Liberty and Union

THE PERIOD FROM 1828 TO 1833 WITNESSED A GREAT DEBATE OVER policies which freemen in Union ought to pursue. The very nature of Union and its destiny came in, as a consequence, for profound consideration. The ideas of nullification and secession served to precipitate debate and to provide much of its form. But there was far more on other side than just matter of preserving Union. Opposition to Nullifiers, it was true, reflected widespread agreement that liberty and Union were not to be so easily separated. Within this consensus among defenders of Union, however, real and significant differences did obtain. The idea of freedom could, with peculiar urgency, lend itself to many interpretations in a society still in process of being built. The nullification controversy thus involved not alone decision to save and to order existing Union; it pointed as well to kind of liberal society to be realized on yet unsettled continent.' As many contemporaries saw it, impending retirement of national debt provided a unique occasion for seminal debate. John G. Watmough of Pennsylvania told House of Representatives in January 1833 that he had long feared the gratifying for Union could not arrive without bringing with it evils and developing springs of political action which 1 The historians who find consensus in American experience run risk of blurring earnest debate about nature of freedom itself. This is especially case in regard to period before Civil War, for then Union of freemen was still in process of being determined. John Locke may have come to wilderness without a dialectical foil, as Louis Hartz has argued in The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since Revolution (New York, 1955), but wilderness remained as an unsettled possibility after he got here

Economics · Law and economics · Nullification · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law

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  John G Grove•American Political Thought•2015

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• The nullification crisis, southern discontents, and the American political process

  Donald J Ratcliffe•American Nineteenth Century History•2000

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• The Authorship of the Compromise of 1850

  F H Hodder•The Mississippi Valley Historical…•1936

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