Jefferson, Madison, and Nullification

publiustx

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday February 01, 2013 · 1:55 AM PST

2013/02/01 · 01:55

Numerous blog sites have been smoking recently with sharp debates over the right of states to nullify federal law. These debates have generated intense heat but very little light. This failure can be partly attributed to the fact that the advocates draw on secondary and tertiary sources, if they draw on any sources at all. In other words, most debates fail to draw directly from the original documents that bear on the question.

With frustration in all this, I decided to “go to the tape.” In this diary I draw from three sets of pre-Civil War documents that are the cornerstones of nullification theory and, further, on The Federalist Papers, to augment the discussion. The three documents are the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, written anonymously by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, respectively, in 1798 and 1799, and South Carolina’s Ordinance of Nullification, which brought to a head the 1832 nullification crisis with the federal government.

RSS