a referendum of the various States on
the subject. If this failed, then secession was to be the remedy.
"Nullification" was the name which this referendum soon acquired.
The attitude of South Carolina was that of every other Southern State
from Virginia to Mississippi, and everywhere it was the older and more
important groups of counties which so bitterly opposed the protective
policy. In Virginia college boys met in formal session and resolved to
wear "homespun" rather than submit to the "yoke" of the Northern
manufacturers; in North Carolina the legislature declared the tariff law
unconstitutional. At the commencement of the University of Georgia the
orator of the occasion appeared in a suit of white cotton cloth, while
his valet wore the cast-off suit of shining broadcloth. The "Tariff of
Abominations," passed in 1828, was producing revolutionary results in
all the region where tobacco, cotton, and rice were grown, and this was
the governing section of the South.[1]
[Footnote 1: See maps on pp. 133, 134.]
Nor was this all; Georgia was still at the point of making actual war
upon the United States because the President and Congress did not remove
the Creek and Cherokee Indians as rapidly as the cotton planters
desired. The Cherokees had declared themselves a State within the
boundaries of Georgia, defied both local and national authority, and
applied to the United States Supreme Court for recognition and support.
The Government of Georgia had formally spread her laws over the Indian
lands and imprisoned those who resisted her sway.
This Indian problem which Jackson would have to solve was of the utmost
importance to all the region from Georgia to northwestern Louisiana, for
in that region lived the ambitious and prosperous cotton planters, who
were bent on getting possession of all the fertile lands of their
section, and the legislatures of Alabama and Mississippi followed the
example of Georgia in assuming jurisdiction over all Indians within
their boundaries. Jackson entertained no tender scruples about
dispossessing the natives, a fact which was well known and widely
advertised. When, therefore, Crawford, who had been very popular with
the planters of all the South, gave up his antagonism to the Tennessee
candidate, and joined with the friends of Calhoun, whom Crawford hated
only a little more than he had disliked Jackson, there was no
substantial resistance in any of the States, from South Carolina to
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