832,
addressed to Governor Hamilton, was a simpler and clearer presentation
of the same body of doctrine.

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 with