ht unlikely that this "Great American Desert" would ever be settled. The controversy was temporarily resolved, but Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that "this momentous question like a firebell in the night awakened me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union." Another source of considerable strife was the tariff issue during the 1820-30s. Toward the end of his first term in office, Jackson was forced to confront the state of South Carolina on the issue of the protective tariff. Business and farming interests in the state had hoped that Jackson would use his presidential power to modify tariff laws they had long opposed. In their view, all the benefits of protection were going to Northern manufacturers, and while the country, as a whole grew richer, South Carolina grew poorer, with its planters bearing the burden of higher prices. The protective tariff passed by Congress and signed into law by Jackson in 1832 was milder than that of 1828, but it further upset many in the state. In response, a number of South Carolina citizens endorsed the states' rights principle of "nullification," which was voiced by John C. Calhoun, Jackson's vice president until 1832. South Carolina dealt with the tariff by adopting the Ordinance of Nullification, which declared both the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null and void within state borders. The legislature also passed laws to enforce the ordinance, including authorization for raising a military force and appropriations for arms. Nullification was only the most recent in a series of state challenges to the authority of the federal government. There had been a continuing contest between the states and the national government over the power of the Union, and over the loyalty of the citizenry, almost since the founding of the republic. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, for example, had defied the Alien and Sedition Acts. When the question of tariff duties again came before Con...
