South Carolina had traveled a long road, politically, since 1789.  In the days of Washington and the elder Adams the State was strongly Federalist.  In 1800 Jefferson secured its electoral vote.  But the Virginian’s leadership was never fully accepted, and even before the Republican party had elsewhere submitted to the inevitable nationalization the South Carolina membership was openly arrayed on the side of a protective tariff, the National Bank, and internal improvements.  Calhoun and Cheves were for years among the most ardent exponents of broad constitutional construction; Hayne himself was elected to the Senate in 1822 as a nationalist, and over another candidate whose chief handicap was that he had proposed that his State secede rather than submit to the Missouri Compromise.

After 1824 sentiment rapidly shifted.  The cause appeared to be the tariff; but in reality deeper forces were at work.  South Carolina was an agricultural State devoted almost exclusively to the raising of cotton and rice.  Soil and climate made her such, and the “peculiar institution” confirmed what Nature already had decreed.  But the planters were now beginning to feel keenly the competition of the new cotton lands of the Gulf plains.  As production increased, the price of cotton fell.  “In 1816,” writes Professor Turner, “the average price of middling uplands...was nearly thirty cents, and South Carolina’s leaders favored the tariff; in 1820 it was seventeen cents, and the South saw in the protective system a grievance; in 1824 it was fourteen and three-quarters cents, and the South Carolinians denounced the tariff as unconstitutional."[11]

Men of the Clay-Adams school argued that the tariff stimulated industry, doubled the profits of agriculture, augmented wealth, and hence promoted the well-being of the nation as a whole.  The Southern planter was never able to discover in the protective system any real advantage for himself, but as long as the tariffs were moderate he was influenced by nationalistic sentiment to accept them.  The demand for protection on the part of the Northern manufacturers seemed, however, insatiable.  An act of 1824 raised the duties on cotton and woolen goods.  A measure of 1827 which applied to woolens the ruinous principle already applied to cottons was passed by the House and was laid on the table in the Senate only by the casting vote of Vice President Calhoun.  The climax was reached in the Tariff Act of 1828, which the Southerners themselves loaded with objectionable provisions in the vain hope of making it so abominable that even New England congressmen would vote against it.

A few years of such legislation sufficed to rouse the South to a deep feeling of grievance.  It was no longer a question of reasonable concession to the general national good.  A vast artificial economic system had been set up, whose benefits accrued to the North and whose burdens fell disproportionately upon the South.  The tone and temper of the manufacturing sections and of the agricultural West gave no promise of a change of policy.  The obvious conclusion was that the planting interests must find some means of bringing pressure to bear for their own relief.