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UNDER the provocative headline "The Administration and Nullifying Vermont," the Memphis Daily Eagle, in its lead editorial for 18 December 1850, shared some alarming news. The newspaper reported that "the President and the entire Cabinet are very much exasperated at the course of proceedings in the Vermont legislature; and that, at a long Cabinet council, held on the 7th inst., they determined to enforce the fugitive slave law in Vermont, should a case arise there, if it required the whole military force of the United States to do it."1
The president, of course, was the same Millard Fillmore who a scant few weeks earlier had signed into law the Compromise of 1850, the controversial third provision of which-the new Fugitive Slave Law-required that "all good citizens," North and South, assist federal marshals in recapturing runaway slaves. In an almost immediate response, Vermont's legislature had, on 13 November, passed the so-called Habeas Corpus Law, which made the despised federal law virtually impossible to enforce within the state's borders. These were the "proceedings" that so "exasperated" President Fillmore and his cabinet-and that led the Memphis paper's editors and other commentators to accuse Vermont of "nullifying" the federal law.
For Americans in 1850, Vermont's defiance, together with the president's reported threat to intervene militarily, must have called to mind an earlier "nullification" crisis. In November 1832, South Carolina, inspired by the ideas of its own John C. Calhoun, had held a special convention that declared a set of recently imposed federal tariffs that favored Northern interests null and void within the state's boundaries. South Carolina's action had touched off a major crisis for the Union. President Andrew Jackson rejected South Carolina's position and, with Congress's backing, threatened to deploy federal troops to the state. Not until the "Great Pacificator," Senator Henry clay of Kentucky, ironed out a compromise tariff in Congress was the crisis defused.
A great deal more had been at stake in this tense standoff than a simple matter of economic policy. The dispute over the tariffs had brought to the fore a long-running debate over state versus federal sovereignty. Indeed, nullification had first been devised by Thomas Jefferson in his 1798 "Kentucky Resolutions," in which he argued that states had the right to resist the...