Matters were at last brought to a head by a new piece of tariff legislation which was passed in 1832 not to appease South Carolina but to take advantage of a comfortable state of affairs that had arisen in the national treasury.  The public lands were again selling well, and the late tariff laws were yielding lavishly.  The national debt was dwindling to the point of disappearance, and the country had more money than it could use.  Jackson therefore called upon Congress to revise the tariff system so as to reduce the revenue, and in the session of 1831-32 several bills to that end were brought forward.  The scale of duties finally embodied in the Act of July 14, 1832, corrected many of the anomalies of the Act of 1828, but it cut off some millions of revenue without making any substantial change in the protective system.  Virginia and North Carolina voted heavily for the bill, but South Carolina and Georgia as vigorously opposed it; and the nullifiers refused to see in it any concession to the tariff principles for which they stood.  “I no longer consider the question one of free trade,” wrote Calhoun when the passage of the bill was assured, “but of consolidation.”  In an address to their constituents the South Carolina delegation in Congress declared that “protection must now be regarded as the settled policy of the country,” that “all hope from Congress is irrevocably gone,” and that it was for the people to decide “whether the rights and liberties which you received as a precious inheritance from an illustrious ancestry shall be tamely surrendered without a struggle, or transmitted undiminished to your posterity.”

In the disaffected State events now moved rapidly.  The elections of the early autumn were carried by the nullifiers, and the new Legislature, acting on the recommendation of Governor Hamilton, promptly called a state convention to consider whether the “federal compact” had been violated and what remedy should be adopted.  The 162 delegates who gathered at Columbia on the 19th of November were, socially and politically, the elite of the State:  Hamiltons, Haynes, Pinckneys, Butlers—­almost all of the great families of a State of great families were represented.  From the outset the convention was practically of one mind; and an ordinance of nullification drawn up by a committee of twenty-one was adopted within five days by a vote of 136 to 26.

The tariff acts of 1828 and 1832 were declared “null, void, and no law, nor binding upon this State, its officers or citizens.”  None of the duties in question were to be permitted to be collected in the State after February 1, 1833.  Appeals to the federal courts for enforcement of the invalidated acts were forbidden, and all officeholders, except members of the Legislature, were required to take an oath to uphold the ordinance.  Calhoun had laboriously argued that nullification did not mean disunion.  But his contention was not sustained by the words of the ordinance, which stated unequivocally that