John C. Calhoun: “To the People of the United States”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

This address was written in November 1832 to explain why South Carolina sought to nullify certain federal laws. Therein, Calhoun expands on his idea that the U.S. government is the result of a compact among the states. He argues, in part, that individual states are better protectors of minorities than the federal government and therefore ought to be allowed to supersede federal laws with laws better suited to their local residents. In Calhoun's day, his arguments in favor of individual states being able to protect their people from federal laws that harm them were fought over in courts of law and in Congress, resulting in rulings in favor of the federal government's power to overrule state laws.

Calhoun's arguments that the United States was created as a compact shaped much of the debate over states' rights before the Civil War. His interpretation of history is that the British colonies of North America rebelled against Great Britain in order to liberate themselves individually and not collectively. That they eventually created a federal constitutional government was out of a need for taking collective action in such matters as foreign relations and war, and the writers of the Constitution carefully limited the federal government's powers so that individual states would be free to pursue their own ways of life. Calhoun argues that abolitionists were trying to end the limits on the federal government denoted in the Constitution and that if they succeeded, chaos would result in slave states because their individual social orders would be destroyed, as slavery was an integral part of their ways of life. He further argues that the compact would be broken the moment a majority of free staters in Congress combined with a free-state president to abolish slavery. It was his view that slavery was protected by the Constitution. His is a plea for a compromise on the issue of slavery, in order to save the Union, and he places the blame for the potential dissolution of the United States squarely on northern states.