According to the nullification theory, the constitution is held to be of the nature of a compact between the States as one party and the Federal Government as the other; and that, as in all contracts, if the agreements contained therein are broken by the one party, the other party has the right to refuse its assent thereto.  Therefore, if the United States government attempts the exercise of powers not granted in the compact, the States have the right to interpose the “rightful remedy” of “nullification.”  That is to say, that each State has the right to determine for itself when an unwarranted power has been assumed by the general government, and in such a case to declare the obnoxious law null and of no force within her own boundaries.

In considering the question of nullification, it is necessary to distinguish between the theory or rather method of nullification propounded by Madison and Jefferson in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, from that of Calhoun brought forward at the time of South Carolina’s resistance to, and attempted nullification of, the Tariff laws of 1828, and 1832.  In the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions the Alien and Sedition Acts were solemnly declared to be unconstitutional, that the Union was a compact, and the States had the right to interpose the remedy of nullification; but open resistance was not proposed.  By the Jeffersonian theory, it was proposed to obtain the opinion of three-fourths of the States that the acts were unconstitutional, and thus to “nullify” them after the manner of a constitutional amendment.  Until such nullification, the laws were to be obeyed.

The Calhoun doctrine was something entirely different from this.  According to his doctrine, any single State might order at once a suspension of the law within her borders, and not until three-fourths of the States in national convention had overruled the nullification could the State be forced to obey the obnoxious law.  To use Calhoun’s own words, his theory was, that “it belongs to the State, as a member of the Union, in her sovereign capacity in convention, to determine definitely, as far as her citizens are concerned, the extent of the obligation which she has contracted; and if, in her opinion, the act exercising the power in dispute be unconstitutional, to declare it null and void, which declaration would be obligatory on her citizens.”  The sum and substance of this was, as Von Holst has pointed out,[1] to give to one-fourth of the States the power if they saw fit to deprive the Federal Government of every power entrusted to it, that is, to alter the constitution at will.

[Footnote 1:  Constitutional History of the United States, Vol.  I, p. 474, note.]