he ordinance of the
South Carolina convention, or any act of its Legislature to give it
effect, should be appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States,
or be regarded if appealed; and that, if the General Government should
employ force to carry these acts into effect, or endeavor to coerce
the State by closing its ports, South Carolina would consider the
Union dissolved, and would proceed to organize a separate government.
A union convention was called in South Carolina to endeavor to
suppress the movement inaugurated by the ordinance of the recent
convention.

The States of Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia--the first through its
Governor, Gayle, and the latter by resolutions of their
Legislatures--took strong anti-nullification grounds. On December 10th
President Andrew Jackson issued his famous proclamation exhorting all
persons to obey the laws, and denouncing the South Carolina ordinance.
He said in this proclamation: "I consider, then, the power to annul a
law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the
existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the
Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every
principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object
for which it was formed."

"This, then, is the position in which we stand. A small majority of
the citizens of one State in the Union have elected delegates to a
State convention. That convention has ordained that all the revenue
laws of the United States must be repealed, or that they are no longer
a member of the Union. The Governor of that State has recommended to
the Legislature the raising of an army to carry the secession into
effect, and that he may be empowered to give clearance to vessels in
the name of the State. No act of violent opposition to the laws has
yet been committed, but such a state of things is hourly apprehended;
and it is the intent of this instrument to proclaim not only that the
duty imposed on me by the Constitution--'to take care that the laws be
faithfully executed'--shall be performed to the extent of the powers
already vested in me by law, or of such other as the wisdom of
Congress shall devise and intrust to me for that purpose, but to warn
the citizens of South Carolina, who have been deluded into an
opposition to the laws, of the danger they will incur by obedience to
the illegal and disorganizing ordinance of the convention; to exhort
those who have r