Adams, elected in 1824, hoped to use the national authority to foster all sorts of useful projects. He asked Congress for a federal program of internal improvements so vast that even Clay boggled when he realized its scope. He came out for aid to manufacturing and agriculture, for a national university, and even for a government astronomical observatory. For a nationalist of unchallengeable Jeffersonian origins like Clay or Calhoun to have pressed for so extensive a program would have been politically risky. For the Son of John Adams to do so was disastrous; every doubter remembered his Federalist background and decided that he was trying to overturn the glorious “Revolution of 1800.” Adams, though nominally a Democrat, was acting like a Federalist!
Adams proved to be his own worst enemy, for he was an inept politician. Although capable on occasion of turning a phrase—in his first annual message to Congress he described astronomical observatories as “light-houses of the skies”—his general style of public utterance was bumbling and cumbersome. Knowing that many citizens considered things like observatories impractical extravagances, he urged Congress not to be “palsied by the will of our constituents.” To persuade Americans, who were almost pathological on the subject of monarchy, to support his road building program, he cited with approval the work being done abroad by “the nations of Europe and. . . their rulers,” which revived fears that all Adamses were royalists at heart. He was insensitive to the ebb and flow of public feeling; even when he wanted to move with the tide, he seldom managed to dramatize and publicize his stand effectively. Many Americans, for example, endorsed a federal bankruptcy law to protect poor debtors; Adams agreed, but instead of describing himself as a friend of debtors, he called for the “amelioration” of the “often oppressive codes relating to insolvency” and buried the recommendation at the tail end of a dull state paper.
•••-[Read the Document John Quincy Adams, Inaugural Address at myhistorylab. com
Calhoun's Exposition and Protest
The tariff question added to the president’s troubles. An increasingly powerful federal government required higher revenues—and higher duties—culminating in what became known as the record-high 1828 “Tariff of Abominations.” This exacerbated sectional divisions. (See Mapping the Past, “North-South Sectionalism Intensifies,” pp. 216-217.)
Vice President Calhoun was especially upset; he believed that the new tariff would impoverish the South. His essay, The South Carolina Exposition and Protest, repudiated the nationalist philosophy he had previously championed.
The South Carolina legislature released this document to the country in December 1828, along with eight resolutions denouncing the protective tariff as unfair and unconstitutional. The theorist Calhoun, however, was not content with outlining the case against the tariff. His Exposition provided an ingenious defense of the right of the people of a state to reject a law of Congress. Starting with John Locke’s revered concept of government as a contractual relationship, he argued that since the states had created the Union, logic dictated that they be the final arbiters of the meaning of the
Constitution. If a special state convention, representing the sovereignty of the people, decided that an act of Congress violated the Constitution, it could interpose its authority and “nullify” the law within its boundaries. Calhoun did not seek to implement this theory in 1828, for he hoped that the next administration would lower the tariff and make nullification unnecessary.
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