservative debate over trade should start with who has the authority and end with who bears the cost.

The nullification crisis also left a lasting lesson about the Union itself. The Founders had hoped that a federal system, with power divided between the nation and the states, would protect liberty. That works only if both levels accept the Constitution as the common rule. When a state claimed the right to decide for itself which laws to obey, the whole structure was at risk. Jackson's answer, that the Union is a government of the people and not a league of states that any member can leave at will, set a precedent that Lincoln would cite in 1861. You can read the constitutional text, including Article I, Section 8 and Article VI, at the Constitution page.

The case in brief

1. The Tariff of 1828, signed on May 19, 1828, set very high duties, partly through a political scheme that backfired, and the cotton South, which sold abroad and bought manufactured goods, called it the Tariff of Abominations.
2. Calhoun's Exposition and Protest of 1828 argued that states could nullify unconstitutional federal laws, and in November 1832 South Carolina's Ordinance of Nullification declared the tariffs void.
3. Jackson answered with his Proclamation of December 10, 1832, and the Force Bill of March 2, 1833, while the Compromise Tariff of 1833 gradually lowered duties.
4. The crisis teaches that unevenly borne taxes breed resentment, that a constitutional grievance does not justify nullification and that compromise can serve the Union.
5. Free-trade conservatives should note how protection turns into log-rolling, and tariff hawks should note that duties must be targeted and justified, not sectional.

What you can do: read Article I, Section 8 and Article VI at the Constitution page on this site, then ask your representative in writing which body, Congress or the President, should have the final say on tariff rates.