modation; and that the majority should not insist upon the execution of measures injurious to the minority simply because it had the power to do so.
Such reasoning would have commended itself at least to the candid and respectful consideration of fair-minded men, had it aimed only at constitutional means for its enforcement. But when it was accompanied with threats of the nullification of laws, and the eventual secession of states from the Union, it assumed the character of aggressive hostility to the Republic.
The excitement on account of the tariff of 1828 was kept under a certain restraint so long as it was expected that Jackson, although at first favoring protection, would, as a Southern man, be mindful of Southern interests. He had, indeed, in his messages gradually abandoned the doctrine advanced in his Coleman letter, and recommended a revision of the tariff to the end of reducing the revenue and of giving up high protective duties as a system. But he signed the tariff act of 1832, which kept the protective system virtually intact. The agitation in the South then received a new impulse, and in South Carolina the nullifiers, for the first time, won complete possession of the state government.
Calhoun, anticipating the acquiescence of Jackson in the continuance of the protective system, had elaborately formulated the doctrine of nullification in an “Address to the People of South Carolina,” published in the summer of 1831. It
