John C. Calhoun: “On the Relation Which the States and General Government Bear to Each Other”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

This text, also known as the Fort Hill address, was written for publication, reaching print in the New York Courier and Enquirer on July 26, 1831. It contains Calhoun's ideas about how the states of the Union are supposed to be organized and how the Constitution was intended to delegate authority, among the branches of the federal government as well as between the federal government and the individual states. The key word in the document is compact. The term summarizes Calhoun's view of the proper relationship among the states and was an important concept in the debate over states' rights.

It was Calhoun's view that the Constitution created a compact among the states, whereas other Americans believed that the Constitution created an inseparable bond among the states in which the federal government was preeminent. Calhoun's argument in “On the Relation Which the States and General Government Bear to Each Other” explains one of the principles that became one of the excuses used by some states to secede from the Union in 1861. In its essence, Calhoun's argument is that the Constitution created a compact among the states—that is, an agreement that each state had to abide by or the agreement would be broken. In his view, some free states were breaking the compact by refusing to return fugitive slaves to their owners, because the Constitution protected the property of citizens. By breaking the compact, the free states were creating a legitimate basis for secession from the Union by slave states.

Calhoun further states that he believes that the Constitution limited the federal government only to those powers specifically mentioned in it. All other powers, he argues, belong to the individual states. In fact, the states were intended to protect the rights of their citizens against oppression by the federal government, which might be swayed by a majority of the states to take civil rights away from citizens of other states. Thus, he believed that an individual state could nullify any federal law that did it harm. At the time, federal taxation was believed to unfairly target states that exported much of their agricultural output, and states such as South Carolina tried to declare those taxes null and void. This inspired one of the key breaks between Andrew Jackson and Calhoun, since Jackson was determined to use force to prevent states from nullifying federal laws.